MLA of the Dead, Part 2

(Guest blogger Karen Renner recently defended her dissertation at UConn and was an eyewitness at this year’s MLA. If you missed it, be sure to read “MLA of the Dead, Part 1.”)

The postage-paid cards fluttered down, and they went for them, whipping out ball-point pens and checking off ethnic identities and veteran and disability statuses. But what we didn’t count on was how quickly they’d go looking for a mailbox to put them in. And that’s when they saw us. There must have been something in our demeanor that made them think we were search-committee members. It was like they could smell our refusal to adjunct for $2,000 a semester without benefits, and they must have assumed that we had some hiring power. They descended upon us.

The first one to shake my hand was a petite blond probably no older than 29. It must have been a decade since her alabaster skin had seen sun outside the ivory tower. “My dissertation collapses the boundaries between sentimental and sensational,” she whispered. A bald man with a carefully trimmed goatee pulled her off me. “In chapter three,” he explained with a confident smile, “I show that female Gothic writers employed elements of the supernatural to critique heteronormativity.” I freed my fingers from his firm handshake, turned, and came face-to-face with an older woman with fresh highlights and conservative earrings. She scared me the most — surely she had a gainfully employed husband (an engineer? a software analyst?) and two school-aged children at home? “In addition to scholarship that collapses the distinction between popular antebellum texts and the classics that still dominate our field,” she hissed, “I have extensive teaching experience with a diverse body of students that closely resembles those at your institution.”

Jake pulled me out of the crowd. “Run, Julie,” he said, tugging my sleeve, “just run.”

We could hear them behind, right on our heels, droning “student-centered classroom,” “wide-ranging interdisciplinary research,” “chaired a recent NeMLA panel.”

We only got away because they turned on other victims. The acquisitions editors manning the book fair on the third floor had heard about the outbreak and were trying to scramble out the building. The horde turned on them. I wanted to help, but Jake said to keep running. Before I turned away, I caught a glimpse of their faces. They were feigning polite interest in yet another study that reconceptualized the origins of American realism, but their eyes were darting side to side, searching for escape. I still see those faces in my dreams sometimes and wake up drenched in sweat, the bed sheets coiled around my torso. 

We stopped on the ground floor of the convention center to catch our breath.

“What do we do now, Jake? What the hell do we do now?” I panted. I could still hear the murmur of chapter summaries coming from the lobby above us.

“Look, I don’t know, OK?” he snapped. He was bent over, arms wrapped around his stomach. “God, Dr. Pannapacker said this was going to happen, but we didn’t listen. We just didn’t listen.”

Looking down, I suddenly noticed a homemade business card in the cuff of my pants. “Oh God,” I screamed. “They got me! Jake, you’ve got to kill me before I begin obsessively logging into the English jobs wikia page, posting defensive Facebook status updates, and starting every conversation with ‘What have you heard?’”

 Jake tweezed the card from my cuff and flung it far away. “It’s not yours, Julie. You’re okay! You’re okay!”

 I collapsed into grateful tears and let him hold me for awhile.

 ”We’ve only got one choice,” I said. “We walk west. All the way to Los Angeles. I heard there’s a survivor’s camp out there.”

 ”There’s no camp, Julie.”

 ”There is! And they’ve got small course loads, manageable class sizes, and reasonable service expectations for junior faculty.”

He grabbed my shoulders and shook me. “Look, I’ve been out here for three years now. There’s no camp. It’s a myth, a story told to keep our hope in the humanities alive. What I’m going to do is walk right out those doors and make my skills relevant in the real world.”

“It’s impossible.”

“Maybe,” he said, running a hand through his dark hair. “But I’ve gotta try.” 

I’ve never seen Jake again, but I like to think that he found work with a not-for-profit who values his editing experience, his advanced knowledge of Web design, and his ability to write in clear, nonacademic prose. I like to think that when he visits his family on the holidays, he no longer worries about how to explain exactly what it is that he’s doing with his life.

As for me, the future lies ahead like the blank spaces of a board game. For now, I’ll keep on believing some mansion of happiness is waiting for me out there in L.A., and I’ll walk west.

(Since returning from MLA, Karen Renner has been hard at work revising her wide-ranging interdisciplinary dissertation — Perverse Subjects: Drunks, Gamblers, Prostitutes, and Murderers in Antebellum America — into a book that, among other things, reconceptualizes the origins of American realism. She is also drafting an article that examines the cultural narratives of success embedded in 19th-century American board games. If you are on a hiring committee, she would further point out that she does indeed have a student-centered classroom and extensive teaching experience with a diverse body of students.)