There Will Be Papers

The chief advantage of attending the MLA without having to spend hours doing interviews is getting to attend a lot of sessions. This is also the chief disadvantage, because more sessions = more papers = more opportunities to hear bad papers. I heard my share of bad papers at the MLA.

But I heard my share of good papers too. The best paper I heard was in the smallest room, a tiny, cavelike conference room that could accommodate maybe 24 people. Lars Erik Larson delivered an outstanding essay on Frank Norris's McTeague, a novel I have always loved without often finding others who share my enthusiasm. Larson's paper was insightful, original, beautifully written, and well delivered, with lots of enthusiasm and a little drama. He made an interesting connection between McTeague and the movie There Will Be Blood, and it was easy to tell who in the audience had seen the movie and who had not. Best of all, his paper and the others in the same session provoked some real discussion in which ideas were exchanged in an atmosphere of mutual respect and understanding, with no rancor or grandstanding. That's an ideal MLA paper.

The bad papers were less memorable. One paper was particularly unmemorable because the grad student delivering the paper spoke tentatively and kept backing away from the microphone as if afraid that it would bite her, so the text of the paper vanished into the ambient noise. I attended several pedagogy panels and I was not surprised to find that pedagogy papers tend to be less formal and less theoretical than literature papers, but I was surprised to find that several of the pedagogy papers I heard were just sloppy: poorly written, poorly organized, poorly delivered. It's always shocking to discover that purported experts on teaching writing are often not particularly good writers.

And my paper? It went well. The crowd was small but enthusiastic, laughing in all the right places, and afterward I was approached by someone interested in publishing my paper, which was encouraging. But you never know...probably there's someone out there right now blogging about all those awful MLA papers--including mine. When it comes to the MLA, you never know whether the papers you hear will be good, bad, or mediocre, but if nothing else, you know There Will Be Papers.