It’s that time of year again. Not just for the holidays, but for the annual Modern Language Association convention—MLA, in common parlance. For years the annual meeting has prompted complaints from critics who bemoan the politicization of the study of literature and the lack of attention to the classics. It has also prompted mocking coverage from reporters who highlight the more flamboyant titles of papers, taking them as evidence of the irrelevance of academics.
Both views have a grain of truth, but both are skewed, and a look at the history of MLA gives a different perspective. In fact, early scholars were not the guardians of tradition we might assume, but insurgents in their own way. And the evolution of the convention has been punctuated by struggles over cultural politics, redefining what literature is, how it should be studied, and its social relevance.
MLA began as a gathering of professors rebelling against the traditional college curriculum, which centered on the classical languages, Greek and Latin. The classics had been the basis of the undergraduate curriculum from the founding of Harvard University through the late 19th century, typically taught through all four years in a set sequence of courses. It was only in the late 19th century that colleges explored more options, with Harvard pioneering the elective system, and the faculty dividing into departments and disciplinary organizations. The Modern Language Association was founded in 1883, the American Historical Association in 1884, and the American Psychological Association in 1892.
Early scholars were not the guardians of tradition we might assume, but insurgents in their own way.
The goal of the MLA, in the words of an early president, Harvard’s James Russell Lowell, was to assert that modern literature and the modern languages “should have a more important place assigned to them in the course of instruction, assigned to them moreover as equals in dignity” to the ancients. In a sense, he and his colleagues were advocating for what was popular, siding with the contemporary relevance and practical use of the modern languages. Those were part of “The New Education,” as it was first called in The Atlantic by Harvard’s Charles W. Eliot, perhaps the most influential college president of the era.
MLA’s inaugural meeting took place in New York City, a small affair sponsored by Columbia University, with 40 scholars delivering a dozen papers. From there the convention quickly gained momentum, averaging about 100 participants from a membership that had risen to 551 by 1900. The convention also moved around, to Boston, Baltimore, and Philadelphia, as well as making its way inland, to Cincinnati, Nashville, and elsewhere.
By the 1920s, the association had grown to more than 3,000 members, reaching about 4,500 in the late 1930s, with conventions averaging more than 1,000 in the 1920s and more than 2,000 through the late 1930s. To accommodate the growth, the association developed its complicated modern structure, with divisions devoted to particular languages and fields, which staged more than 200 papers by 1929.
It’s a familiar fact that higher education expanded after World War II, but it grew steadily through the entire century, from about 238,000 students and 24,000 faculty members in 1900 to 1,494,000 students and 147,000 faculty members in 1940, and MLA went along for the ride. Unlike the classics, the modern languages were a vehicle suited to mass higher education and came to supplant them as a keystone of liberal education.
MLA’s success has also long been marked by periodic nostalgia. Ashley Horace Thorndike’s 1927 presidential address observed: “Forever gone are the halcyon days when one smoking room accommodated all the membership except the president, the secretary, the gentleman reading a paper, and the few lady scholars.” Similarly, in 2012 the literary critic and MLA denizen Stanley Fish wistfully remarked on how “absent or sparsely represented are the topics that in previous years dominated the meeting and identified the avant garde.” Change never delivers quite what we think it will.
Still, some things don’t change, like the overly long talks by professors. During a session at the 1887 MLA, evidently Hermann Collitz, of Bryn Mawr College, exceeded his time discussing German verbs (his paper has a very long title in German, so I’ll spare you). As some exceptionally responsible soul recorded in the proceedings, one participant moved that Collitz be permitted to continue, but several others opposed the motion, one bluntly stating, “I object to the paper being continued any longer. This paper is of special interest, and only half of us can understand it. In fact I think that half an hour is too long.” As I tell my graduate students, no one ever complains about a shorter paper.
During the 1950s, MLA shifted from a focus on linguistic and historical studies to the interpretation of literature. The 1950 convention, bringing in 3,200 members out of 6,515, featured a plenary session led by Yale University’s W.K. Wimsatt Jr., who outlined the new direction in “History and Criticism: A Problematic Relationship.” He argued for criticism—offering interpretations, or “close readings"—over traditional methods. In many ways, the tension between interpretation and history still inflects literary work.
The cultural politics again leaned to the popular, making literary study available to a widening pool of students, as American higher education opened to an unprecedented new population. You didn’t need special background but only determined intelligence to take up the practices of close reading.
Another paper in the plenary session was by Katherine Koller, of the University of Rochester, speaking about “Social Usefulness as a Criterion for Research.” We tend to think of this period as quietist, with New Critics like Wimsatt focusing on formal matters, but there was active debate about the social role of literature.
That debate flared into a bonfire in the late 1960s, notably at the convention in 1968, in New York, which saw a group of young faculty members and graduate students, led by Paul Lauter, Louis Kampf, Florence Howe, and others, protesting the political complacency of their seniors and asserting the political relevance of literature. As Kampf and Lauter remarked in the introduction to a 1972 volume they edited, The Politics of Literature: Dissenting Essays on the Teaching of English, this turn to politics “began with the student sit-ins of 1960 and Mississippi Freedom Summer, 1964; Berkeley 1965; and the Columbia strike that spring.” Capping off this insurgency, Kampf became president of the association in 1971 and Howe in 1973.
Many scholars no doubt continued doing conventional work in their particular fields, but the cultural politics of the time—this time questions of gender, sexual, racial, and social justice—once again affected literary studies. As did demographic changes, with many more women entering the field.
Less widely known, another consequential change took place in the late 1960s: the first squeeze on jobs. Academic positions had been readily available, but the first signs of trouble appeared during the convention in 1969, when there were fewer job postings than candidates. The job market also precipitated a shift from an informal hiring system, which functioned largely via word of mouth, to the more formal contemporary system, in which colleges advertise openings nationally.
If the MLA Handbook for the Writers of Research Papers is the primary link that undergraduates have with the association, the MLA’s Job Information List database is key for graduate students. The association started listing “vacancies” only in the late 1960s and published the first list in 1971. Job interviews henceforth have become a major component of the convention, boosting attendance. Until recently, conventions have averaged about 10,000 out of a membership hovering around 30,000. The interviews have also toned the dynamic, with myriad anxious candidates and weary interviewing committees added to those giving and hearing talks.
While literary criticism around 1970 flirted with philosophical ideas like phenomenology, the full bloom of theories like feminism, Marxism, and deconstruction did not show itself until about 1980. Sometimes theory was presented as “politics by other means,” and a good deal of criticism embraced that notion. The 1980 MLA—grown to more than 500 events and 1,500 papers—featured panels such as “The Politics of Criticism,” with Edward W. Said and Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak, both of whom would go on to define postcolonial studies. Myra Jehlen and Sonia Sanchez, who helped turn attention to gender, offered “Feminism and Contemporary Ideologies.” But the meeting also included a number of other panels on modes of interpretation with no explicit political import, such as “Literary Hermeneutics,” “Speech Acts,” and Psychoanalysis and Literary Theory.”
In 1986, J. Hillis Miller, an influential expositor of deconstruction, could title his presidential address “The Triumph of Theory.” Those of us who came onto the scene after that—I went to graduate school in the late 1980s and gave my first MLA talk in 1988—make up the post-theory generation. We arrived in the wake of the vibrant debates about theory—and in the wake of plentiful tenure-stream jobs. It was a more chastened time.
Taking the insights of theory for granted, some of us have challenged its style and insisted on aiming it toward a broader public. One of the best expressions of this turn was in a paper at the 1992 convention, in New York, on “Popularizing Academic Criticism,” by Michael Bérubé, then a young assistant professor and now a recent president of the association.
The 1990s and the 2000s have been another revisionary period in criticism, and MLA has seen the rise of various “studies” that negotiate our era’s cultural politics. They include gay and lesbian studies, postcolonial studies, queer theory, visual studies, disability studies, globalization studies, and, most recently, digital and other media studies, not to mention new approaches embracing the era of data, such as “distant reading,” which looks at statistical patterns in the mass of novels or other literary works rather than dwelling on individual texts.
Perhaps the biggest change over the past 20 years has been a focus on academic labor. At first the decline of tenure-stream jobs was the elephant in the room, brushed away with projections that the situation would get better as soon as older faculty members began to retire. But since the mid-1990s, scholars and activists have called attention to the precarious position of graduate students, the rise of a faculty majority with contingent positions, the corporatization of universities, and the shrinking of the humanities.
A moment that encapsulated that phenomenon came not in a paper but in the delegate assembly in 1995. Marc Bousquet, then president of the MLA-affiliated Graduate Student Caucus and now an associate professor of English at Emory University, hammered home the point that graduate students were not getting jobs, that they certainly were not the recipients of a benevolent system of academic labor, and that the MLA should do more about the situation.
Through its history, the Modern Language Association has thus followed the fate of American higher education. With the squeeze on jobs, conventions over the past four years have started to shrink from their average of more than 10,000 registrants, now mustering about 7,500. That is a problem, since it drains some of the opportunities for contact that are essential for intellectual life.
For now, MLA remains a prime stage for literary critics. Let’s hope we can sustain it.
Jeffrey J. Williams is a professor of English and literary and cultural studies at Carnegie Mellon University. His most recent book, coedited with Heather Steffen, is The Critical Pulse: Thirty-Six Credos by Contemporary Critics (Columbia University Press, 2012).
