The MLA conference in Los Angeles just drew to a close. I didn't go. I've gone before and found both stimulation and irritation. When people suggest that I attend the MLA conference, I think they believe that since I work in the English Department, I must therefore be interested in what they do at such a conference.
This is not true.
MLA, and my own field, creative writing, are quite far apart. Literature and creative writing are not very far apart, but what they do at an MLA conference has very little to do with literature. In fact, in an essay for The Believer, Gideon Lewis-Kraus critiques the perception of MLA participants:
"[T]here seems to be a tacit consensus that English professors are self-parodying hypocrites who claim to teach English but can’t even write it intelligibly, or hack critics who treat the magic of literature as so much grist for the reigning theoretical paradigm."
Unfortunately, that's often true. But some of my favorite people are the ones that break those stereotypes. The stereotype, though, is there because the field generally molds professors into mouthpieces for parodic prose and theoretical philosophizing. Much easier to get tenure when you obey the conventions rather than flouting them.
In creative writing, the conference of note is the AWP conference. Made it last year — won't make it this year — will make it next year.
I'll leave you with a quote from the linguist Roman Jakobson. When someone told him that Vladamir Nabokov was going to teach literature at Harvard, he replied: "What’s next? Shall we appoint elephants to teach zoology?" (Another version has him saying "I do respect very much the elephant, but would you give him the chair of Zoology?") As if writers — even writers the stature of Nabokov — have nothing to say about the art they create.
I don't think that elephant/zoology analogy is quite right. I prefer an architectural one. Say you want to know something about a house. Would you ask the architect of the house, or the person who has lived in it for twenty years?
The architect of the house (in this case, the writer, if you're slow on SAT-type analogies) will know not only the dimensions but the reasons for those dimensions, and how every part of the house holds together, and why it was shaped the way it was.
But the dweller will know which board creaks when going up the stairs, and can navigate through the house at night when half asleep, and knows how when you slam one cupboard particularly hard the light on the wall will flicker.
Both have an unique form of knowledge. Both are necessary. The unique views of both should not be ignored, and there isn't a hierarchy between the two.
So long live MLA. I think I'll stick to the creative writing side of the fence.
