MLA Lingo Bingo

David Clemens

INSTRUCTIONS:

  1. Pick up your MLA Lingo Bingo card at the Convention desk.
  2. Proceed to your first MLA panel.
  3. When you hear a Lingo Bingo word, place a green M&M on it.  At five M&Ms in a row, shout “discursive practices” and win an interview for a non-existent job at a fictional university.
  Hegemony   Desire   Discursive   Precisely   Space
  Negotiate   Crucial   Vital   Seemingly   Body
  Recover   Expose   We   Otherness   Urgent
  Intervention   Negotiate   Capitalist   Work   Site
  Exactly   Necessary   Community   Diversity   Critical

I tried, but it is nearly impossible to parody the Modern Language Association (MLA) Convention’s yearly orgy of political correctness, anti-capitalism, and Theory, just concluded in Los Angeles.  Rumor was that the MLA had “gotten better,” but if so, I didn’t hear it.  Wondering “why literature matters,” I heard that the possibility that Helen actually sent a double to Troy shows how much "we need simulacra that are then exposed” and how “wars are fought and people die for illusion” and how “they also die for the narrative."  That’s how you use apparent literary analysis to (wink, nudge) criticize the Iraq War (as though the whole golden apple-Aphrodite  deal was real in the first place). Worried that students don’t read, I heard that “readers fashion individual identities for themselves at the moment of selection practice.”  It was this kind of language abuse that drove me away from the MLA 30 years ago because nothing of importance can be conveyed in such lingo.  Yet the jargon persists because it can’t be replaced.  The words are so reified and so necessarily opaque that they cannot be paraphrased or defined.  They are simply formulaic, rhythmical iterations that no longer convey “meaning” except as signs of one or another critical theory. Oh, there were a few straight-faced panels on newer “disciplines” such as Ecocriticism, History of Reading, and Fidelity Criticism, but listen closely and you find that they, too, have just wandered out of Farmer Marx’s barn. MLA lingo is terribly serious and terribly self-important (“vital,” “crucial”), very “urgent,” very “precise,” always collective, often sexy, and romantically revolutionary.  I had not seen a Che Guevara tee-shirt in years.  In the caverns of the L.A. Convention Center, the tedium was palpable, the outlook was bleak, and the air was stale.

  • Share

Most Commented

September 6, 2024

1.

Professor Alleges "Widespread" Discriminatory Hiring Coverup at University of Washington

Audio acquired by the National Association of Scholars describes allegations of coverup race-based hiring coverup at the University of Washington...

October 29, 2024

2.

The Looming Irrelevance of Middle East Study Centers

Today’s Middle Eastern Studies Centers are facing a crisis due to the winds of change in the Middle East and their own ideological echo chamber....

September 25, 2024

3.

NAS Statement on University of Pennsylvania Sanction of Amy Wax

The National Association of Scholars is outraged—but not surprised—by Penn's decision to penalize Wax for exercising her academic freedom. ...

Most Read

May 15, 2015

1.

Where Did We Get the Idea That Only White People Can Be Racist?

A look at the double standard that has arisen regarding racism, illustrated recently by the reaction to a black professor's biased comments on Twitter....

October 12, 2010

2.

Ask a Scholar: What is the True Definition of Latino?

What does it mean to be Latino? Are only Latin American people Latino, or does the term apply to anyone whose language derived from Latin?...

September 21, 2010

3.

Ask a Scholar: What Does YHWH Elohim Mean?

A reader asks, "If Elohim refers to multiple 'gods,' then Yhwh Elohim really means Lord of Gods...the one of many, right?" A Hebrew expert answers....