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Desecrating literature: reading the PMLA

Commonweal, April 5, 1996 by Frank McConnell

For reasons too complicated to go into here, I recently found myself subscribed--for the first time since 1964, my first year as a graduate student at Yale--to PMLA. That's Publications of the Modern Language Association of America, and in my racket it's the boss journal. You get a piece in there, and your career isn't exactly made, but it's well on its way: like being a first-draft choice for the Celtics. The magazine has this cachet because the Modern Language Association, its parent group, is the only and I mean only organization of literature professors in the U.S., and has a stranglehold on the hiring process. Every year, just after Christmas, MLA holds its annual convention in some big city. And thousands of professors, and more importantly, grad-student/professor wannabees, flock there ostensibly to give and hear papers on literary topics. Right.

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The fact is--I've been to one MLA convention in thirty years, and one was enough-it's about as dignified as any convention, and maybe less so. (At least the Shriners in Indianapolis admit they come there to party, something entirely beneath the self-image of your average MLA weenie, thank you very much. Everybody gets drunk, nobody goes to the papers, and the grad students all try as hard as they can to ingratiate themselves to the various departments of English, Romance languages, etc., in their job interviews because this is the one chance you're going to get to be hired for next September, and start to pay off that gigantic loan you floated to write your Ph.D.

However, the convention is not my main point: it's not MLA I want to talk about, but PMLA, the journal, and how the journal is necessary and sufficient cause for the elimination of Departments of English altogether.

Nor am I kidding. I've spent my life teaching literature--or trying to--and I got into it because I thought it would be a fine and shining thing to spend a life loving, and sharing the love of, the dance of language and feeling that is the literature we have made, and that continues to make us: a vocation, if you will, and not a shabby one. Now I, like a lot of my colleagues, wonder what the hell ever happened to the mission we chose so gaily, and who these people are who now call themselves professors of literature. (Not to mention--we'll get to this--what damage they're doing to their students.

I told Harold Bloom, over the phone, "It's just not the life I trained myself for." And he said--first time ever he'd really replied to me--"Yes. We lost."

Indeed we did. And the students did. And the university did, and most important, you did, if you have a kid in college or if you believe in the idea of college, or if you do something even as inoffensive as pay your taxes, which of course pays part of the salary of the strange folks who are now, in most of America's major universities, teaching something they call literature.

Okay. There have been a number of recent arguments that trends like "deconstruction," "multiculturalism," and new historicism" in English studies are in fact silly, self-serving, anti-educational cults of specialists. Most of them, though, have come from nonacademics, journalists. And academics, than whom no one is more snobbish, easily sniff at attacks from that quarter: just another sign, the weenies think (and say) that the great unwashed can't hope to understand the complexity and importance of what they are doing. And when Harold Bloom, surely our most eminent and humane critic, said the same thing in his wonderful book, The Western Canon (Harcourt Press, 1994), the stuck-pig squeals of outrage from the tenured out-decibelled your average heavy metal concert.

I'm neither a journalist nor an eminence, neither a war correspondent nor a general. Essentially, I'm a grunt, and I'm here to tell you from the front lines that the situation is hopeless, and quite serious. We've produced a generation of teachers who cannot read, can barely write, and do not teach. We have turned the Department of Literature into, effectively, an asylum run by the inmates.

Here's one example, from the May 1995 PMLA. Donald Morton is professor of English at Syracuse University and the author of the essay, "Birth of the "queer." (You have to know that queer theory' is the current flash word for studies of gay writers and the gay experience.) Here's the first sentence of his abstract--and please read it all:

While the return of queer is usually

explained locally as an oppressed

minority's positive

reunderstanding of a negative

word, as the adoption of an umbrella

to cover diverse marginal

subjectivities or as a sign of generational

difference, the term's

reappearance must instead be historicized--systematically

and

globally--as one of the theoretical,

cultural, and social changes that

result from the uncritical acceptance

(for class reasons) of the

premises of ludic (post)modern

theory in the dominant academy

and the culture industry'

Now I've read and reread Morton's essay, and he actually has some fine and smart points to make. But that's not the point. The point is that he's a professor of English and can't write his native language; at least not when he's being a "professor" of it. Here's my rewrite of his sentence:

Desecrating literature: reading the PMLA

Commonweal, April 5, 1996 by Frank McConnell

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