ILMLA?

MLA = Modern Language Association

Major League Archery

Mike Love Appreciationists

More Lame Acronyms

Mums I Like to Analrape.

(have you guys played ACRO before btw?)

I should be going, but, seeing as I was too busy this fall to get any applications together, I didn't really see the point. (aside from, you know, hearing papers)

Momus Loves Asians

that sounds like an awesome association! wish i was up enough on languages to go to cool things like this and also fap with drew!

Didn't someone from ILComics present something there a year or two ago? Was that you Drew?

Nope, not me. I have attended MLA once before, when it was in San Francisco. I attended quite a contentious discussion celebrating the anniversary of William Empson's "Milton's God", and a Spenser Society luncheon, but no presentation for me. This year I'm here for job interviews along with thousands of other hopeful souls in suits and ties clogging the lobbies of every downtown hotel.

I've been to the MLA once, in Chicago in 1999. Highlight was running in to Michael Bérubé and talking to him about how undergrads don't know who Elvis Costello is.

Sure they do, if you count "that extra from that one sitcom/movie" as a valid answer.

Or "that guy? with the one old lounge-singer guy? who was in Austin Powers or whatever?"

Huh: the weird thing about that, especially with regard to Costello, is that ... umm, well, I'm guessing plenty of college freshman don't recognize some of the canonical literary works they're about to be taught, either; they're canonized by a whole history of specialists and then taught to the students on that basis. (And if they weren't taught to students on that basis, I have to say I'm not sure how long The Faerie Queene would be recognizable to many people at all.) I'm not really sure where the essay is standing on the sometimes different mechanisms between that and the survival of a work in popular culture, and I get the feeling it's a little fudged, maybe? Because while freshmen might not know who Elvis Costello is, his work is (so far) fairly canonized among specialists and enthusiasts (we'll see about 50 years and all, but y'know), and if you applied the same sorts of tactics we do with literature, he'd theoretically be fair game for seriously assigning and teaching to students, whether they know about him or not -- as we do with plenty of canonical lit, and as we do much more often with film, actually. The only real difference is that there aren't pop-music programs or departments -- but still, when someone throws together a course on pop music, that kind of pushing of semi-canonical works is still what they do.

In other words I guess the thing I find weird is that he's talking about how pop culture lasts or doesn't as pop culture, in the whole mass-culture consciousness, quite apart from the meddling and power-holding and observation of specialists and enthusiasts, but the way he's talking about literature is quite clearly not that, it's centuries of mediation and meddling and canonization by the few, and I don't understand how he's dealing with that difference in his thought process -- and while the obvious answer might be "well that's the difference between 'pop culture' and 'high culture,' that one is democratic and the other requires learned response," I'm not sure that really helps, and probably just opens up whole bigger problems to account for.

That's a good point.