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Periodicals ISSN 0160-5720 85 Broad Street, Suite 500 New York, NY 10004-2434 Volume 52 Number 4 Winter 2020 IN THIS ISSUE 1 Collaboration, Companionship, and Consolation: An Interview with Susan Gubar Upcoming Webinar: What’s New in the 2 President’s Column Ninth Edition of the MLA Handbook 3 PMLA Online 4 Brent Hayes Edwards Named Learn about new content, how the style has changed, and more! PMLA Editor 24 March 2021 (2:00 p.m. EST) webinars.mla.org 5 MLA Hosts Summit for the Future of Doctoral Education Volume 52 Number 4 Winter 2020 Collaboration, Companionship, and Consolation: An Interview with Susan Gubar The MLA Award for Lifetime Scholarly Achievement has been awarded to Susan Gubar, distinguished emerita professor of English at Indiana University, Bloomington. She accepted the award online during the MLA Awards Ceremony on 9 January 2021. Your early works, written and asked that some of them share edited with Sandra M. Gilbert, the virtual stage when you re- including The Madwoman in the ceive the award. Can you tell us Attic and The Norton Anthology more about that group and how of Literature by Women, changed it shaped your work? how we read literature by women and expanded the number and SG: At academic conferences range of women writers on col- during the seventies and eight- lege syllabi. What or who inspired ies, Sandra and I met many fem- you to pursue this direction in inist colleagues embarked on your scholarship? projects similar or related to ours. They were dealing with different Susan Gubar: Sandra and I met in genres or different chronologi- 1973, during the surging second cal periods or different geogra- wave of the women’s movement. phies, but feminist critics in this The questions it was raising re- generation were excited to be minded us that we had always discovering and supporting each loved literature by women (Jane other. I remember the palpable Eyre, Little Women, Emily Dickin- excitement I experienced when son’s poems), but we had never Elaine Showalter or Barbara studied it in undergraduate or Christian gave a lecture or pub- Photo credit: Eli Setiya graduate school. Nor had we lished an essay. Especially in the ever had a female professor. A course partner in crime. I certainly would not headnotes for the Norton Anthology of we team-taught at IU led to The Mad- have been able to go it alone! But also, Literature by Women, Sandra and I could woman. Then the richness of women’s both books were wide-ranging, so it was highlight the contributions of our peers, contributions to literary history led us a comfort to be able to divide up the var- who excavated such out-of-print women to ask, Why not celebrate them with the ious tasks, even when we always revised writers as Kate Chopin, Charlotte Per- Norton stamp of approval? each other’s work. But I suspect the real kins Gilman, and Zora Neale Hurston. reason I enjoy collaborating with San- Those are only two of the many books dra is that she is a poet whose visionary The committee that nominated you you’ve published with Gilbert. Why do gleams always inspire me. Collaboration for this award wrote that your work you enjoy collaborative writing? is a lot of fun. “transmits” your “enduring belief in the explanatory and healing power of litera- SG: At the start, the questions we were When you learned you were receiving ture as a life companion.” Do you agree? asking—about patriarchal aesthetic this award, you emphasized that the How do you see this understanding of assumptions and women’s exclusion feminist scholarship that you’d done literature shaping your work? from the canon—seemed so audacious was part of a larger movement that in- to each of us that both of us needed a volved many other scholars, and you (continued on p. 4) 1 PRESIDENT’S COLUMN The Future of the Humanities Can Be Found Comment on this column at in Its Public Forms president.mla.hcommons.org. WE ARE, OF COURSE, ALL WORRIED so many people value literature and ten working without a livable wage and about the future of language and liter- yet also voice skepticism of or disdain health insurance. The limiting of imagi- ature departments, the humanities in for the teaching of literature in higher nation and the acceptance of wretched general, and the arts, as fiscal crises education. Why can’t we make good work conditions go hand in hand, fol- lead administrators to decide among on the high value placed on literature? lowing from a realism mandated by mar- programs and departments to fund. The answer may have less to do with ket rationality. In my last column, I suggested that as literary critical schools than with higher How do we make the case for what much as we need to show how the hu- education as a whole—specifically, we do that appeals to those who al- manities serve the social sciences, the with the difficulty of making higher ready value literature and the imagina- sciences, public policy, law, and the education affordable. Would literature tion and want to see their connection study of the environment, we also need be considered a waste of time if time to their public worlds? Surveys are a to show how all of those disciplines re- were measured less by productivity and strange form of knowledge gathering, quire the humanities. If we try, for in- stance, only to show how we might be useful to the STEM fields and other lu- crative disciplines, we pursue a strategy that accepts the hierarchy of values that “. as much as we need to show how casts the humanities as secondary and the humanities serve the social sciences, derivative. No public defense of the hu- manities can proceed on the basis of the sciences, public policy, law, and the study the assumption that the humanities only gain their value by serving more highly of the environment, we also need to show how funded disciplines and fields. Yes, we are all worried about where humanities all of those disciplines require the humanities.” PhDs will find work and we are eager to showcase the many talents of our grad- uates, but if the rationale we use for that purpose admits that the humanities have profit? Do art and scholarship become and I have my questions about some of no value in themselves, we are contrib- regarded as wasteful or even self-in- the categories and methods deployed uting to the demise of the humanities, dulgent when the gifts they offer fail to in the AAAS-Mellon report. And yet the making our situation even more dire be measured by the available metrics? report offers some insights that illumi- than it already is. Certainly, it would be unwise to ignore nate a path forward. So-called political A recent survey conducted by the such market values as we argue for our liberals generally have a favorable im- American Academy of Arts and Sci- place within higher education. But if we pression of the term foreign languages, ences with Mellon funding found that accepted those values as the defining while far fewer conservatives perceive 84% of Americans (it is not clear how ones for what we do, we would be shut- that term favorably. Question: What’s that category is defined) have a posi- ting down that horizon of alternative nationalism got to do with it? Interest- tive view of literature, and yet many values that gives a sense of life outside ingly, it appears that Black, Latinx, and reported that the teaching of literature the market and opposes the dominance Asian Americans “are substantially at the college or university level is a of markets. Market values narrow our more likely than White Americans to “waste of time” or “cost[s] too much.” ideas of knowledge and depend on the believe it important that young people The immediate question, then, is why precarious labor of adjuncts who are of- learn languages other than English,” 2 and those who are less affluent are African American and African diasporic their histories and creative works monu- more in favor of learning foreign lan- studies are rife with memoir, history, mentalized in older versions of the liter- guages than those who are affluent. poetry, and experimental writing, in- ary canon. The literatures and art forms Question: What does learning across cluding Afro- and critical fabulations, included in ethnic studies teaching, for national and linguistic boundaries offer crossing performance, history, and nar- example, are generally related both to underrepresented communities? Con- ration. Indigenous peoples across the a history of exclusion, effacement, ex- tractivism, and empire and to a way of imagining a better world. Palestinian poetry cannot be fully understood apart from the way that it enters and registers “The future of the humanities may well depend the rhythms of ordinary life, the effort to preserve a people’s memory against on realizing that the best case for art, poetry, its erasure by official history, a memory linked through recitation to the task of literature, and performance is already being persisting under protracted conditions of occupation and dispossession. These made by our most publicly engaged fields.” are among the many sites in the uni- versity where the connection to public worlds is already being made; these sites should be supported as the portals to a broader world, the link between the sider another finding: Latinx and Black Americas rely on poetry and ritual art to university and those who require the Americans are “nearly three times as preserve their traditions, tell their sto- humanities to live a more illuminated likely to have frequently attended po- ries, and negotiate the relations to time life.