NEWS: The M.L.A. Wears No "Clothes"

Basking in this unaccustomed level of public notice, Modern Language Association scholars brought increasingly attention-grabbing papers to the convention through the 1990's, "queering" the "canon," some said, and championing the "postcolonial," proposing wild theories about everything from comic books to hip-hop to television and movies. Last year, perhaps hoping to put a stop to the trend, the Chronicle of Higher Education announced its first Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative M.L.A. Paper Titles (a k a the Provokies) but this year the Chronicle decided to drop the awards. Scott McLemee, a senior Chronical writer, explained that "crafting titles to get them written about and attacked in the press used to be exciting.



"Now it's become a reflex, and their hearts aren't really in it anymore."



However, from this year's several thousand entries, the Provokies may still have a long, robust life.



After two solid decades "queered" remains a major preoccupation, evidenced by titles like "She's Just Like Alvy Singer! Kissing Jessica Stein and the Postethnic Jewish Lesbian," "The Lesbian Mammy," "Queering World War II," "t.A.T.u. You! The Global Politics of Faux Lesbian Pop" (t.A.T.u., meaning tattoo) is a Russian female pop group), and "A Place for Giggling Field Hands: Queer Power and Social Equality in the Mid-20th-Century Plantation Myth." Then there's the race/sexuality/avant-gardist trifecta of "Feeling Around in the Dark: Black Queer Experimental Poetry."[…]

What any of it has to do with teaching literature to America's college students remains as vexing a question to some today as it was a decade ago. There is, in fact, something achingly 90's about the whole affair. The association has come to resemble a hyperactive child who, having interrupted the grownups' conversation by dancing on the coffee table, can't be made to stop. Citing Professor Crews's book in The Partisan Review last year, Sanford Pinsker said: "In my better moods, I try to convince myself that 'Postmodern Pooh' marks the end of the arrant foolishness that has turned literary studies into a laughingstock; in my darker moments, however, I fear that there are other, even more outrageous would-be celebrities hoping to cash in on whatever post-postmodernism turns out to be."



Or, as Mr. McLemee put it: "The circus is looking pretty threadbare, and the ones trying to do the freak show aspect of it are looking silly now." And yes, many believe that the press is encouraging them by continuing to pay attention.