Live-Blogging the MLA? also, Are Graduate Students Really That Ignorant?

(X-posted from the Valve)

Last year, I handled the duties myself.  But it’s difficult to prepare a talk and network and keep you informed, but I’ll try my best.  Updates, as soon as they’re available, can be found here. Included among them will be the finalized plans for the big meet-up this Thursday.  Ideas are still circulating, but we should have it all hammered out early tomorrow. 

On another note, John doesn’t believe the following claims made by Jeffrey Williams and William Spanos in the forthcoming the minnesota review.  I don’t either, but for different reasons.  Here’s an excerpt from my talk:

Later in [his interview with Toril Moi], he notes that his students “might have read [Judith] Butler, but have no idea who Paul de Man is.” In another interview, William Spanos observes that his “students haven’t the foggiest idea the history of literary criticism prior to the contemporary moment.  Not simply the hegemony of New Criticism, but also the emergent struggle of the early postructuralists to revolutionize that earlier tradition.  They don’t know who Cleanth Brooks is, they haven’t read Cooper’s Last of the Mohicans or Twain’s Pudd’enhead Wilson or Faulkner’s ‘The Bear.’"

I find it difficult to believe that graduate students in English have never heard of Cleanth Brooks and Paul de Man—then again, I did my undergraduate work at LSU, in rooms down the hall from the office of The Southern Review, and am doing my graduate work at UCI, in a building shared with Andrzej Warminski.  To not have heard of Brooks or de Man would’ve required a concerted effort, one whose intensity implies that I had, in fact, heard of them and simply wanted no more of it. 

Are there really graduate students who haven’t heard of Brooks or de Man, or are Williams and Spanos merely lamenting a decline in familiarity with The Well-Wrought Urn and Blindness and Insight?  But isn’t that even a little hyperbolic?  Or are my LSU/UCI-tinted glasses coloring my expectations?

Comments

[Rich Puchalsky]

I'd like to ship you a present for your panel at the MLA, Scott, unless it's too much trouble for you to deal with picking it up / handling it out to three other people in addition to everything else you're doing. So could you Email me with where you'll be staying? I'll have a package Fedexed to your hotel, assuming that such a thing is possible.

[Karl Steel]

I've heard only of Pudd’enhead Wilson. I'm pretty much a Pudd'enhead Wilson specialist. Or monomaniac.

SEK: If I can hack it, I want to come to your session tomorrow. It is tomorrow, yes, at noon? Where?

--
You know what bugs me? The decrease in the number of students who know Martianus Capella. It's probably been in steady decline since, oh, the 12th century. Damn those post-late-classical humanists!

[sxKitten]

Heck, I'm a lowly Commerce undergrad, and I've heard of Paul de Man.

OK, I was dating a guy doing his masters in English, but still ...

[Mike S]

“students haven’t the foggiest idea the history of literary criticism prior to the contemporary moment. Not simply the hegemony of New Criticism, but also the emergent struggle of the early postructuralists to revolutionize that earlier tradition."

Sadly, I think there's some truth to this.

I'd be interested to know how many of us had Brooks or de Man as required reading on either an undergrad or grad syllabus. I'd wager it's a small number.

I think it might have something to do with the fact that there are other writers/critics assigned in lieu of Brooks and de Man. Derrida occupies a more prominent canonical position than does de Man, and I'd say the same about Richards and Empson in relation to Brooks.

[Paul]

Is that you, CultureSpace? :P

[Karl Steel]

Liberty Ballroom, Salon C.

[Liz Y.]

Brooks and de Man were not on our syllabus, and I took criticism at UCI. But I have heard of them.

[Adam Kotsko]

The Western education system started going downhill as soon as we stopped using The Marriage of Mercury and Philology as a basic textbook.

[Karl Steel]

Adam: that's my joke! Look above.

SEK: next time I'll both read and bring along the MLA schedule. I just saw three lovely papers by A. Singh, M. Berube, and whossit Phenomenology from Virginia, but no paper by SEK. Why? Who knows. Time well spent.

[ben wolfson]

I've heard of all persons and texts mentioned, and I'm not even a lit person. You people must be in a state.

[Adam Kotsko]

I was echoing your joke, Karl. If this were Unfogged, my comment would have been preceded by the number corresponding to your comment, in order to make this clear. It was never my intention to steal your thunder, but rather to help it to resonate ever-further.

[Karl Steel]

A "god of thunder and rock and roll" K: my apologies for my thin skin.

[Alex Leibowitz]

It is interesting how the standards of 'education' vary widely (wildly) from field to field.

[Miriam]

Brooks was on the reading list when I took Michael Clark's CR100A at UC Irvine--this would have been around 1990 or so. No de Man, though (although we did approach Derrida, with considerable trepidation).

[Liz Y.]

Miriam, we're still approaching Derrida with trepidation, believe me.