Don’t you hate big academic conferences? I mean, the papers are always so tedious, and the squabbles on the panels so petty. Flattery and fakeness prevail as everybody tries to seem important and schmooze some senior scholar or editor. Don’t you even hate the people who love to go to big academic conferences? Don’t you think downtown Atlanta is kind of depressing?
Everyone hates big academic conferences. And yet everyone goes to them. A third of the Modern Language Association’s 30,000 members attend its annual convention, held between Christmas and New Year’s. More than half of the 10,000 members of my professional organization, the American Academy of Religion, attend its annual meeting on the weekend before Thanksgiving.
Because I never think the holiday season is quite hectic enough, and because I, like many of you, secretly like big academic conferences, I went to both the AAR and the MLA this year.
In each of the previous four years, I went to the AAR meeting primarily to interview for jobs. I outlined sample syllabi on the airplane. I traded tips on interviewers with friends who were interviewing for the same jobs. I mentally rehearsed answers to standard questions in my hotel room, and I flubbed a few of those answers when it came time to give them for real. One of those interviews finally panned out last year, as I am in my first year on the tenure track.
Without job-seeking to worry about, I was free to enjoy the conference. That’s right: “enjoy.” My schedule was pretty full, but it was entirely devoid of time spent fretting. Instead, I put in many hours catching up with friends I hadn’t seen in a while, both graduate-school friends and conference friends -- the people you are always happy to see at the annual meeting but don’t interact with regularly outside of it.
Feeling free to attend more panel presentations than I ever had before, I managed to find out about the scholarly world that exists beyond my dissertation. I even asked a question in one session, another first for me.
I poked my head into the lounge where job-seekers wait for someone to call their names and lead them off to an interview. Heads turned expectantly as I entered the room. I immediately felt guilty for spectating at their anxiety and for being a tease, and I spun on my heel and dashed out.
I did my best to encourage friends who were interviewing this year -- as well as those who were looking for jobs but didn’t have any interviews scheduled. I felt for them, and tried to be living proof that you don’t have to have multiple book contracts to get a job. As I assured them that I was just like them in previous years, I mentally recalled the huge role that dumb luck played in my getting a job.
What a difference a year can make: I had never felt more marginal than I had the year before, when I was a part-time attendant in a parking lot where several of my graduate-school professors parked. Now, with a tenure-track job and a publication on the way, I feel fully a part of the profession.
The AAR meeting ended right before Thanksgiving. A month later, after driving back to my parents’ home for two holidays, grading final papers and exams, and imbibing eggnog by the quart, I went with my girlfriend Ashley, a graduate student in English, to Washington, for the MLA Convention.
My purposes in going to the religion meeting were to socialize and to participate in the conversation of my discipline. With no professional stake in the MLA, I went mainly to hear some really crazy papers.
On the drive down to D.C. I flipped through the program book to find the nuttiest, most far-out papers, the ones that held promise of either postmodern glossolalia or an absurd reverence for popular culture. The best I could come up with were, “‘Give Me Back My Eighteen Dollars!': Brecht’s Theatrical Ideals and South Park” and “Simultaneously Marxian and Queer Comments on Jameson, Allegory, and Method.”
Although the latter paper sounds awfully sweeping in its scope, neither title is really all that outrageous. Neither holds a candle to 2003’s “Judith Butler Got Me Tenure (but I Owe My Job to k.d. lang): High Theory, Pop Culture, and Some Thoughts About the Role of Literature in Contemporary Queer Studies.”
Where were the hyperpolitical and hypertheoretical puns this year? Where were the internal parentheses and slashes? The neologisms? The lame attempts at seeming transgressive? I was expecting to see papers with titles like, “Obviating the State by Stating the Obvious: Discourse-Analytical Linguistics and Anarchism” or “Bestio-scatological Politics in ‘Go Dog, Go.’”
But no. Judging by their titles, many of the papers at the MLA are still overtly political in purpose, but surprisingly few of them take the kinds of liberties with language that enabled the Sokal hoax and inspired the journal Philosophy and Literature’s Bad Writing Contest and the online Postmodern Generator.
Given the reputation that precedes MLA members, I’m always a little disappointed when Ashley tells me about her colleagues at the major research university where she’s a student -- they all seem so normal. They seem to love literature and earnestly want it to change people’s lives for the better, and they say things like, “I’m going to be the best professor my students ever had!”
While the AAR isn’t as legendarily wacky as the MLA convention, it has its moments. This year’s AAR award for self-indulgent excess had to go to the panel of Important European Theorists who tried to outdo each other with extemporized jargon-suffused riffs and gratuitously provocative one-liners that bore only lightly on the ostensible theme of the panel. Should I have been surprised that the room emptied out, like a movie theater during the credits, after the Most Important European Theorist (himself enough of a star to be the subject of a recent documentary film) concluded his rambling, hour-long rant, even though another panelist had yet to speak? It was a spectacle, and little else. I’ll bring popcorn next time.
On the other hand, the MLA (at least on its last day, when I attended) seemed relatively spectacle-free. I was surprised to find it so workaday.
Especially surprising was the familiarity of the paper topics. Seventeen panels were devoted to religion and spirituality. Nearly as many were on related topics like ethics, secularization, and the culture wars. “Interdisciplinarity” has been a watchword in the humanities for some time now, but it still came as a surprise to see my discipline -- which is not taught at all at many North American colleges -- so readily incorporated into the program of the humanities’ most publicly visible convention.
Maybe religion has begun its rise to prominence above race, class, and gender as high theory passes away, as Stanley Fish argued in these pages a year ago. And maybe I couldn’t find the wacky papers I had hoped to hear at the convention because “getting religion” means, for the MLA, giving up its postmodern excesses of the past generation.
In a panel on teaching the bible in the literature classroom, I heard about some in-class problems I might not have anticipated and learned a pedagogical technique I will certainly use the next time I teach the bible. While I was in that session, Ashley went to one on the emergent literary genre of blogging. I think she was drawn, in part, by the promise that the paper about a blogging group called “The Vagina Posse” would exhibit the prime MLA virtue of provocation. Instead, it was almost homey in its sincerity. Ashley learned a good bit about blogging -- why people write and read blogs, how bloggers borrow from other genres, and how teachers might use blogging to teach composition. Other panels we went to were either mildly illuminative or mildly dull, but none was even slightly outrageous.
All I’ve ever read about the MLA Convention in this publication, in magazines, and in daily newspapers is how ridiculous the papers are. The MLA’s reputation as outlandishly postmodern and politically doctrinaire has become such a commonplace that the “look how crazy the MLA is!” article has been eclipsed by the article about the ubiquity of the “look how crazy the MLA is!” article. Now, what really seems crazy is the media’s obsession with the myth of the MLA’s craziness.
Given that all academics claim to hate going to big conferences, maybe we faithfully go every year anyway because part of what we hate -- the gratuitously provocative papers -- is also what we secretly love.
Jonathan Malesic, who earned his Ph.D. in religious studies from the University of Virginia, started this fall as an assistant professor of theology at King’s College, in Wilkes-Barre, Pa.
