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Topic and Nature of the Proposed Forum [Program and Presenters listed below]
For the 1997 MLA Convention, Thomas Crochunis and Charles J.
Stivale
proposed and developed a Special Session entitled "MLAlienation"
(December 29, 1997). Besides excellent attendance at the panel
(over 140 participants), the discussion that followed the brief
presentation of papers was extremely lively and moving, in response
to the personal statements presented by each of the panelists.
Moreover, this discussion could easily have continued for hours,
and the common feeling of all in the meeting room certainly was
that such discussions should continue regularly at the MLA. [The
individual papers in the 1997 Special Sessions remain available
for consultation at http://www.langlab.wayne.edu/MLAlienation/Home.html]
Following the Special Session discussion, a number of MLA members spoke to each of the panelists about practical means for pursuing specific topics inspired by the papers and raised following them by the group. The organization of this proposed Forum adheres, therefore, to three different foci of general concern that the audience members proposed.
As in the "MLAlienation" Special Session in 1997, the overall Forum and Workshops will provide a forum in which the speakers could offer personal as well as professional testimony on the complex structures of feeling and behavior that the culture of the MLA organization produces. By using the term "job front" in distinction to "job market" (or even "job system" as proposed in the Committee on Professional Employment report), the Forum deliberately acknowledges the stressful and often emotionally devastating circumstances that constitute the job search process.
However, in contrast to "job workshops" and graduate student orientation that the MLA sponsors each year, the distinguishing features of this session emerge from a particular governing assumption: that the job market is not simply one part of the profession, but constitutes the profession's ideological unconscious in very complex ways. That is, there simply is nothing in the profession that is not, in some way, part of "the job market," and there is no one who is not, in some real or vicarious way, a "job candidate." As a result of this assumption, the participants in the Main Session and the Workshops will neither just mark off "the job market" and talk about "it," nor indulge in a gripe session vilifying the search process and bemoaning the fate of job seekers. Rather, they will talk about their lives in academia (as administrators, teachers, colleagues, mentors, friends, selves, bodies, and so on) and trace the influences of the "job front" within them, personally and professionally, often in unexpected ways and perhaps, therefore, with profound and even disturbing consequences. Through these forms of testimony, the goal of the Main Session is to develop and problematize this notion of the "job front" and, thereby, to deepen our conceptualization of the "crisis."
Main Session: "MLAlienation
1998: Tales from the Job Front," Chair: Charles J. Stivale,
Wayne State University
1. Thomas Crochunis, The LAB at Brown University, "The Invisible
Man: A Humanities Scholar on the Job (Market)"
2. George Levine, Rutgers University, "A View from the Other
Side"
3. Elizabeth Keller, Rutgers University, "Second Guessing
the Job Market: Preoccupations of a Comparative Literature Graduate
Student"
4. Jane Gallop, University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee, "Castration
Anxiety and the Unemployed Ph.D."
Workshop 1: "MLAlienation 1998: Academic Professions," Chair: Stephanie Girard, Princeton University
1. John Protevi, Louisiana State University, "'Welcome,
New Faculty Members!': Adminspeak, or the Political Economy of
Mr./Ms. Chips, the Part-timer"
2. Annie Merrill Ingram, Davidson College, "The Overload
Syndrome"
3. Victoria C. Olsen, Stanford University, "Re: Re-Entry"
4. Charles J. Stivale, Wayne State University, "Tenure and
its Denial: Facing the Winter Years and Beyond"
Workshop 2: "MLAlienation 1998: New Parameters of the Academic 'Fold'," Chair: Nora A. McGuinness, University of California-Davis
1. Lezlie Hart Stivale, Wayne State University, "From
Teaching to Administration: Re-Viewing the 'Fold'"
2. Kimberly A. Nance, Illinois State University, "Positions
for Academic Couples: Fantasy, Gossip, Urban Legends and Cautionary
Tales"
3. Jonathan Worley, Belfast, Ireland, "'The Troubles' and
Other Troubles on 'The Job Front'"
4. Christina Boufis, Stanford University/University of California-Berkeley,
"Getting Out/Staying In: From Women's Studies to Women's
Jails"