Sunday, January 10, 2016


According to the MLA, The Modern Language Association  Convention, first held in 1883, is an annual gathering of teachers and scholars in the field of language and literature study.  The convention enables members of the profession to share their ideas and research with colleagues from other universities and colleges. 

The 2016 convention was held in Austin from 7 to 10 January, and the presidential theme for the convention is Literature and Its Publics: Past, Present, and Future.

In his welcome letter, MLA President Roland Greene wrote that this year's Convention theme invites attendees to discuss how film, digital media, and rhetoric "move among the arts and how our field engages other intellectual disciplines; to reflect on literature’s past publics and speculate on its future publics; and to think about media, reception, audience, commentary, translation, and adaptation—and more—as ways of connecting to a public."
He said that "our work as teachers, historians, editors, and critics...is a public act" and that "everything we contribute—every reading, intervention, and argument—makes an implicit claim for the social good of our common enterprise."
Reading these words, I headed into the 2016 MLA Convention expecting to feel regenerated as an educated, to remember that my role as an educator is tremendously important in our society.  

Scales of Time and Shakespeare

Presided by Sarah Werner, Independent Scholar

First Presenter: Christopher D'Addario, Gettysburg College
"Inside Time in Shakespeare's Late Plays"

Dr. D'Addario spoke to what happens to the perceptions of an audience when it moved indoors to the Black Friars Theater within the city walls of London from the outdoor Globe experience. 

The Black Friars theater was acquired by the Kings Men, and in viewing The Winter's Tale at this new venue, the audience would have been aware that they were inside the city walls, as opposed to a more wide open Southwark.  Chaos would have been caused by the theater goers, with the narrow, cooked streets crowded with coaches, horses, and unruly theatre goers.  Inside, the galleries would have been crowded and the candle lighting would have strong.  A sense of isolation would have been emphasized. 

D'Addario says that an audience could imagine an existence far removed from time, and that the smaller, indoor space of the Black Friars, with its limits put on actor movements, would have contributed to this feeling.  The audience would have been able to closely observe the faces of actors, especially in the tableaux scenes, which focuses on the stasis of time rather than its movement.  Since people fear the transformation of time, which naturally comes with the passage of time, they desire the static present.  Moving the performance into a secluded space would have slowed down the moment and allowed the audience to see how much motion there is in a still, silent moment--that nothing is ever settled; when time freezes, the audience becomes aware of the candlelight, the rustle of costume, the shimming of neighbor movements.

2nd Presenter:  Katherine Attie, Towson University
"Redeeming Time: Prince Hal's Reformation and the Poetics of the Everyday"

In discussing Prince Hal in Shakespeare's Henry IV, Dr. Attie discussed how rather than being a memorable climatic event promised, the reformation of Prince Hal, the future Henry V, turns out to be as spectacular as grass turning green.  The reformation actually turns out to be a revealing of quiet, constructive process. 
Attie says that Shakespeare's early plays include a vast temporal span in his early plays.  Consequently, Hal is very attentive to the hour glass.  Henry's reverie reveals smaller time periods that are an ode to time, a way of ordering human activity, and suggests that routine doesn't result in boredom, but beauty.  Henry, in fact, imagines that he is in control of time because he created a sun dial, but his understanding of actual time is not understood.  He mostly counts hours of leisure, not work.

Shakespeare amplifies the portrayal of the habitual effort involved in everyday work with the quiet beauty of routine.  He explores and emphasizes everyday labor, which was both an Elizabethan request and considered a Calvinistic triumph.  It wasn't mere labor; it gave life meaning.  When Hal leads his men into battle, he is laboring within his calling; he has been working on self-improvement all along.  And he has changed toward time, valuing it like never before.  With labor, lifelong existence is profitable.  Ultimately, Shakespeare conveys the daily routine as a pattern that conveys the meaning that ordinary is beautiful.
Third Presenter:  Paul Menzer, Mary Baldwin College
"One Time:  Shakespeare in the Key of Anecdote"
This speaker was a funny man, which is appropriate to the topic of anecdote.  In fact, he began his talk by pointing out the incongruousness of speaking abouy theater at such an early hour (earliest AM session).  Then he shared an anecdote about a Peter O'Toole performance in Twelfth Night, which he heard shortly after the death of that actor.  It was a funny story told about drunk actors, which has been told and retold, which has resulted in many variations and original authors.  250 years, he said, can change an anecdote--the years, in fact, are what have made the story anecdotal.  His point was that theatrical anecdotes are very much part of theatrical history.  He expanded that theater history is told through anecdotes; they are a form of vernacular criticisms.  They resolve the unresolvable about the plays. 

Tracing of anecdotes about plays, he says, is a weird branch of theatrical history, but they are also a form of prophecy.  The phrase, “one time” is a time stamp, and tracing them provides a history.  Anecdote is not a fake memory--it is a promising note of what will happen again.  They are recollections of the past and promise of the future. 
Because anecdotes are often absurd, they would never stand up to the kind of scrutiny of involved in archives--there is no specific date or time ascribe directly to an anecdote, making them hostile to systemization.  One can’t organize the experience.  "One time" is an antonym to a date, time.  Anecdotal time is time without specificity.  Anecdotes, Dr. Menzer says, do count time, but it's the kind of time that doesn't use a clock to count. 

Menzer finished his talk by saying that actors live out pre scripted lives, finished before it begins.  Anecdotes are all about preventing the play from running its pre-scripted course.  It is a protest, and actors are reluctant recorders.  Anecdotes interrupt, but they don't care about the consequences:  interruptions introduce breaks in the sameness; they produce a deviant history.  Ultimately, anecdotes are both an echo and a promise.

On Joan Didion: Essayist, Journalist, Memoirist, Novelist


This was a special session here at the convention called to explore the work of one of the most influential writers of our time, Joan Didion, who is now 84 and has been publishing since the 1960s.  Didion has been getting a lot of attention lately, including winning the 2012 National Medal of Arts and an upcoming documentary--see trailer.  Many believe that she's been neglected in the canonization of literature.

First Speaker: Leigh Gilmore, Brown University
Dr. Gilmore addressed Didion's two memoirs, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, both depicting the deaths of her husband and daughter, respectively.  Didion says that these books account "the mutual disaster of losing both of them."  These books represent a Style icon—the moment Didion has in occupying the space of grief in the public.  History is created in this moment; she asserts value and pain of loved ones.

Dr. Gilmore connects and compares this style to the way in which police shootings of minorities are publicized.  In ascribing dignity to the deaths of her loved ones--their lives and death, as well as her own grief, she makes it matter.  Public killings often shows the opposite. The international activist movement Black Lives Matter (BLM) insistently counters The Year of Magical Thinking.   BLM challenges media by circulating family photos, forcing police killings into public view.  Trayvon Martin, for example, is honored, as is the grief of his mother.  Didion's memoirs have structured the space of public grief.


Second Speaker:  Fanny Nudelman, Carleton University
Dr. Nudelman spoke on Didion's early essays and her interest in murder and her idiosyncratic use of the first person.  Referring to Didion's essay "The White Album," Nudelman asserted that Didion preferred closed doors. Unlike the iconic sign blessing both strangers and kin coming through the back door, Didion did no such thing in her California town during the time when Charles Manson was hard at work.  Didion's style during the New Journalism era of the 1960s and 70s, which experimented with hybrid expanded forms, relies on the methods of autobiography.  A reporter barging through the door (Wolf's image) denies perception under duress.  In "The White Album," Didion's controlled first person awaits catastrophe; she exerts control by refusing to avoid conventions that would link to the feeling of dread and fear.  She rejects a confessional mode--she insists that dread is rooted in history, but she never names the historical source.  Years later, readers learn that one source of her fear is nuclear war.  By the time she writes Blue Nights, there’s no longer any left to dread; the worst has come to pass.   The figure of the stranger at the door is diffused.

Third Speaker:  Casey Shoop, University of Oregon

Dr. Shoop  says that Didion wrote about Nixon early on. He was the flotsam of California, and he read westerns.  Didion's style, Shoop says, has always been generically western, a clear eyed realism.  Reganism, especially during the Iran-Contra scandal, changed her style.  Her language wasn't a political argument.  She made many attempts to characterize Reagan as the New West, but her style relied on the myths of the West.  Didion admitted later that she did not examine what she needed to believe. 

Cli-Fi: Climate Change and Narrative Fiction


First Speaker:  Courtney Traub, University of Oxford
"Ecocatastrophic Nightmares in Recent Experimental Fiction"
Dr. Davis discussed Kathryn Davis's The Walking Tour (1999) and Only Revolutions by Mark Z Danielewski (2006) as examples of ecocatastrophic experimental fiction.  These works have to do with the anxiety and fears associated with recent eco threats.  Generally, nature survives only as an object of nostalgia.  
 Climate change and climate disruption calls back the conventions related to gothics and how Romantic anxieties respond to new technologies--as in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.  Unchecked technologies are still associated with unknown threats.  As in ETA Hoffmann's The Sandman, with climate change, it is impossible to see the whole because you can’t see the same.  With images of melting glaciers in the Artic, the Earth itself becomes monstrous and threatening.  We realize, in these books, that we are not masters of the earth--it masters us.  Negative affect of fear and dread take center stage with icy desolate mountain tops—both beauty and threat.  An ecophobic thrust develops.  The beauty of landscapes are replaced by post apocalyptic dull grey landscape resulting from the abuse and unleashing of new technologies.  Apocalypse becomes a way of life resulting from devastating human made climate change.  Finally, re-emergence of the natural world becomes an important factor. 
Second Speaker: Richard Crownshaw, Goldsmiths University of London
"Climate-Change Fiction and the Future Anterior"
Dr. Crownshaw begins with the statement that climate change renders life unsustainable. In climate change fiction, catastrophe and post-catastrophe results from immoral act of ignoring climate change; these fictions are a history of our fears, a kind of cultural memory.  They include population culling, species extinction, dislocation, etc.  Odds are against tomorrow.  At center is the political and ethical message that human corporality is inseparable from the environment.  In the environmental trauma paradigm, geological trauma is mediated by financial capitalism, speculation on the future—a satire based on the catastrophe ready to happen. 

Third Presenter:  Derek Woods, Rice University
"Genre and Atmotechnics--Cli-Fi Performativity?"
Cli-Fi is a genre that was named during the internet era; it is the reframing of literary categories, a scaled up humanity.  It is Predictive Realism in which the worst case is attributed to the best case scenarios.  The new genre results from matching it to the scale of the Earth.  The norm reiterated in Cli-Fi is the ideal climate, but the definition for a normal climate depends on representation.  An ideal climate is already behind us.  Climate stability, in fact, has never existed. 
 

 

Why Teach Literature?

First Presenter:  Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University
"Literature and the Future of the Past"

Literature is valuable for what it can for the future and past.  We as a country have a habit of obliterating unflattering facts as evidence in our history books.  In fact, five million history textbooks issued this year left out KKK and Jim crow laws.  The Civil War and slavery gets white washed; lynchings are often left out, except by some statistics.  Race and American memory can be kept more complete through literature which enables human perspectives to come alive.  Literature can hear voices from the past that have been silenced.
Bone Dance by Wendy Rose, illustrates how Indian art and artifacts often get more respect than Indians themselves.  Literature prompts us to reexamine what we thought we knew of our history, such as the experience of Internment Camp prisoners, those involved with the Treaty of Mexico, and women’s experiences regarding gender and equality in the family and the workplace.  Such works as Fanny Fern’s Ruth Hall, Michael Harrington’s The Other America: Poverty in the United States, and Thanhha Laie’s Inside Out and Back Again are good examples. 

Mark Twain used irony to attack Racism in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn.  Yet, Hannibal, Missouri, has since erased any history of slavery in the town, even in exhibits about the book.  They have an eye for keen historical preservation, but only if it makes them look good.  Faye Dant, author from Hannibal, has worked to preserve the facts that her town has erased; now, Hannibal has a new Black History Museum, although the Hannibal Trolley drives right past the museum without mention.  Literature can reveal choices that need to be made and aspects of our selves.
Second Presenter: Robert Warrior, University of Illinois, Urbana
“I Teach Literature Because I Believe in It and Think It makes the World Better”
Dr. Warrior discussed the book Tracks by Louise Erdrich, which is one of a dozen books written about the Ojibwe Native Peoples and the reservations of North Dakota.  The Allotment Act, which has removed land from the reservation, plays a role in the book.  The prose, says Dr. Warrior, is pure beauty.  Other books include The Bee Queen and Love Medicine.  Federal history and tribal stories do not tell the same stories; literature adds insight. 
 
Third Presenter:  Lisa Lowe, Tufts University
"Metaphors of Globalization"
Dr. Lowe began with two epitaphs, one by Salman Rushdie, who was born Indian, who said, “It may be argued that the past is a country from which we have all emigrated, that its loss is part of our common humanity.” And the second by Audre Lord, who wrote,
for the embattled

there is no place
that cannot be
home
nor is.

Lowe said that homelessness is a common and differential experience for Americans and displacement known generally.  Many people hark from another place, changing languages, forming the diaspora.  Because of globalization, homelessness is universal.
Lord’s poem unites being at home and homelessness.  To become at home is not the same as having a home.  Dr Lowe teaches world literature, which reflects the ongoing globalization and sees literature as a window to the culture of our period.  In Jhampa Lahiri’s story “Interpreter of Maladies,” 10 year Lilia’s perspective on her American world is juxtaposed to that of a friend of the family who is no longer Pakistani due to the restructuring of national borders. Lilia sees that her own connection to her home is not what she thought it was. 

Dr. Lowe says that she teaches literature because it introduces this disconnected, connected experience, homelessness, to readers.   


The Future of the Past in Hannibal: (Re)Presenting Race in Mark Twain's Home Town in the Twenty-First Century

Presenter:  Shelley Fisher Fishkin, Stanford University

I liked Dr. Fisher Fishkin’s presentation yesterday so much that I thought I’d come see what else she had to say about Mark Twain.  Her emphasis was on the fact that Hannibal, Missouri, almost completely relies on tourism for its continued economy, and yet the issues of slavery presented in Mark Twain’s books, as well as Twain’s anti-slavery feelings and criticisms of the townspeople, have not made its way into the town’s historic preservation.  The town calls itself "America’s Hometown" but has whitewashed all its negative history--just as Tom Sawyer does the fence.  Little boys are depicted as marble-players, not orphans sold by parents. 
 
Relatively recently, some changes have occurred.  Terrell Dempsey, an attorney from Hannibal, prompted in part by the publications of Dr. Fisher Fishkin, gathered evidence and wrote Searchingfor Jim: Slavery in Sam Clemens’s World (2003).  In his book, Dempsey speaks to the town revenue and how nearly ten percent of it came from a tax on owned slaves.  In fact, virtually every aspect of Hannibal’s society—government, law, religion, economics, and social status had a stake in keeping the institution of slavery alive.  To this day, city board members have made public their desire that the boyhood home of Mark Twain not be tainted with slavery.   

In recent years, a monument was established honoring the black owned shops that existed in the city from 1920-1984, highlighting the existence of a vibrant black community.  White citizens responded by insisting that a similar monument be installed across the street in remembrance of white owned stores, and so it was.  In addition, small bits of information now appear in the Mark Twain Boyhood Museum, but they are detached and unexplained.  And nothing exists about Mark Twain’s feelings about slavery.  For example, Twain’s famous quotes: 

“There are many humorous things in the world; among them, the white man's notion that he is less savage than the other savages.” 

“Governments derive their just powers from the consent of the governed white men” Stupendous Procession 1901 

Faye Dant, descendent of Henry Dant (1835-1939) who was a model for Twain’s Jim, remembers Jim Crow (separate but equal in schools, restaurants, etc.).  persisting even fifty years after their abolishment.  In 2011, also inspired by Dr. Fisher Fishkin’s books, Dant began to collect artifacts for a museum that ultimately opened in 2013 called Jim’s Journey, the Huck Finn FreedomCenter.  It is housed in the Old Welshman’s house, which figures in a key scene in AHF.   

Fisher Fishkin concluded her talk by saying that Hannibal has the opportunity to become America’s Hometown in actuality by embracing and reflecting upon its past.  The Welcome sign inside the Jim’s Journey Museum says, “In order to live in the present and prepare for the future, we must first…”

The Public Jane Austen in Austin; or, How to Keep Austen Weird

Presiding: Devoney Looser, Arizona State University, Tempe

Loosner’s introductory remarks included how this session received it’s title: “Keep Austin Weird” is a cherished city slogan here in Austin, and MLA has also wanted to Keep Austen Weird.  Apparently, this idea started when Eve Segwick presented a paper in 1989 about Jane Austen and a masturbating girl.  Whether degenerative to the humanities or not, Jane Austen’s resonance still continues today. 

First Presenter:  Mary Ann O'Farrell, Texas A&M University

"Jane Austen and the 'After 9/11' Question"

Dr. O’Farrell is currently completing a book on Austen’s appearances in contemporary popular culture and political discourse.  She seemed very pleased to receive Jane Austen gifts at this conference, namely a Jane Austen tee shirt and toothpaste.  She began her talk about all the books you can find on Amazon that deal with how life has changed since 9/11.  Austen writes about manners in a small world and O’Farrell did a lot of reading about manners in preparation for this paper.  She discussed the disaster that occurs at Box Hill in Jane Austen’s Emma, and how this scene in which Emma clumsily destroys a balanced world constitutes a disaster, an “after” to “before and after.” Box Hill is a marker of time the way 9/11 is.  Emma spends the “after” trying to make amends, to clean up.  O’Farrell points out, however, that the social disillusion that came to a head at Box Hill actually began the day before at Donwell.  As an answer to how Austen contributes to contemporary culture, O’Farrell says that hypervigilance is a strategy we all use to try to keep the future changes at bay, and what occurs at Box Hill is a rupture that leads to a broadening, the beginning of letting in the broad world.  What follows that day is everydayness. 
 
Second Presenters: Janine G. Barchas, University of Texas, Austin and Kristina Straub, Carnegie Mellon University

"Will and Jane, at Four Hundred and Two Hundred,"
 
Dr. Archas wrote the book Matters of Factin Jane Austen: History, Location, and Celebrity and her most recent project is the “What Jane Saw” website, which digitally reconstructs two Georgian museum exhibitions witnessed by Jane Austen in 1796 and 1813.  Together with Kristina Straub, she is co-curator of an upcoming brick-and-mortar exhibition, entitled “Will & Jane: Shakespeare, Austen,and the Cult of Celebrity” at the Folger Shakespeare Library in fall 2016 (August to November).  Kristina Straub is the author of Domestic Affairs: Intimacy, Eroticism, and Violence BetweenServants and Masters in Eighteenth Century Britain. 

The Exhibit at the Folgers Shakespeare Library in Washington DC will be a show that looks at the various aspects of Shakespeare at 400 years old and Austen at 200.  It will examine biography, literary celebrity, etc.  The authors provided a audio-visual preview of the show.