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February 01, 2008, 01:23 PM ET
What Do Convention Programs Mean?
Last week I published a commentary questioning the excess amount of attention to race and politics at the 2006 4Cs Convention. The response was, well, overwhelmingly denunciatory. Next week I’ll respond to some of the substantive particulars of the replies, which are still trickling in.
One general point consistently raised speaks against the method, and it merits separate attention.
Why base judgments about a field on a survey of panels and papers at the field’s major annual meeting? It sounds like cherry-picking, selective and biased, cheap and lazy. Critics who do so, the objection says, score vulgar polemical points at the expense of genuinely serious work that goes into the conference and its presentations. Sure, a few instances will display the lesser traits of any large intellectual gathering, but they aren’t representative of the whole. Scholars and teachers deserve better.
This is a frequent reply to what has grown into a two-decade tradition. It goes back to the late-1980s when articles began appearing in newspapers on the MLA convention, for instance, the infamous “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl” episode. Hilton Kramer and Roger Kimball started composing annual reports on the meeting, which were picked up in newspapers and cited to poke fun at the pretentious radicalism of selected sessions.
The conferees began arguing back, and the exchanges turned into something of an annual rite. Indeed, the post-conference assessments have become a topic in themselves, and in the ensuing public contests, academics generally lost, their lingo and background unsuited to the discourse of journalism.
The continuing debate poses again and again the basic question of fairness. Why isn’t a conference roster a fair representation of a field? Not the best work of a field, which may not make it into the program — but a measure of the hot topics and concern. A correspondent who prefers anonymity tells me precisely that, stating that the conference is often a venue not for serious work but for professional positioning, for people to get attention and advancement. So, he argues, one shoots for articles on edgy themes and provocative texts.
Maybe he’s right. But doesn’t the ensuing program indicate, then, what the field thinks is edgy? And isn’t that an accurate window upon the values and concerns of the discipline?
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