Search results for "Modern Language Association"

One way in which the world’s largest conclave of English professors—the Modern Language Association (MLA)—lives up to its name is to leave attendees at its annual conferences with a new vocabulary that they cannot shake. Thus, after a couple of days at one of these annual meet-ups, you find yourself uttering sentences such as, “We […]

In Stalinist Russia, they had a love-hate relationship with the United States: Stalin hated it but the writers he dispatched to the U. S. on investigatory trips got to rather like it. Ilya Ilf and Yevgeni Petrov, co-authors of The Twelve Chairs, had such an epiphany when the Man of Steel sent them to America […]

Truly, some authors are just too important to be left to academia. Charles Dickens is one of them. Yet and still, the Modern Language Association (MLA), at its annual conventions, regularly tries to modernize the Dickensian, which may well become a panel at a forthcoming MLA meeting. At such panels, professors and PhD candidates try […]

When the Modern Language Association (MLA) deconstructs something, it stays scrambled. Thousands of English professors attend the annual MLA conferences and just about every English Department is represented there. At this year’s meeting in Austin, Christian Haines, an assistant professor of English at Dartmouth, tried to link the shooting of aggressive shoplifter Michael Brown in […]

Growing old is hard enough without a cadre of pedagogues telling you what it means. “Critical aging does not toss the baby out with its ideological bathwater,” LaSalle professor Emily Mattingly said at this year’s Modern Language Association (MLA) meeting in Austin, Texas. “Critical aging lifts the hood on dominance.” At the MLA, Mattingly used […]

When thousands of English professors gathered in Austin, Texas earlier this month for the annual Modern Language Association (MLA) convention, they were rather pessimistic about the future of their profession, with one small but notable caveat. “English majors do go on to a variety of jobs but do not become baristas,” Robert Matz, of George […]

Scroll down for all the photos taken of the Modern Language Association (MLA) protest of Texas’s campus carry law in downtown Austin, Texas, where legal firearms can be carried onto the grounds of public universities.

Somewhat true to its name, the Modern Language Association (MLA) has transformed the word “imaginary” from an adjective into a noun. “In the dominant United States imaginary, some children are more sacred than others,” Sarah Ropp of the University of Texas at Austin said at an MLA panel on “The Profane West.” She cited the […]

At the Modern Language Association’s annual convention, this year held in Austin, Texas, leftist language professors marched to the State Capitol in downtown Austin to voice their opposition with the state’s newest campus carry laws (where it is legal to carry a legal firearm on public university grounds). Assembling in the hotel conference center before […]

The Modern Language Association (MLA) is obsessive over Steven Salaita’s firing at the University of Illinois, demonstrated by a panel session entitled, “Salaita, Academic Freedom, and the Question of Palestine: Where Do We Go from Here?” at their annual convention held this year in Austin, Texas. Warrior, a Native American director of American Indian Studies […]

#GamerGate and feminism in gaming were the subjects of a paper at a recent Modern Language Association (MLA) panel at their annual convention, held this year in Austin, Texas. Anastasia Salter, an assistant professor of digital media at the University of Central Florida (UCF), said that gaming is “about silencing women.” She noted, correctly, that […]

Capitalism discriminates against the poor and disabled, one professor said during a panel entitled, “Disability and the Global South” at the Modern Language Association’s annual convention. This year, it was held in Austin, Texas, hardly a home for red state conservatives. J.C. “Jay” Sibara, an assistant professor of English at Colby College (Maine), claimed that […]