Thus we are pleased to announce the winners of The Chronicle’s First Annual Awards for Self-Consciously Provocative MLA Paper Titles (also known as the Provokies). All selections are cited as listed in the program for the 119th MLA Annual Convention, to be held this month in San Diego. (In other words, no paper titles were made up.)…[T]he judges quickly reached consensus on Most Provocative Panel Title: “Apertures and Orifices in Chaucer.” As luck would have it, Most Provocative Paper Title went to a presentation to be delivered during that same session: “‘The Entree Was Long and Streit, and Gastly for to See’: Visual and Verbal Penetration in the Knight’s Tale,” by Disa Gambera of the University of Utah. —Scott McLemee —Signifyin’ at the MLA (Chronicle)
One of my favorite MLA paper titles was “The Semiotics of Sinatra,” presented by the former chair of the University of Toronto’s English department. (Yes, that’s Frank Sinatra.)
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Matthew Kirschenbaum has a good response to the seasonal MLA-bashing, as amplified by the angst typically displayed over at Invisible Adjunct. As someone who is professionally somewhere between an adjunct and a research professor, I can see both sides. Yes, Mike, I had to unlearn a bit of professional conditioning in order to function as a liberal arts teacher/researcher. SO much of my intellectual identity was formed in graduate seminars that I do feel a pain, knowing that I'm not likely to preside over a class that contains such a high percentage of future professors. The academic profession has developed its own genre that suits its needs. Spending so much time teaching freshman comp and other basic writing courses probably sensitizes us to see the artifice in an MLA paper, since not all of its characteristics meet our daily needs.
I think so much of the ire directed at the MLA in particular is because graduate students typically have to spend as much as one-third of what they earn teaching in front of a classroom, just to attend the MLA for a job interview. Attending in order to be interviewed, or to conduct a series of interviews (I haven't been on that side of the table yet) probably puts people in a cranky mood. Anyway, I didn't think the Chronicle article was as bad as similar ones I've read in the past.
Loved this article. So true. I'd like to see an academic paper ABOUT academic paper titles. They are very slippery signifiers in and of themselves. Personally, I've had to unlearn a lot of the bad habits I picked up from theory; a long hard journey in the latter years of grad school. It's important to understand the grammatology of theory in order to get the nuances of deep structures of meaning, but it's no way to write if you want to communicate....thank god I had a dissertation director who understood this! Unless we are as groundbreaking as Zizek, our job is often to translate the etheric memes of theory, not parrot it. No?