Modern Language

This year's event was barely noticed in the press -- only than the aforementioned calendar item in SFWeekly, there was a only a brief note in sfgate.com's Bay Area Biz Blog.

In the heyday of the "culture wars" of the early 1990s, though, the MLA was a notorious but political battleground. In those days of yore, J. Danforth Quayle was Vice-President of the US and Dr. Mrs. Lynn Cheney (yes, that Cheney) ran the National Endowment for the Humanities. Flag pins and Gavin Newsom hadn't been invented yet, so the the Right had to go after somebody.

In those heady days, the New York Times would adoringly profile outlandishly postmodern and/or Marxist professors of literature, reprinting, as SFWeekly noted last week, the most bizarre-seeming paper titles from the conference program. Here's a short excerpt from a 1991 NYT article focused on NYU professor Andrew Ross:

"M.L.A. is an anxious, exploitative, self-referential universe," Ross says, "but we do get a lot done at these bashes." He straightens his hand-painted Japanese tie, smooths his pale mango wool-and-silk Comme des Garcons blazer ("It's a sendup of the academic male convention of yellow polyester") and checks the wedge-heeled suede lace-ups recently acquired on West Eighth Street in Greenwich Village ("White boy's shoes, worn always with white socks"). Politely sidestepping a clutch of Dante experts, Ross disappears into an elevator, off to present a paper on censorship, Mapplethorpe and 2 Live Crew.