Last year, I posted the titles of all the papers on British Literature that were presented at MLA 2003.
This year, I’m doing it again. Why? Because people in the press and in the blogosphere tend to pull out a few paper titles, argue that they’re silly or worthless, and then imply first that most of the papers at MLA are silly or worthless and second that contemporary scholarship in language and literature is.
It makes for amusing commentary.
But not only is such commentary intellectually shallow (mocking paper titles? please); it’s demonstrably wrong. As I wrote last year, the majority of papers presented at MLA are “the kind of interesting work one would expect scholars of language and literature to be doing.”

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“When the academic humanities are finally, definitively destroyed by the studied, self-important irrelevance of theorists’ dogmatically inaccessible progressivist stance, no one will be able to complain that there were not cogent warnings of what was to come.” –Erin O’Connor

If the academic humanities are finally destroyed–and reports of this impending destruction are greatly exaggerated–it will not be because of theorists. Death will come when people finally give in to the notion that institutions of higher education should be financially profitable enterprises run like corporations, and when they give in to the notion that the purpose of higher education is to allow those who partake of its benefits to earn more money at their jobs. What chance do the humanities have then? It won’t matter if humanities academics are writing like Jacques Derrida or like Cleanth Brooks. All the good writing in the world will not save the academic humanities at that point.

“This thing upon me like a flower and a feast. This thing upon me crawling like a snake. It’s not death, but dying will solve its power … And as my hands drop a last desperate pen in some cheap room they will find me there and never know my name, my meaning, nor the treasure of my escape.” -Charles Bukowski