MLA 13

In lieu of an actual MLA blog post, I'm just going to link to the two sessions I Storified.

1. The Poet-Scholar: Session 150, Thursday, 7:00–8:15 p.m. A special session. Presiding: Hillary Gravendyk, Pomona Coll. Speakers: Julie Carr, U of Colorado, Boulder; Heather Dubrow, Fordham U; Margaret Ronda, Rutgers U; Jennifer Scappettone, U of Chicago; Juliana M. Spahr, Mills C; Barrett Watten, Wayne State U.

2. Theories of Close Reading in Socially Motivated Criticism: Session 625, Saturday, 5 January, 5:15–6:30 p.m. Program arranged by the Division on Twentieth-Century American Literature. Presiding: Robert Dale Parker, Univ. of Illinois, Urbana

1. "Vectors, Schemas, and Percepts in the Practice of Close Reading," Paula M. L. Moya, Stanford Univ.

2. "Too Good to be True: On Sentimental Miseducations and Socially Motivated Queer Theory," Lee Charles Edelman, Tufts Univ.

3. "Feminist Reading in the 1970s: New? Close? Theoretical?" Jane Gallop, Univ. of Wisconsin, Milwaukee

A special shout-out to Session 661, "U.S. Culture in the Age of Expertise," organized by Scott Selisker. I tweeted it but didn't Storify it, since I was the only person tweeting that 8:30 am panel!

And I also wish I'd been present at what sounded like an absolutely electric (so to speak) panel on "The Dark Side of the Digital Humanities." William Pannapacker and Alexis Lothian have both written up useful notes on the panel.

One thing I really love about MLA is getting to see all my friends and colleagues from around the country--you can hardly walk ten feet at MLA without running into far-flung friends--something that means a lot for a former west-coaster now parked (and sometimes unfairly towed) on the east coast. On Saturday night I even got to have dinner with a large percentage of my old dissertation writing group, which was wonderful.

Thanks to Rosemary Feal and the hard-working MLA staff for putting together such a successful, lively conference.

Anti-intellectualism, déjà vu.

I don't really want to dwell further on the madness that is the Church of Higher Efficiency's* response to Naomi Schaefer Riley's anti-intellectual blog post dismissing all of Black Studies basically on the grounds that Schaefer Riley does not understand the titles of some dissertations. [background]

But I do want to note Amy Alexander's suggestion that cuts at UC and CSU should be the real target of outrage, as if there couldn't ever at any one time be more than one issue deserving of outrage.

As Gautam Premnath rightly pointed out, it's not as though the two issues are unrelated. "The crisis of public higher ed," Gautam observes, "has its roots in the contempt for scholarship you condone."

Schaefer Riley's MO—"check out these titles; aren't they obviously ridiculous? This entire discipline is clearly worthless!" is a very familiar one. Various mainstream publications trot out the ritual mocking of the MLA program every winter, as if a journalist's inability to understand the titles of talks in a specialized field proved something. Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick describes how such tactics were taken up against (the title of a talk from) her work in her 1993 essay "Queer and Now." Anyone who knows scholarship knows that Sedgwick was a true thinker—careful, erudite, inventive, insightful. But you don't have to know anything to mock a title.

We're used to seeing such unrigorous hit jobs in the mainstream press, because the mainstream press is anti-intellectual. Amy Alexander has been defending the Church of Higher Efficiency's dubious decision to give NSR a blog (and, as Brian Leiter points out, this has been dubious for a very long time) on the basis that "CHE is a NewsOrg, not part of Academe." True enough. But if a paper purports to be the Chronicle of Higher Education, shouldn't it have a specialized knowledge of higher ed, or at least not be actively hostile to higher ed? Shouldn't ye olde MLA-season title-snarking be plain out of bounds for any higher-ed-related publication?

My sense is that a lot of academics feel ambivalent about the Church of Higher Efficiency—"it's a dreadful rag, but it's our dreadful rag." CHE is quite adamantly saying, "no, no, we're not your dreadful rag at all; we have no obligations to higher ed whatsoever." The Church of Higher Efficiency is thus taking the stance on scholarship that Amazon takes on books: you read it; it's a major part of your intellectual and personal life; it contains ideas? Great; whatever; to us it's a widget that we ship out of a warehouse in Tacoma. We are happy to ship you a coffeemaker as well; makes no difference to us. Pageviews, plz.

That's unfortunate, although I can't exactly weep over the Church of Higher Efficiency getting explicit about just how little it cares about higher ed per se. I mean, it's a dreadful rag (exception: the excellent Jen Howard). Rather, I want us all to make the connection that Gautam made, between these routine pot-shots at scholarship by journalists who proudly announce that they are not in a position to know what they are talking about and the kinds of sweeping policy changes that are currently leading to the effective dismantling of public higher ed in California and elsewhere. "Is college WORTH IT?" they ask. Not if you can make a career of announcing your lack of education and taking pot-shots at the educated, under the auspices of a periodical allegedly meant to serve the higher ed community, no less.

More public scholarship. Less Church of Higher Efficiency.

***

UPDATE 5/7: The Church of Higher Efficiency has apologized for its editorial oversights and dismissed NSR. Tressie McMillen Cottom deserves the internet equivalent of a standing ovation.

*"Church of Higher Efficiency": h/t Mark Sample.

Sedgwick, Eve Kosofsky. "Queer and Now." Tendencies. Durham: Duke UP, 1993. Print.

Two quick links on NTT labor

1. Bérubé on New Faculty Majority and non-tenure-track academic labor. See also the brilliant Goldstone's point on the importance of advocating for tenure and the tenure track as part of improving NTT working conditions.

2. Josh Boldt's already (in)famous adjunct spreadsheet. Well done.

I can't believe it—I almost let an MLA go by without posting the annual link to that seasonal classic, "Margery Kempe at the Feeste of MLA."

Fixed.

New stuff

I sure have been neglecting this blog lately, and all I have of late is a little linkspam.

First of all, Ryan Cordell writes on the overly-Facebooky-but-okay-I-guess Google+ about a cool project for people who want to get started in digital humanities but aren't sure where to begin:

Know someone who wants to get started in the digital humanities but doesn't know how to do so? They should apply for DHCommons' preconvention workshop at MLA 2012, cosponsored by NITLE and the Texas A&M Initiative for Digital Humanities, Media, and Culture. Representatives from a range of prominent DH projects and centers will be on hand for training and consultation.

Apply here.

And second, we've finally launched Colloquies at Arcade! Here's my Ed Blog post introducing Colloquies, the Colloquies landing page, which will soon have more than one Colloquy on it (specifically, on September 1, when I release the next Colloquy), and our very first Colloquy, "The Contemporary Novel," introduced by the great Lee Konstantinou.

And, shhh, Arcade may also be seeing a long-awaited up-hay-ade-gray.

Oh, and I switched my California driver's license over to a Georgia one. Guess I'm a Georgian now.

Image: Peaches. Bryan Costin, 2005. CC NC-BY-SA 2.0.

CFP: Automating Love's Labors (MLA 2012, Seattle)

300-word abstracts and brief bios to all.mla2012@gmail.com by March 15, 2011.

“[A] woman stunts her intelligence to become childlike, turns away from individual identity to become an anonymous biological robot in a docile mass. She becomes less than human...”

     —Betty Friedan, The Feminine Mystique

When Adam requires a companion to alleviate his loneliness, God fashions him one out of a spare bone; if Christ, of whom Adam is the prefiguration, is “begotten, not made,” Eve is pointedly the reverse. Thus when Auguste Villiers de l’Isle-Adam envisions an Ève future (1886), it is perhaps no surprise that this ideal helpmeet should be a machine: she perfects the machinic quality of the original Eve. While a prevalent discourse of the machine age marks out the robotic and the automatic as the cold inverse of real human (often female) affection, British and American texts of the modernist period, broadly conceived, stage the robotic and the automatic as inquiries into the relations between modernity, labor, affect, and gender. From L’Ève future and Metropolis to The Feminine Mystique and Valerie Solanas’s SCUM Manifesto, modernist and mid-century narratives have taken up developments such as Christine Frederick’s domestic Taylorism, advertising’s construction of the credulous female shopper, and the advent of domestic appliances. This panel draws on recent work by Michael North, Jennifer L. Fleissner, Bill Brown, Sianne Ngai, and Minsoo Kang, among others, to inquire into the remarkably tight relationship between the always gendered labors of care--what Eva Feder Kittay has called “love’s labor”--and discourses of automatism in industrial and early postindustrial culture, as they are staged in literary and theoretical interventions in the British and American contexts. By giving new historical groundings to fictions and manifestos that examine the profoundly feminized domain of domestic and affective labor between the 1900s and the 1960s, the papers in this panel also hope to attain a stronger purchase on the broader role of “love’s labor” in more recent decades, from the centrality of affective labor in the postindustrial economy (Michael Hardt and Antonio Negri, Arlie Russell Hochschild), to the cultural and political consequences of Donna Haraway’s cyborgs, Cynthia Breazeal’s “Personal Robots” project, and the Roomba. Moreover, we contend that a focus on the literatures of gendered affective labor can renew scholarly understandings of feminist and vernacular modernisms, feminist forms of liberation, literary stagings of labor and repetition, and a feminist ethic of care.

Why PMLA should become PLotMLA; or, Using your powers for good

I'm not really a PMLA-hater in the way that so many seem to be. I feel that I've read many a good article in it, and one of the great things about PMLA is that it's ubiquitous and covers a lot of scholarly terrain that I forget that I give a crap about when not reminded from time to time. PMLA is the irregularly-appearing, late-arriving, flimsily bound, comically hyperprofessionalized flagship publication of our field. From where I stand it would be a little hard not to love it.*

But I think PMLA should fold.

Think about it. The MLA is forever passing resolutions, which are well-intentioned, controversial only to a limited subset of nerds, and nonbinding. A statement from the MLA on the ethical treatment of adjuncts is a welcome thing, but it isn't likely hiring practices or people's life situations all that much. I actually think the most awesome thing the MLA has done in recent years is open a Twitter account for Rosemary Feal.** (The MLA: it's friendly!) Prestige only gets you so far. (Please correct me if I'm wrong; I'd love to hear that the MLA made some department start adding tenure lines.)

It's a different matter, though, when it comes to publishing. The MLA does actually put out its own publications, and they're some of the most useful and central to the profession, much as we love to affectionately deride PMLA and compare the MLA Handbook unfavorably to the magisterial CMoS. As slow to update as the MLA Bibliography is, as prone to crashing as the JIL is, where would we be without these things?

The greatest virtue of being the center of the profession is being the center of the profession. Suppose PMLA were to move entirely to open peer review and open access, reconstituting itself as a Public Library of the MLA (on the model of PLoS), perhaps with the help of an NEH grant. Would its prestige disappear? I doubt it. Its reputation for stodginess might, though.

Unlike those resolutions, the move to open peer review and open access would amount to an action, not just a recommendation. Because PMLA comes with a boatload of prestige, it would solve one problem that open peer review projects often face: fear among contributors that their work won't count toward promotion and tenure. It could be a decisive move to open up the acceptance of open peer review in the humanities, and make it easier for other journals to move to such models.

I am, of course, leaving aside the logistical complications, which are legion. And in a way, I understand the value of PMLA behaving like the most conservative journal of all time. It can't really afford to make sudden moves, precisely because it's big and central and purports to represent such a broad range of scholars.*** Any move PMLA makes is likely to be consequential, whether or not it's where we want the profession to be. But that's what drives so many people nuts about it now, and that's why the switch could effect a powerful change in how we handle scholarly publication.


*One of the most regularly made criticisms of PMLA (which Gregory Jusdanis, for example, makes) is that it is insufficiently "cutting-edge" or "revolutionary." I'm already on record as being against innovation, so it will come as no surprise that I think this desideratum is misguided. This topic is worth more than a footnote, but for now I'll just say that, first, newness is not self-evidently a good, and second, that to reserve approval for that scholarship which thoroughly changes our thinking is analogous to a capitalist logic of production, in which only "growth" counts.

**I genuinely think this is awesome.

***I grant that the committee-driven compromise that could easily come out of such a proposal would probably be something like a pilot program that effectively creates two tiers: "real" PMLA and "experimental" (perhaps all-online, perhaps less valuable toward t&p) PMLA. And that would never do.

No, seriously, how am I going to squish this down into a twenty-minute talk?

CFP: The Literary Organ

Due tomorrow! (upenn link)

The Literary Organ, MLA 2011 (January 6-9, 2011; Los Angeles)

“I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion. The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale?”

--Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

An organ is, among other things, a part of a human or animal body; a site of sensation; a functioning unit within a larger system; a medium or engine of circulation, as in a magazine or journal; an instrument, device, or tool; a contraption of pipes that produces music. The concept of the organ unites mechanicity with organicity, function with form, embodiment with perception. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest that it is by detaching from the physical intractability of organs and their functions that we may repurpose the physical and produce an unstable, flowing “body without organs.” We invite papers that seek to mine the valences of perception, embodiment, medium, and literary form prompted by the term “organ,” especially in relation to literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Please send 300-word abstracts and short bio to Natalia Cecire (cecire at berkeley dot edu) and Hillary Gravendyk (hillary dot gravendyk at pomona dot edu) by 1 March 2010.

L'esprit de l'ascenseur

I've been thinking about a question I was asked at MLA this year. Someone asked me about the moment at the end of Marianne Moore's "To a Snail," which ends by alluding to "the curious phenomenon of your [the snail's] occipital horn." In an eventually-to-be-published article, I pointed out that, first of all, "occipital horn" sounds terribly technical, and that, second, when it comes to snails, it isn't technical at all. Snails don't have a part called the "occipital horn"; in the poem it's, in my belief, a metaphor for the whorl of the shell.

The question was, simply, what's up with that? Is Marianne Moore punking us? Are we meant, now, to lose faith in reference, in scientific language, in reality, in all that is good and dear?

The superficial answer (which I think I gave) is that she isn't punking us exactly, but she isn't making a mistake either. She's recuperating the aesthetic (here, metaphoric) properties of scientific language, much in the way that she recuperates the aesthetic properties of quotations from various pop-cultural and/or bureaucratic materials elsewhere in her work.

But there's something else going on here that the occipital horn marks in "To a Snail." The words "occipital horn" are a note of finality; they are the last words in the poem, but also the last and incredibly fitting words in a lengthy, syntactically balanced, chiasmic sentence, a real rhetorical gem. When we get to "occipital horn," we have settled. We have landed, and landed with finality, on something solid, an apparently technical term for a part of the snail. This is why the tricky reversal -- the technical term turning out not to be technical but rather metaphorical -- might seem a little rude.

But not only are we not being punked, I would argue; we are being offered a sense of the real. Turns like the one I've just described characterize the experimental mode all the time. Things are not what they seem -- that's why we need complex experimental processes and regulation of the senses to access reality. The experimental mode takes this as a given; to push on the capacities of technical language doesn't therefore make us lose faith in technical language in general, but rather ground us in the exigencies of particularity that make "occipital horn," in this moment, metaphorical rather than strictly referential. (There is, in fact, such a thing as an occipital horn. Two such things. But not on a snail.) The turn, the revelation that things are not as they seem, helps to impart the sense of the real. But equally, there's no infinite regress or infinite play of meaning here: the words "occipital horn" finally fill a rôle that's aesthetic, and the syntactic balance of the sentence that these words help to complete support the metaphor and lend it formal solidity in lieu of referential solidity.

This is why the language of the joke or of mischief seems wrong to me in the case of "To a Snail." While the experimental mode can be playful, it is not irresponsible. Experimental play works in the service of negotiating an intractable reality -- like the model of play discussed by D.W. Winnicott in Playing and Reality, for instance. Winnicott isn't central to what I'm saying here, but reality is, because the experimental is above all interested in a place for the genuine, in mobilizing whatever mad powers of language there are to create a sense of the real, to land, ultimately, on something solid. It's a responsible mode -- as some put it, "sincere" -- with all the moral overtones that the word entails. This is not intrinsically good or bad, although I think it produced quite a lot of good art.

But to clarify a little further what I mean, think of the 'pataphysical tradition, which runs through surrealism on one side and the Oulipo on the other. The entire 'pataphysical tradition (as the name suggests) is deeply invested in the trappings of science, but largely in the name of travesty, puerility, and irresponsibility. In the 'pataphysical tradition, an infinite regress of meaning is not only possible but desirable; any obligation to reality may be abdicated; 'pataphysical art treads the fine line between meditation and gimmick, and is not sorry when it strays well into gimmick territory. This is art that actually does want us to lose faith in all that is good and dear -- and to laugh about it. (Flarf is without a doubt indebted to the 'pataphysical tradition.) This, too, has produced good art. But it is qualitatively different from the experimental mode, despite some of its practitioners' insistence on the word "experimental."

The distinction between experimental and 'pataphysical is not the same, by the way, as the distinction between modernist and avant-garde, although perhaps the lines often fall out that way. The distinction between modernist and avant-garde is typically thought of in the terms of a relation to the social body, whereas the distinction between experimental and 'pataphysical is given by an attitude toward knowledge.

CFP: The Literary Organ

The Literary Organ, MLA 2011 (January 6-9, 2011; Los Angeles)
A Special Session (subject to MLA approval)

“I have given no small attention to that not unvexed subject, the skin of the whale. I have had controversies about it with experienced whalemen afloat, and learned naturalists ashore. My original opinion remains unchanged; but it is only an opinion. The question is, what and where is the skin of the whale?”

     --Herman Melville, Moby-Dick

An organ is, among other things, a part of a human or animal body; a site of sensation; a functioning unit within a larger system; a medium or engine of circulation, as in a magazine or journal; an instrument, device, or tool; a contraption of pipes that produces music. The concept of the organ unites mechanicity with organicity, function with form, embodiment with perception. Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari suggest that it is by detaching from the physical intractability of organs and their functions that we may repurpose the physical and produce an unstable, flowing “body without organs.” We invite papers that seek to mine the valences of perception, embodiment, medium, and literary form prompted by the term “organ,” especially in relation to literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. Please send 300-word abstracts and short bio to Natalia Cecire (cecire at berkeley dot edu) and Hillary Gravendyk (hillary dot gravendyk at pomona dot edu) by 1 March 2010.

(Our cfp is now also live at upenn.)

Interviews (with apologies to Gertrude Stein)

Room where is the room. Where is the room. A convention. A convention an elevator a convention and an intervention. Intervene how does it intervene what are the stakes. The stakes are high and they intervene in the discourse, a very fine discourse. Where is the room in an elevator.

An intervention an intervention a convention and it intervenes it just intervenes. It intervenes and a job. A job a job and a pedagogy. The diligence is spreading.

Best of luck to all those interviewing, and a happy MLA '09 to all!

(For a more classic take, here once again is the Chaucer blogger's Margerye Kempe at the Feest of MLA.)

MLA 2008

I haven't had much of a chance to write about MLA. I didn't go to very many panels this year; being local meant so much of my own life was right here, reminding me of its existence, whereas when you're alone in town with only the MLA to claim your attention, going to many panels seems logical and right.

One panel that I attended was titled "Why Teach Literature Anyway?" The panelists were John Guillory, Walter Benn Michaels, and Marjorie Perloff. Of the three talks, I found Guillory's the most convincing, which isn't surprising, since I also generally find his writing very convincing. Both Guillory and Perloff began their talks by close-reading the title of the panel, turning the tools of the trade on the language by which its validity is questioned. It struck me as a rather defensive move, though of course they did it well.

Guillory brought up the notion of the "lay reader," the hidden antagonist in our discipline, the figure against which the professional reader is counterposed, but also a kind of ideal reader, as in Samuel Johnson's "common reader." Guillory pointed out that "reading" as a practice is too often conflated with the reading of literature, which is the result of an insufficient attention to theories of media, and to the pleasures specific to writing as a medium. I think this is quite right.

Walter Benn Michaels said some things with which I very violently disagreed.

Marjorie Perloff gave a charming and funny talk that oscillated between theorizing the place of reading in contemporary life and offering close readings of Barack Obama's memoir Dreams from my Father. I didn't expect her to talk about Barack Obama, but in general it was the kind of response to the question of the title, Why teach literature anyway?, that her criticism led me to expect. I disagreed with her on several points but share her sense that the teaching of literature is fundamentally the teaching of reading, a complex and time-consuming practice. Teaching reading practices is central to the way I teach literature.

Perhaps I'll have time to write more about MLA later. Anyway, it's time for the annual link to Margery Kempe at the Feest of MLA.

MLA 2007: some notes

It's the second day of MLA, and I'm sort of horrified that there's just as much more to come.

I've heard many good talks and some miserable ones, and some in between. Here are some highlights so far:

Session 21: The Challenge of a Million Books

The crappy panel title notwithstanding, I thought this session, run by the Association for Computers and the Humanities (program here), was very good. Each of the presenters discussed computational methods in literary research. Brad Pasanek and D. Sculley (the latter not present at the panel) used a classification algorithm to test how well patterns in metaphor predicted political affiliations; they have a database of metaphors at http://metaphorized.net, which could come in handy sometime. Glenn Roe and Robert Voyer used text mining to try to understand the classification of knowledge in Diderot's Encyclopédie, and Sara Steger used similar techniques to try to make more precise the formulaic quality of sentimental writing. Good times. I would be especially interested in learning more about pedagogical applications for these techniques.

Session 85: Micro: Studies in the Very Small

Wai Chee Dimock gave the first paper, "Fractals: The Micro in a Global World," and much as I respect Dimock as a scholar, I must say that I found her use of "fractals" entirely specious. She began by suggesting a loosening of the idea of fractals in order to think of self-similarity in terms of scalablility and the structural self-similarity of epic as a genre. Perhaps I was missing part of what was going on, but Dimock's paper struck me as an old-school organic unity paper with the word "fractal" stuck on it. By loosening the definition of "fractal," the usefulness of which I was already dubious, I felt that she robbed it of its power as a concept. She also used the term "recursion" to mean, more or less, repetition, again diluting the meaningfulness of the concept of recursion. It is possible that the short format of the talk prevented Dimock from supplying some crucial justifications for these moves, but I simply came away from the talk with the sense that she has little understanding of complex dynamics, and that they bear no relation whatever to the epic as a genre.

I found Robert Rushing's paper, "Fractal Microscopy: Blowup, Greene, Calvino" more convincing and quite entertaining. Rushing discussed how three texts try to assimilate the traumatic sublime of quantum mechanics (its impossibly small scale, its discreteness, its counterintuitiveness) to everyday life through ideologically charged metaphors. This was my favorite talk in the panel, and came away with an urgent feeling that I need to see Antonioni's Blowup.

Anna Botta gave a paper on dust. I more or less liked it, but can't say much about it, since it was mainly an art history paper and discussed a lot of works that I wasn't familiar with.

James Ramey gave an interesting paper called "Micropoetics: Nabokov's Small-Scale Parasites," which refreshingly used science in a legitimate way. Ramey explored how Nabokov uses the metaphor of the parasite to characterize creativity, especially literary creativity--a sinister generativity. I wound up asking him a question at the end about the difference between being the gestating egg and the egg-laying parent bug, since Nabokov seemed to be enormously interested in the "sting" of the egg-laying. (Some dim person in the audience turned around and suggested that it would help to think of the parasite as species rather than as individual bugs, as if I were confused about it. Sigh.)

Session 93: The Press

This session was arranged by the Division on Nineteenth Century French Literature.

I really enjoyed Cary Hollinshead-Strick's paper, "Personifying the Press: Newspapers on Stage after 1830," which looked at how vaudeville and the press spoke to and about one another.

I also enjoyed Marie-Eve Thérenty's paper, "Vies drôles et scalps de puces: Des formes brèves dans les quotidiens à la Belle Epoque," which looked at a hitherto little-noted genre of short, humorous newspaper pieces. It was a very interesting talk, but as it was in French, I'm sure I only caught about a third of it.

Evelyn Gould's paper, "Among Dreyfus Affairs: The Emergence of Testimonial Chronicle," similarly engaged in a kind of genre study, this time of very long works somewhere in between journalism and autobiography. I'm not really sure I understood how she was theorizing "testimonial chronicle," but she discussed the texts in interesting ways.

I went to a mostly miserable panel late on Thursday evening. It will remain nameless.

I also went to a panel today solely because a friend was presenting a paper on it. In my completely unbiased view, hers was the best paper on the panel, which was on nineteenth century American women's religious poetry. Apart from my friend, one panelist seemed to be trying to recuperate this corpus, which has been widely charged with crappiness, but she seemed to want to do so by pointing out a few exceptional writers (i.e. yes, this genre is crappy, but here are a few diamonds in the rough), and by valorizing these writers in spite of form. I'm baffled. I do want to check out her book, however. The other panelist seemed to have, um, missed the last 30 years of feminist studies?

Session 324: Brave New Worlds: Digital Scholarship and the Future of Early American Studies

I mostly liked this panel; I didn't come away with anything portable, but I learned some stuff about Samson Occom, and am interested in the Charles Brockden Brown Electronic Archive, which draws on fourteen different physical archives, which must be a giant pain in the butt for the people on the project. Interestingly, one presenter was Michelle Harper, the director of project management for Readex. Apparently they're coming out with an interesting feature in which you can annotate digital editions from their archive. It looks cooler that I'm making it sound here, but my notes are sadly devoid of detail, and I'm too spaced out now to remember it.

I gave my paper this evening, but perhaps I'll post on that panel separately, or not post on it at all.

Today I ran into some friends, a former professor, and a woman from Stanford with whom I once took summer German, which was nice. Margery Kempe was right, though: MLA is a desperaat tryal and a terribil oon amonges devils and hir ministeres and necromanceres.