Most of this year’s Modern Language Association convention, the 130th, took place at the Vancouver Convention Centre, a cavernous yet surprisingly warm structure of glass and wood that looks out across Vancouver Harbour to the North Shore Mountains.DARRYL DYCK/The Canadian Press
The Modern Language Association annual convention – a four-day megaconference for literary scholars known as the MLA – happens the second week of every January. It used to occur in the pinched no man's land between Boxing Day and New Year's Eve, a clever ruse, one professor once told, for escaping the smothering demands of one's family.
Nominally it's a chance for scholars working on every possible subfield and branch of literary studies to share their research with thousands of colleagues and peers. Take a look at the 300-page MLA convention program, though, and the image that comes to mind is less the T-1000 reconstituting itself in Terminator 2 than the catalogue for some unsolvable 1,000-piece jigsaw puzzle on the polar bears of the Arctic Circle during a snowstorm.
Most of this year's conference, the 130th, took place at the Vancouver Convention Centre, a cavernous yet surprisingly warm structure of glass and wood that looks out across Vancouver Harbour to the North Shore Mountains. Much of the harbour remained predictably clouded-over throughout the weekend, though this hardly stopped attendee after attendee from taking in the vista with a puppyish pet-store-window longing.
Vancouver is a welcome respite from the lip-chapping, skin-blistering winters of the past two MLA conferences in Boston and Chicago. For all that, it is not, apparently, everyone's first choice. Some of my colleagues on Facebook bellyached, often deservedly, over the costs, even those with travel funding. Hotel rooms, taxis, drinks, dinners, flights, babysitters – it all adds up for what is, in effect, the world's worst vacation.
So it's a massive conference, but it's also the North American job mill for academic hiring. A huge number of modern-language departments do preliminary interviews at MLA each year. The fog on the harbour might have been a pressure system, though it seemed equally likely that the clouding was nothing more than the anxious pheromonal stew that suffocated almost every common meeting area. More than once I entered a room only to feel a deep neurological tingle that suggested a group of random chimpanzees had just finished fighting.
Interviewing here is itself an accomplishment – you're one of a dozen applicants whose paper identities as CVs, cover letters and research statements emerged from the scrum of hundreds of overqualified people. An even luckier three or four will be flown out a few weeks later to the potential employer's university for a "campus visit," often for a series of Guantanamo Bay speed-dating conversations with upper-level administrators, professors and students, before giving a 45-minute talk in front of faculty members.
Meals are scheduled during these visits, but every student-lounge cookie or faculty-club salad is interrupted by well-meaning inquisitions about your publication plans and how you'd teach a course on, say, postcolonial allegories about inanimate objects.
During one campus visit last year, I felt like I was on some horrible endurance game show called How Little Can You Eat? I was eventually able to momentarily beg out from one of my half-dozen back-to-back chats to scarf down an energy bar at a urinal, only to have an eager graduate student emerge from a stall to ask me about trends in ecocriticism.
I'm also one of those forsaken souls on the job market, but lucky enough to have the safety net of a two-year fellowship in Montreal. The job market has shrunk painfully since the financial crisis, and yet graduate programs have continued to churn out PhD holders. Many young academics spend years trying to lock down a professorship, taking part in the job market's transcontinental kabuki theatre that runs annually from September to March.
Soon will come the rejections, almost comical in their Kafka-esque brutality. In October I finally received a thanks-but-no-thanks letter for a professorship I had applied to in 2013. I took a photo of it and sent it to my friend, who was runner-up for the job, though they had forgotten, nine months earlier, to tell him that the selected candidate finally accepted their offer. "Great news about X University!" he wrote back. "Maybe they'll get in touch with me soon, too."
Not all institutions are so callous. Some strive for kindness, but like a well-meaning flower arrangement at a funeral, such generosity tends only to remind you of what's been lost. Example: Last year I received a formal rejection e-mail for a fellowship at a major Midwestern U.S. university with the encouragingly personalized but poorly punctuated message: "We were very impressed by your qualifications, but unfortunately, we are unable to offer you a postdoctoral scholarship." It was addressed to "Dear _PERSON."
A spiderweb-thin hope leads some job seekers to adopt bizarre superstitions that make baseball players look reasonable. I'd been growing a beard for about a year and half, a migratory overcompensation for my impending baldness, which I'd recast as an intellectual side effect of belonging to the intelligentsia – like, "Look, I'm thinking too hard to shave!" But reservations had begun to creep in. Maybe a beard was a distraction. In the multilevel self-doubting consciousness of being interviewed by brilliant strangers, I suspected people were looking at my face rather than listening to my words. Should I shave it off, I asked a retired professor from an Ivy League university while at dinner in October. "No, I don't think it matters," he said, before adding with a thoughtful squint to the rafters, "though we never hired someone with a beard." Any lingering doubts vanished a few weeks later. An article titled "The Comedy of Beards" appeared on Slate. I reached for the clippers. Bzzzzzzzzzz.
Catching up with so many scattered friends from so many disconnected subfields is the poorly kept secret why many choose to attend the MLA at all. "If in my later years I recall nothing of MLA 2015 but food, friends and fog," a colleague I had dinner with Thursday night at the convention posted on Facebook, "I yet will be content." Ditto. On Saturday night I got together with eight friends at a delicious, if slightly fussy, locavore restaurant. Everyone in the group sat quietly as the kindly, pedantic waiter explained the menu. Coming from Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, Calif., San Francisco, Portland, Ore., Boulder, Colo., and Memphis, Tenn., we'd all heard the same speech before about cardamom-infused oils and locally sourced goat cheese. But it was a pleasant if slightly uncanny experience to do in Vancouver what we all do at home with people we had all met somewhere else.
My MLA ends a day early, after a few interviews, several lunches and dinners, a presentation and an endless, melding succession of panels, roundtables, coffees and drinks. I'm on my way back to San Francisco, my research base for the next few months until, hopefully, I begin packing to start my professorship at some university. I'm exhausted, but for all that I can't help but look forward, as my plane takes off early Sunday morning, to MLA 2016 in Austin, and to seeing again all of those friends and colleagues who will soon be boarding their own flights to every corner of North America.
Andrew Bricker is an Andrew W. Mellon Postdoctoral Fellow at McGill University and is working on a book about the law and satire.