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Monday, December 27, 2004
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"EGGHEADS' NAUGHTY WORD GAMES"
The New York Times has written its obligatory article about the MLA convention, which is going on in Philadelphia even as we blog. You can sense the dread the Times writer felt when he realized he'd drawn this assignment, this event whose ridicule he calls a "holiday ritual for journalists." For lo his prose is weary, Lord... it seemeth in each sentence to pray for deliverance... nay even to be full of thankfulness as its final paragraph descends... The writer reminds us of desperate MLA titles of years past, and he updates the roster with this year's desperadoes. His take on the MLA convention is that English professors are "naughty" immature people (the article is titled "Eggheads' Naughty Word Games") whose annual gathering resembles a "hyperactive child who, having interrupted the grownups' conversation by dancing on the coffee table, can't be made to stop." He quotes another writer who sees no way out of the "arrant foolishness that has turned literary studies into a laughingstock." Yet if you look at the titles the Times cites, few of them are remotely literary. Even if some novel seems involved, it's really not -- a few lines or images from the book will be pressed into an argument that has nothing to do with literature. Or again, a poem or a play may appear, but it turns out to be a work not of art, but of propaganda. When you edit down the MLA convention, the problem isn't infantile provocativeness, as the Times writer suggests, but ideological non-deviationism. The papers are displays of party discipline. |