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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 humanities 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 university 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. The future of the humanities may etry/literature readings and other lit- and space against a history of genocide well depend on realizing that the best erary events as White Americans, and and its denial. Throughout Latinx liter- case for art, poetry, literature, and per- the youngest adults (ages 18 to 29) are atures, as diverse as they are, a poet- formance is already being made by our more than twice as likely as those 45 ics is operative not only as the study of most publicly engaged fields. and older.” If the task ahead is to trans- the technique of poems but also as the late the general appreciation for litera- technique of persisting while burdened Judith Butler ture and the arts into an appreciation and scarred by a history of colonial for what colleges and universities have expansion and effacement. Feminist, to offer, we should perhaps take as our queer, and trans writing has always point of departure those public poetry been linked with fundamental ques- WORK CITED and literature readings that compel tions of how to survive, live, flourish, “The Humanities in American Life: A Survey people, especially young people from fight, and pursue the promise of radical of the Public’s Attitudes and Engagement.” communities of color, to show up or transformation. American Academy of Arts and Sciences, tune in with the hope of making sense Public events that include perfor- 2020, www.amacad.org/humanities of their world, reckoning with their his- mance art, poetry, and literature draw -indicators/humanities-american-life-survey tories and their desires. The fields of from publics who do not regularly see -publics-attitudes-and-engagement. *

March 2020 PMLA Online

Volume 135 Number 2

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3 Brent Hayes Edwards Named PMLA Editor

At its October meeting, the MLA Execu- Harlem Renaissance period editor for The tive Council appointed Brent Hayes Ed- Norton Anthology of African American wards, Peng Family Professor of English Literature. and Comparative Literature at Columbia MLA Executive Director Paula M. Krebs University, to serve as the next editor of remarks that Edwards brings to the posi- PMLA. His term begins in July 2021 and tion “a wide range of scholarly interests, runs for three years. Edwards’s research from literature and theory to popular and teaching focus on topics including culture and diaspora studies. His journal African American literature, francophone editing experience and history of collab- literature, theories of the African dias- orative work make him the ideal editor pora, translation studies, archive theory, for PMLA at this important time in the black radical historiography, cultural poli- journal’s history.” Says Edwards, “I am tics in Paris in the 1920s and 1930s, surre- honored and excited to serve as editor alism, experimental poetics, and jazz. He of PMLA, given its long-standing central- is the author of the award-winning books (in collaboration with Jean-Christophe ity to the field and its crucial role as an Epistrophies: Jazz and the Literary Imag- Cloutier) Claude McKay’s Amiable with incubator for new scholarship. I look for- ination (2017) and The Practice of Dias- Big Teeth. Edwards has translated work ward to working with the extraordinary pora: Literature, Translation, and the Rise by writers including Edouard Glissant, staff and with colleagues on the Editorial of Black Internationalism (2003) and has Aimé Césaire, Jacques Derrida, Jean Board to shape this new chapter in the published scholarly editions of Frederick Baudrillard, Sony Labou Tansi, Moncho- history of the journal.” Douglass’s My Bondage and My Free- achi, and Michel Leiris. He served as co- Edwards will be the ninth editor of dom, Joseph Conrad’s Nostromo, W. E. editor of the journal Social Text from 2001 PMLA, succeeding Wai Chee Dimock, B. Du Bois’s The Souls of Black Folk, and to 2011, and in 2012 he was named the who has been editor since July 2016.

(continued from p. 1) recently, for example, about a short story a complex textual or cultural problem. by George Saunders, titled “Tenth of De- Sandra and I have been thinking of our SG: I see this emerging in my work as cember,” in which a main character with next collaborative publication, Still Mad: I went on to write about pain in racial terminal disease comes to terms with his American Women Writers and the Femi- and ethnic contexts. After my cancer di- anxiety about physical degeneration. nist Imagination, 1950–2020 (which will agnosis in 2008, I sought out literature But the writing process also feels ther- come out in August 2021), as an effort that could help me and other patients apeutic, especially when I am compos- to teach the history we ourselves lived come to terms with traumatic injuries. ing an essay about my own treatment through. Of course, in the process of Then I learned about the medical hu- issues, because it gives me some dis- teaching it, we found that we relearned manities, a field whose many scholars tance from them and provides a means it in a new way. That is the bliss of tap the healing power of literature for for me to better understand their nature teaching. people in need of companionship, con- and potential consequences. solation, and some clarity about per- Whose work do you enjoy now? What plexing, life-threatening, or disabling This award is for scholarly achievement, books—either scholarly works or litera- conditions. but some of us have had the pleasure ture—should we be reading? of seeing you teach and know how you In recent years you’ve written a column can hold an undergraduate lecture hall SG: During the pandemic lockdown, for The New York Times about the ex- rapt. How has your teaching informed reading has been a refuge. In my feminist perience of fighting and living with can- your scholarly writing? reading group, we have tackled loads of cer. What roles have reading and writing contemporary writers: Marilynne Robin- played in your healing? SG: I am happiest writing when it feels son, Tayari Jones, Brit Bennett, Jesmyn like teaching. In retirement, I have to Ward, Curtis Sittenfeld, Patricia Lock- SG: Often in the column, “Living with admit that I don’t miss attending de- wood, Susan Choi, and Sally Rooney. I’m Cancer,” a poem or story, a movie or partmental meetings or grading papers. always on the lookout for a new publica- novel furnishes me some insight into the But I very much miss being in the class- tion by Zadie Smith, Rachel Cusk, N. K. experiences of cancer patients. I wrote room, engaged with lots of students on Jemisin, or Ali Smith.

4 MLA Hosts Summit for the Future of Doctoral Education

In November, the MLA hosted its inau- ated some hurdles, the online setting roles in fields beyond higher education. gural Summit for the Future of Doctoral allowed for a broader range of partici- Such a change would not be possible Education. The event brought together pants. Departments from across the without departmental and institutional representatives from humanities doc- United States and Canada were able to buy-in. To achieve this buy-in, attendees toral programs for high-level discus- participate, and in greater numbers than of the summit came as part of institutional sions and hands-on workshops aimed at originally planned: while the initial plans or departmental teams, including at least helping participants initiate and sustain for an in-person event imagined twenty one graduate student each, committed to meaningful change in their departments. to twenty-five teams representing differ- making lasting change locally. The idea for the summit arose from ent doctoral programs, the virtual gath- While many of the challenges to this ongoing conversations among graduate ering had thirty-three. And while we work are structural and will take time to address, the summit also identified key actions that can be taken in the near “. . . doctoral programs must change if they term. Here are three: want to prepare a new generation of PhDs to 1 Update your departmental website’s succeed intellectually and professionally.” alumni directory with career outcomes for all alumni, regardless of their career path and current role; communicate students, faculty members, and higher originally anticipated having four or five about and embrace all outcomes as education professionals about how doc- experts in the field leading the gather- equally successful. toral programs should adapt to the aca- ing, twelve experts in faculty, staff, and demic humanities’ changing landscape. administrator positions—at institutions 2 Decreased funding for the humanities from Washington State to Washington, Engage with alumni meaningfully and and declining numbers of tenure-track DC, midtown Manhattan to southeastern create opportunities for them to interact positions, combined with increased inter- Idaho—Zoomed in to share their knowl- with current students. est in publicly engaged scholarship and edge and experience. humanities careers outside the acad- The summit is the latest initiative in the 3 emy, suggest that doctoral programs MLA’s ongoing efforts to shape the field Assess admissions practices and re- must change if they want to prepare a of doctoral education in response to doc- cruitment materials; determine whether new generation of PhDs to succeed in- toral students’ changing needs. It builds these accurately reflect the goals of the tellectually and professionally. With the on the work and successes of the Mel- program and the values of the depart- support of Yale University, Columbia lon-funded Connected Academics proj- ment and institution; embrace more ho- University, and the Teagle Foundation, ect (connect.mla.hcommons.org), which listic admissions and advising practices. the MLA convened a diverse array of sought to broaden career horizons for voices to discuss how doctoral educa- language and literature PhDs. One of the We hope these actions will serve as a tion can evolve to face new challenges main lessons learned from that project starting point for doctoral programs and embrace new opportunities. was that alongside hands-on professional seeking to adapt to the changing career Originally conceived as an in-person development, a real change in program landscape for PhDs in the humanities, event, the summit took place on a vir- culture was necessary to showcase the and we look forward to continuing to tual platform because of the COVID-19 broad range of career outcomes for hu- reflect on the many stimulating discus- pandemic; although the transition cre- manities PhDs and to prepare them for sions that emerged from the summit.

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