San Francisco — Last year, when the Modern Language Association held its annual conference, the theme was “The Humanities at Work in the World.” This year the unofficial theme is “Who’s Getting Work at All?”
The numbers look terrible. Job listings in language-and-literature fields are down more than 22 percent from last year, according to an analysis the MLA released this month. That hasn’t kept scholars and job-hunters at home, however. About 9,000 people registered for this year’s gathering, a small decline from the 2007 figure.
Does the ailing economy have anything to do with a pragmatic streak evident in some of the panels this year? Maybe not, but you could say the timing is good. Gerald Graff, a professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago, picked “The Way We Teach Now” as the topic of his presidential forum. At the session, some of the profession’s marquee names tackled questions of how literary theory works (or doesn’t) in the classroom and how senior scholars could do a better job of helping their graduate students acclimate to “the culture of the profession, whatever that means,” as Michael Bérubé put it.
One subtext, of course, was the ever-gloomier job market. Mr. Bérubé, a professor of English at Pennsylvania State University, got a chuckle out of the crowd when he said that professors should stop thinking of their graduate students as fledglings and start thinking of them as hamsters on a wheel. That includes teaching them such survival skills as how to handle a campus interview and how to cope with “lazy, lousy” readers’ reports.
Mr. Bérubé left the theorizing to his co-panelists — Amanda S. Anderson, a professor of English at the Johns Hopkins University, and Rita Felski, a professor of English at the University of Virginia — who focused more on the classroom than on the job hunt. Ms. Anderson tried to make the case that “argument culture,” or the give-and-take of intellectual debate, can overcome what she called “disciplinary Balkanization.”
Ms. Felski put things less abstractly. What do literary studies have to teach students nowadays besides how to “outfox” every text? (What, in theoryspeak, comes after the hermeneutics of suspicion?) “What else could we teach our students besides critical reading?” she asked.
Answer: what Ms. Felski called postcritical, or “reflective,” reading. Good pedagogy, she hinted, may mean teaching students to be skeptical, but it doesn’t mean teaching them to be ashamed of the enthusiasm that brought them to literature in the first place. “Art is the quintessential mind-altering substance,” she said.
Richard E. Miller, a professor of English at Rutgers University, made the idea of theory in the classroom look almost quaint with a talk — make that show — on reading and writing in a 2.0 world. The Web not only has changed how we compose, but has become the material of composition, he said, citing the work of Jonathan Harris as a prime example.
“We are living at the moment of the greatest change in human communication” the world has ever seen, he said — more important than the moment our ancestors crawled out of the muck, more revolutionary than the invention of the printing press. If you want revolution, he seemed to be saying, it’s already here.
No word on how the virtual job market is these days. —Jennifer Howard
