It`s not clear what Henry James would think of the Modern Language Association, but the head of the vice squad would be right at home. Many of the scholarly papers presented at its convention sound like entries from a police-station blotter.
To be sure, James, the patriarch of modern American fiction, had his enthusiasts among the 11,000 professors of English and foreign languages who assembled in Chicago recently for their annual between-semesters meeting. So, too, did Mark Twain, Alfred Lord Tennyson, William Faulkner, Dante Alighieri and other literary giants perennially dear to the hearts of book lovers.
But at seminars and round tables, the MLA (members` shorthand for their group, the largest association of academics in the U.S.) also offered undeniable evidence that the academic life just ain`t what it used to be.
Participants read papers on ”The Lesbian Phallus: Or Does
Heterosexuality Exist?” ”When `He` Means `She`: Verbal Cross-Dressing in Women-Identified Writers” and ”Melancholia and Jouissance: Reopening the Case of the Missing Penis.”
Other titles simply cannot be reprinted in a family newspaper. Anglo-Saxon used to be subject matter for MLA sessions on the history of English. Now its very earthy anatomical terms show up on the title pages of
participants` essays.
”You have to understand the academic world is a very faddish place, and these days sexual liberation is the `in` topic,” said Eric Miller, a graduate student in German literature at Princeton. ”Actually, as I remember it, there were more naughty words on last year`s convention program.”
Statistically, that may be true. But a visitor found few signs at this conference that MLA members are about to return to the intellectually chaste universe of their ”Mr. Chips” predecessors. Indeed, today`s professors can find a prurient interest in places where even Sen. Jesse Helms wouldn`t dream of looking.
At one session, Lawrence Rothfield of the University of Chicago presented a paper on ”The Detective as Pervert.” His own literary detective work, Rothfield informed his colleagues, convinces him that Sherlock Holmes and Dr. Watson were united by something more than platonic friendship.
Hidden clues
Tucked in between what he sees as the other clues of Sir Arthur Conan Doyle`s detective novels, Rothfield claims to find traces of the mannerisms and gestures that he says gays use as a code to quietly signal their sexual preferences, without alerting the suspicions or hostilities of heterosexuals. At one point in ”Scandal in Bohemia,” Watson sighs deeply, Rothfield recalled. As Rothfield reads the text, this can only mean the good doctor regretted having gotten married and thus having less time for his bachelor friend. Holmes` deviance is even greater, by Rothfield`s analysis. He observed that Holmes likes to confront a suspect with the evidence, then watch his prey squirm with discomfort.
”What kind of man enjoys inflicting pain on others?” Rothfield said.
”Isn`t that what we mean by the term `sadism`?”
As his audience nodded its assent, Rothfield concluded on a note of personal modesty. Why had no one before him realized that the Sherlock Holmes books offer evidence of ”The Detective as Pervert”? Why hadn`t those telltale clues been ”decoded”? he asked, using one of the academic buzzwords that echoed through the Hyatt Regency Hotel, headquarters for the MLA meetings. (Fittingly, one paper was entitled: ”In Defense of Jargon.”)
Source of all evil
Answering his own question, Rothfield pinned the blame on the ultimate source of all evil, according to the reigning cosmology of today`s ivory tower: Capitalism.
Conan Doyle wrote at the end of the last century, just as capitalism was getting into high gear. His first readers were white-collar workers, Rothfield noted. The backbone of a modern market economy, Sherlock Holmes` fans would have been aghast to realize their hero was gay. So in some way (and here the professor`s logic got a bit vague) their ”culture” reached out to gently turn their eyes away from a literary fact of life offensive to Victorian sensibilities.
Academic flower children
During social hours interspersed between their scholarly sessions of the four-day conference, veteran members of the MLA noted that with communism`s failure in Eastern Europe, about the only remaining Marxists are to be found at America`s universities. Many of today`s junior faculty members were students during the upheavals of the 1960s, when they saw themselves as the vanguard of a forthcoming, second American Revolution. Then the nation turned conservative, and these academic flower children decided that, if the larger world wanted no part of them, at least they could make the campus safe for their brand of politics.
”My younger colleagues just don`t relate to books as literature, the way our generation did,” said Albert Labriola, a professor at Duquesne University, who was in charge of a membership booth on behalf of the Milton Society of America, of which he is secretary. Instead, this new breed of English professors considers even literary classics important chiefly as sourcebooks for their ideological combat with mainstream America.
Demographics of creativity
Feminists, Labriola explained, now read novels and poems for evidence of society`s longstanding discrimination against women. Many young black professors and homosexual critics have similar axes to grind.
”The only new members we get are interested in sessions devoted to political topics like `Milton as Proto-Marxist` ” Labriola said of his society, devoted to the great 17th Century English poet.
Self-proclaimed populists, these New Age professors are also uncomfortable with the basic demographics of creativity: The muse of genius touches only a tiny handful of the billions of people who have walked this Earth.
”We now have graduate students who are skeptical about literature itself,” said Arnold Rampersad, a Princeton professor, at a forum devoted to the state of the profession. A distinguished black scholar, Rampersad noted that some young radicals now simply refuse to read Shakespeare and Faulkner. Their war cry, Rampersad noted, is the curious conviction that all books, like all men, are created equal.
Solving an old problem
”These future teachers of the humanities,” Rampersad said, ”are themselves anti-humanist.”
Still, those ideological blinders give this new professorial generation a quick-and-dirty solution to an age-old pedagogical problem. Anyone who has stood at a podium recognizes that all classrooms have the same topography:
Seated down front are the few students who share their teacher`s enthusiasm, while the back rows are inhabited by the majority, who virtually dare the instructor to force some culture down their throats. But if all books are equal, that resistance can be overcome simply by reducing the syllabus to the tastes of those back-benchers.
”Many young professors now prefer to teach popular culture instead of the classics,” noted David Shields, a professor at The Citadel. ”Then they come to MLA meetings and justify that change by presenting papers on `The Aesthetic of the Street.”`
Comic-book education?
In the short run, that might make undergraduates happy, added John Seelye of the University of Florida. But whether it is truly in their better interest is open to serious question.
”Already, six or seven years ago, I presented a paper at the MLA on this new wave of popular-culture curricula,” Seelye said. ”I asked my colleagues, `Do we really want kids graduating college having read only comic books?”`
Now, a few more English professors seem to be seriously considering the implications of Seelye`s question. At this year`s MLA meeting, a large audience, rejecting some sexier sessions running simultaneously, turned out instead for an old-fashioned session on values and literature.
There, Alain Finkielkraut, a young French philosopher, recounted a curious fact of recent history. In America, he noted, many professors shy away from terms like ”good” and ”bad” and self-conciously reject their predecessors` assumption that novels and poetry can be sources of moral inspiration to readers.
In Eastern Europe, though, dissident intellectuals sustained themselves through decades of totalitarian repression by reading those same classics that their counterparts in the West were so eagerly putting down. Living under communism`s yoke, Czech and Polish intellectuals took seriously John Locke and Thomas Jefferson`s ideas about the value of freedom and the dignity of the individual.
”Over here, we have Attila the Philosophers eager to distance themselves from what earlier generations called the Great Books,” Finkielkraut said.
”In Eastern Europe, they honored those same books and, in 1989, made a revolution that set them free. I hope that inspires us in the West to rethink our naive rejection of literature as a source of values.”
Restoring balance
Finkielkraut`s speach was widely applauded. Afterwards, Catherine Stimpson, president of the MLA, told a visiting reporter she hoped the session might help restore a sense of balance to the profession.
In the MLA`s ideological struggles, Stimpson, a professor at Rutgers University, generally has supported partisans of the new against defenders of the old. Still, she recognizes that in their haste to do political battle, her junior colleagues might be missing out on some of the joys of literature.
”Once when I was a kid and sick in bed, my mother read Richard Wright`s
`Native Son` out loud to me, cover to cover,” Stimpson said. ”It hit me like a slap in the face, and hooked me on reading forever. Boy, I sure hope our young professors can still get that kind of kick out of books.”
Hot topics
So much for dull and boring. Here are some of the seminar titles at the Modern Language Association conference:
”Rhyme, Reason, and Linguistic Intent in Fifteenth-Century Castilian Debate Poetry”
”The Lesbian Phallus: Or, Does Heterosexuality Exist?”
”Typist, Housewife, Mother, Spy: The Role(s) of Ethel Rosenberg in Legal Documents and Postmodern Literature”
”Victorian Underwear and Representations of the Female Body”
”When `He` Means `She`: Verbal Cross-Dressing in Women-Identified Writers”
”The Split Infinitive: A Problem `to Carefully Consider` ”
”Some Germanic-Finno-Ugric Parallels”
”The Repulsive Woman as Poet: Djuna Barnes and the Politics of Sexual Deviance”
”The Art of Undress(ing): The Deshabille in Proust`s Recherche”
Cash Bar: Arranged by the Gay and Lesbian Caucus for the Modern Languages. Dinner: Arranged by the Friends of George Sand.
