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How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Enjoy MLA

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By Jim Harris

Two days after Christmas, after a whirlwind trip visiting family, my wife and I headed for New York City and the annual convention of the Modern Language Association, the most important, widely attended, prestigious, and often parodied meeting in the field of literary studies.

The MLA provides the setting for most initial job interviews in English, comparative literature, and foreign languages, and as we departed for the convention, my emotions were mixed.

I had one interview -- I had hoped for more, but many of the departments I've applied to ended up not interviewing at the MLA, for various reasons. The one interview I did have in New York was with one of my top choices. The anxiety inspired by the MLA in general and my impending interview in particular vied with my excitement at the prospect of four days in New York City with my wife at convention rates and with departmental funding -- a big deal to a new Ph.D.

In general, I was upbeat as we arrived in New York and took a shuttle to Grand Central, then a smaller shuttle to our hotel. My own vague sense of unease seemed mild compared to a fellow traveler on the shuttle whose wife called him Bo. "My last driver hit some dude on a bike ... and just kept driving, like he didn't even notice," he told me, voice thick with Dixie overtones, eyes wide with disbelief. "This place is insane." As we drove up to Bo's hotel, we were greeted by a crowd of picketing workers, waving signs registering vague complaints about the management. Behind them stood a 12-foot inflatable rat with a necktie draped around its shoulders -- intended, no doubt, to represent the management. "You've got to be kidding me," Bo repeated, over and over, as he unloaded his luggage and headed in past the angry throng.

I wasn't fazed, but when I arrived at the convention, my optimism began to flag. There are many wonderful things about the MLA convention: It is, after all, a meeting of many of the premier minds in my discipline, united at least in part by the desire to exchange knowledge and to discuss ideas. There are scores of fascinating panels, devoted to topics popular and arcane, and there is always an enormous book exhibit that would intoxicate any academic.

From the perspective of the hopeful, nervous job seeker, however, the MLA took on a distinctly unpleasant aspect. A profound divide seemed to emerge between those who were "in the club" -- successful academics with tenure or at least on the tenure track -- and those who hoped fervently to join. A strange, pseudo-Hollywood feeling prevailed, as eager job seekers and ambitious young operators scanned nametags to determine whether people they passed were "important" or could help advance their careers, and swiftly bypassed those who could not.

A sense of desperation seemed to prevail; very few of the job seekers seemed to be having a good time. The prospective interviewees lined up outside the communal interview area all evinced varying degrees of intestinal distress; many looked as if they were awaiting sentencing.

This sense of dread is understandable: Much of the preparation I received, both from my department and from general advice books, strategically focused on preparing me for aggressive, combative interviewers who wanted nothing more than to debunk the methodology of my dissertation, to expose me as a pedagogical charlatan, and possibly to question the status of my soul. I appreciate this worst-case scenario approach to preparation -- better to have a surprisingly congenial interview than to be caught flat-footed by a difficult question -- but it certainly doesn't make one eager to be interviewed.

As I looked around at the nauseated job seekers and the nauseating status seekers, my stress-clouded mind turned the MLA into everything many of us got into academe to avoid.

In my early years as a graduate student, I relied heavily on a book called Critical Terms for Literary Study, a very useful resource with essays explaining many of the concepts and terms fundamental to my field. An essay in it on "Class," by Daniel T. O'Hara, used academe itself as an ironic model of class prejudice and inequality in a fascinating piece that seemed half blistering exposé and half grim parody.

It seemed to me that O'Hara's critique was playing out before my very eyes as I observed the schmoozing, the jockeying for position, the disdain I read (or read into) the expressions of the senior faculty pestered by the junior climbers. The unspoken credo overlying it all seemed to be, "you've gotta hustle in this business" -- painfully ironic in one of the few enclaves in which Marxism is still alive and well.

Many of these negative impressions were, I would later realize, either amplified or wholly created by my own nervousness. At the time, though, I couldn't stand it. The program, which had so interested me as I perused it in the weeks before, suddenly seemed insufferably pompous. I was seized with a spirit of Whitmanian rebellion -- I fled the learn'd astronomers, and opted for the unfiltered experiences of the city beyond the MLA.

In short, I played hooky.

My interview was the following afternoon, I don't get to New York very often, and had not been in several years. So, instead of attending panels theorizing multicultural America, I strolled down Seventh Avenue and delighted in hearing six languages spoken in the course of two blocks. Instead of listening to papers about ethnic literature, I looked out from Battery Park at the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island, where my great grandparents arrived almost a century ago. Instead of discussing trauma theory in a hotel conference room at the Hilton, I went to Ground Zero, and marveled at the spirit of reverence and air of quiet that still prevail there. Instead of deconstructing gender roles in the American marriage, I held hands with my wife as we walked through Central Park. And instead of sitting in the job information center and experiencing gastrointestinal discomfort, I found my own, oddly purer form of gastrointestinal discomfort in the form of the "Hobie," a blue cheese and peppercorn churrasco from Island Burgers. (I regret nothing.)

I returned renewed and revitalized, infused with the excitement of the city, energized by exercise, and, oddly enough, brimming with course ideas and possible research projects that crept into my mind while I wasn't looking. I went into my interview relaxed and alert, and thoroughly enjoyed it: These were no stone-faced, haughty intellectual patricians looking to expose me as an intellectual fraud, but devoted educators and energetic scholars who were genuinely interested in my work.

The interview was collegial, interesting, and even enjoyable. I found that I liked talking to these people, that I liked talking about my work and my teaching plans and philosophy with people who were interested in hearing about them. No one emitted weary, theatrical sighs; no one barked out "Wrong!" in the manner of the old Saturday Night Live parody of The McLaughlin Group. Even if it doesn't end in a job, I'm glad I had that conversation, that I met those people.

I returned to the convention on the other side of the interview with a renewed outlook. The experience mirrored and renewed my appreciation for the rhythms of academic life -- the ebb and flow of the school year, the revival born of rest, the intellectual rebirth of the new year. I could once again appreciate the positive aspects of MLA. I went to panels and enjoyed them, relished the play of ideas, savored the fruits of innovative research. I ran into colleagues, mentors, friends, and began to have fun. I even managed to sniff around a bit for a publisher for my book manuscript. Hey, you've gotta hustle in this business.

On the way back to the airport, we passed in front of Bo's hotel. It was still besieged by picketers, the giant rat standing unmoved, if a bit the worse for wear. The only change in the scene was the tooth-rattling din of a road crew energetically jackhammering the nearby sidewalk. I can only hope that Bo was able to gain some perspective on his situation.