Goodbye Academia Part 7: What I'll Miss

This series has to end sometime, and that time is now. Though I could probably write indefinitely on the topics of academia and my life, I'd like to conclude by mentioning what I'll miss about not being a part of academia. After all, I did spend a massive amount of time, a ton of money, and a lot of stress trying to get into a PhD program. Obviously, I wanted to go, even if there were other things I was (and am) interested in doing. So here are a few things that I'll really miss about not being an academic.

1.(Producing) Big ideas. I can't think of another profession where people are paid to sit around and think about big ideas like "ethics" or "humanity" or "art" or a lot of other things. Whether it's researching, teaching, etc., academics are supposed to turn a critical eye on culture. They're supposed to make connections and see things about the big picture that are hidden from others. That's something that journalistic writing—as well as many other things I've done—don't really do. They're more interested in presenting information. Scholars, on the other hand, produce information. That really appeals to me, and is probably the thing I will miss the most.

2. Being on campus. Have you ever seen a sappy, poorly-made movie about high school seniors about to graduate. Its the best time of their lives! As silly as those depictions are, that's largely how I feel about being in college. I was cutting across BYU's campus to get to the Daily Herald the other day, for example, when I realized just how enjoyable it is to be in the bustle of a college campus. There's always a bunch of interesting things going on. Living near a college provides similar opportunities, but I've found that not being in school makes it harder to know about them and participate.

3. Teaching. This might be a strange thing to put on here, given my previous posts, but there are great parts of it too. If I could teach one course a semester, for the rest of my life, while doing other interesting things, that might be ideal. In any case, while I won't miss grading, I will miss being in a classroom with students.

4. Discussion. Obviously, discussion can go on anywhere, but at a college it is supposed to happen. I've also found that many people outside of the classroom/college don't have the time or inclination (or stomach) for heated, passionate discussion. Most workplaces, church settings, etc. aren't really set up for people to bring up ideas and argue out their disagreements. Though I try to have discussions with people where ever and whenever I can, I find that A) it still happens much less often post-college than during college, and B) a lot of people just get offended or defensive when people push back against their ideas. There's probably a lot of reasons for this fact, but my experience is that there are few thick-skinned intellectuals outside of the academic setting.

5. Flexibility. This is a practical concern, but an important one. Being a professor allows people to largely determine their own schedules. As long as they get things done, they can work early or late, or whatever. I think I thrive in that sort of environment. I like working, for example, at 2 a.m., and sleeping in late. One day I might be one fire with ideas, and the next I might be lacking. I like how academia, though busy, gives professors a greater degree of flexibility than many jobs. I'm sure everyone wants a job like that, but until recently, I was actively pursuing one.

6. The Political Orientation. Let's be honest, most academics are liberal. And though I hate labels, I typically find myself in agreement with liberal politics. The prospect of being surrounded by people with whom I agree is immensely appealing. That's probably because I currently live in Utah, and I'm constantly surrounded by conservative fanatics who claim the Tea Party isn't racist or idiotic. But seriously, I'm so tired of being a lone liberal on a sea of hyper-conservatism. Some people want academia to be more politically diverse, and objectively I know that's a good thing, but secretly I just want to go to a place where people seem to care about each other, are willing to sacrifice for the good of others, and see government as a collective choice to help the less fortunate. Also, the conservatives I know in academia (or in my program) are smart, insightful, and decorous about their views. So, ultimately, academia is conducive to being a liberal, and if nothing else values respect and rational justifications for whatever conclusions people arrive at. (Maybe what I want is to be surrounded by people who investigate and are interested in politics, regardless of their orientation.)

7. The Culture. The people who go into academia are a self-selecting bunch, and they're into certain cultural things. Even the most mainstream of my professors had a decent understanding of pop culture, for example, and I remember having several interesting conversations with different professors about growing and preserving food at home. Academia isn't hipster-ville, of course, but the professors I admire take a holistic approach to culture and seem to think it is important to be conversant in things outside their disciplines. Obviously there are people like that outside of academia, but in the college community that approach to culture is common, even expected. If nothing else, academics seem to be interested in trying new things. Those things may be approaches to literary theory, or something like twitter or Lady Gaga.

Well, this could go on and on, but it's already a lot longer than I wanted it to be. Also, none of things are necessarily unique to academia, but I think they're all present there, and in abundance. I'm not sure there's another field where that is the case.

Today's Poetry: Flipping the Figurative Bird?

Today, I had this short piece in the Daily Herald. The purpose of the piece was essentially to argue to people who don't read poetry that the genre has merit, and can be rewarding. However, because I think that some people who might read this blog have more experience with poetry, and might be more literary-minded than the general newspaper audience, I'd now like to take a minute to be completely honest about the dying literary art.

In short, much of today's poetry flips a the figurative bird at its audience.

By saying that I mean to point out that the poetry being written today is often impossibly hard to comprehend. Poets, in an effort be "true" to their message, forget that someone is supposed to read their work. They cram poems full of semantics and syntax that are painfully opaque, and as a result effectively tell readers to f--- off.

And readers typically oblige. If there's anything in America that's read as infrequently as scholarship, it has to be poetry. Unlike scholarship, however, can really be fantastic, so it's a shame more people don't read it.

Here's how I see the problem: the people who write poetry are often either academics, closely allied with academics, or very highly educated. The vast amount of knowledge they've acquired makes their poetry dense. That makes it rewarding for people familiar with the canon of western literature, but impossible to read for everyone else.

For example, an SLC-based poetry once came to a class I was taking and described herself as a "maximalist poet." I think that was to contrast her work with minimalists like William Carlos Williams, but it was also to point out that she tries to pack as much into her work as she possibly can.

Fair enough, but it literally took me 20 minutes to decipher a few this woman's lines. The poetry might as well have been either A) random assortments of words, or B) a foreign language. (This is not an over exaggeration.) And I was a MA candidate in English, willing to look for meaning even under those circumstances. Imagine how a more typical reader, without a deep background in poetry and less desire to understand it, would feel. It'd be like trying to glean complex meaning from cracks in the pavement. In other words, contemporary poetry often doesn't make sense to me, and I can only assume it makes even less sense to readers unfamiliar with it.

I genuinely think that many poets are out of touch with this reality. I love poetry, but I don't have the energy to look up 50% of the works in a 14 line poem. I don't have the time to spend an hour figuring out what a sonnet says (not what it means, but merely what it's superficially about). I suspect that poets either have forgotten how much (or little) knowledge their readers possess, or simply don't care. In other words, they mistakenly believe that their poetry isn't impossible to decipher, or they think that readers who are unwilling to spend a lot of time investigating poems are hamstringing their own intellectual development. And maybe they are, but that doesn't leave a lot of room for enticing new readers or drawing people into the art form.

This isn't to say that poets should write simple, easy to read poems, or that complex work isn't pleasurable. Quite the opposite, in fact. And hopefully there will always be people willing to decipher difficult works and rejoice over arcane syntactic tricks. But a person can't really be a "writer" —of poetry, scholarship, or anything else—without acknowledging a reader. There are also poets who appeal more broadly, like Billy Collins, but they are too often ostracized in the academic establishment, or altogether ignored. (My impression is that Collins is viewed by English professors they way Thomas Kinkade is viewed by real artists. That's also a shame, because not only is Collins good and fun to read, but his work can actually touch on profound topics.)

This situation is not helping poetry. Few people read it now, and poets aren't only doing nothing to attract new readers, they're actually alienating people. The poetry sections in most books stores is already tiny, so how long will it be before publishers finally decide to give up? Unless poetry is to be relegated to a form of writing that is personally and professionally fulfilling for a few academics, but meaningless or extinct in larger culture, something has to change.

If it doesn't, we might watch as humanity's first art form is snuffed out by those charged with preserving it.

Goodbye Academia Part 6: A Few More Thoughts on Teaching

So I've been pleasantly surprised that people are reading this series, and even more so that a few of these posts have prompted discussion. I've been thinking a lot about some of the comments that were made in previous sections, and I wanted to discuss them briefly.

In Part 3, I talked about some of the frustrating aspects of teaching, and I pointed out that it was rare that my students really impressed me with their comments. As I've thought back over my time as a teacher, however, I can actually think of a bunch of instances when I was impressed by my students ideas. Once, for example, one of my classes wanted to discuss politics, so I threw out my lesson plan and we just debated for an hour. It was great and enlightening. So why did it feel like I was more often hearing the same thing over and over?

I think the curriculum largely to blame. I was teaching writing, and while that sometimes included critical-thinking exercises, it also included a lot of practical things. Like instructions on how to write thesis statements. Or how to do MLA citation. Or even grammar.

In retrospect, it seems like many of these practical considerations overwhelmed my courses. I'd want to discuss some interesting idea, but my students didn't understand yet how to craft a good thesis, so I'd have to backtrack and show them.

So, my students rarely had much to say about these practical things, and, to be honest, I don't either. After all, what is there to say, that's really interesting, about topic sentences? In the end, I think the reason my students were consistently coming up with old news was because we were in a writing class, as opposed to a philosophy, literature, or film course. In those settings there is an actual text to analyze, and that text is supposed to mean something larger about the world. In a writing class, the "text" is often a set of instructions on writing, and most analysis centers on how emulate good writers (or, worse, how to get a good grade).

As I've been typing this post I've also realized something else: a scholar keeps intellectually progressing, but each time a new semester starts, a teacher is back to square one with his/her students. It's frustrating because each time a person thinks about something—even something as mundane as a semicolon or topic sentence—that person might theoretically come up with a new insight.

However, if you teach the same thing over and over, you come to new insights that you students probably won't have the time to get to.

One semester, for example, I asked my students to go out on campus and determine what the thesis statement was for various objects. A few of them got it, but I think for most of them the idea of "thesis statements" hadn't simmered long enough in their minds for them to see it as a metaphorical idea that can be applied to anything.

This worked better when we tried it at the art museum, but at some point it might be interesting to discuss the ideological implications of campus architecture or floral design, as exemplified by those things' theses. It's hard to do that in a writing class, and when you do you're often neglecting something practical that you're supposed to be teaching.

Ultimately, then, I guess writing curriculum can be modified to discuss some fascinating things, but if it's taken me years to come up with the ideas, a lot of young undergrads won't have the background to appreciate them (yet). Also, there is administrative pressure, in the form of predetermined texts and course structures, to give students a "skill set" that they can use elsewhere (like, God help us, in the business school). It was an eye-opening experience as a graduate instructor, and one that fundamentally changed my career goals.

Goodbye Academia Part 5: The Public Intellectual

I think that what I've been hoping to become as a result of my education, often without knowing it, is a public intellectual, or even a man of letters. And, basically, I see a successful public intellectual as being someone with the chops of an academic, but the charisma of a public figure. I see it as someone who thinks (and can write) as deeply as a professor, but who is also involved in the translation of those thoughts into the public consciousness.

And, despite some negative aspects to working in academia, there are definitely things I like about it, which I'd like to couple with non-scholarly publication and other work.

My understanding of what it takes to become a public intellectual is probably naive and biased. However, as far as I know, most professors don't regularly write commentary for newspapers or TV. Their books aren't praised for walking the line between academic and popular works. They aren't tapped to serve with politicians, or transition back and forth between academia and industries like, say, consulting (which theoretically should have a lot in common with the critical study rhetoric and texts).

In other words, most professors that I know tend to work almost exclusively within academia. And that's great.

But there is also a different kind of professor. At NYU for example, film professors listed publications in The Village Voice and The New York Times. Some of the professors I researched at USC and UCLA routinely serve as judges at well-known film festivals. Some of the English professors that I researched had more "public" work listed alongside their scholarship. (Herbert Blau, for example, at University of Washington, has worked in theater and fashion, but now also teaches in the University of Washington's English department.) The point here is that there are some people who write or produce both for academics, and others. (Stanley Fish, Wendell Barry, and Nigel Spivey are examples of people who have done this to one degree or another. An while I don't agree with everything they say, I do admire the venues available to them to say it.)

Obviously, the people who become public intellectuals are those who have risen to the top of their respective fields (with a lot of hard work). And, they also typically don't have those opportunities straight out of school. Yet, the another thing they seem to have in common is that they studied at, and then often worked at, really good schools. My conclusion: to become a public intellectual it's helpful to have an elite academic pedigree. Also, one has to aspire to that position. I think a lot of people are happy to simply teach and publish within their discipline. Which is cool of course. But others definitely hope for a more diverse work load.

Like I said, this is probably an incomplete vision of what it means to be an intellectual. It's certainly romanticized. But ultimately I don't think I'd be content teaching three or four classes a semester at a remote state school and publishing in Western Humanities Review or The Journal of American Culture for the next 30 years. (Both those journals are great ones that I used in my thesis.) I don't expect to have a regular column in The New York Times, but I'd like a career path that at least includes the possibility of public work/writing in addition to submitting work to academic journals. For most professors—and for whatever reason—it seems like those doors aren't just closed, they often don't exist at all.

So the point, it seems, is that like becoming, say, an astronaut, becoming a public intellectual requires a pretty specific career path. Without that path, the probability of reaching that goal is minuscule.

In my case, it was literally not until I began writing this series of blogs that I began to understand my own ambitions and goals, but as I look back on the choices I've made and the people I professionally admire, it seems obvious that I was looking for some balance between academia and public work (because I enjoy parts of both). Not surprisingly I suppose, as I've gravitated away from scholarship, I've moved toward journalism, which is in many ways the flip side of academia. Instead of emphasizing specialized writing, it's more populist and very general. It has a clear purpose, and reason for existing. Obviously it has it's own problems too, but without a degree from an elite university a choice likely has to be made between public work and scholarship, and I'm as surprised as anyone to find myself gravitating toward the former.

Goodbye Academia Part 4: The Work (Scholarship)

I'd like my career to be at least one of two things: fun, or meaningful. Ideally, it'd be both. And while I know that there are aspects to even the funnest and most meaningful jobs that are tedious and un-enjoyable, I don't think it's unreasonable to expect a career to have an overall net positive amount of fun and/or meaningful-ness. (Obviously many people, and perhaps myself in the future,have to work just to survive. Still, who doesn't want to have a job that offers more?)

In my last post of this series, I basically commented on the less-than-fun aspects of being a professor. But that leaves the question: is it meaning? Does it matter?

Increasingly, my answer to that question is "no." When I entered BYU's master's program I was very confident about the power of professors to shape society. They teach people, sure, but they also publish research that affects how people thing. To be honest, this aspect of the job excited me much more than teaching.

Yet as I researched, I became increasingly disillusioned with the academic publishing environment. Scholarly conferences were not only boring, but individual sessions were poorly attended. No one seemed to care. Scholarly journals weren't getting much more interesting, just because I was moving up in education status. Though I had frequently defended the relevance of humanities scholarship, by the time I was halfway through my master's degree I had completely lost faith in its ability to do anything but earn people tenure. In other words, it didn't seem to matter.

Basically, academic publishing in the humanities is, at best, a kind of trickle-down intellectualism. It supposes that there are a few experts who are qualified to explore certain topics, and that what they find will eventually (somehow) influence something. That's a really disheartening thing. It means that while most humanities scholars are politically liberal, they are among the most culturally conservative people I can think of. They are trying to conserve the past (literature, or other historic texts), and they are doing it by joining a small corps of power-holding elites. So it doesn't matter how many liberal issues they support, their career choices are literally the definition of conservatism.

Which has made me wonder: where is the populism? Where are the people who are so skeptical of power structures that they try to redistribute authority in academia?

The answer, of course, is that they're probably not academics. Or, if they are, they're exceptions to the rule. They probably don't publish as much, get denied tenure, and end up teaching at lesser institutions.

Or whatever. The point is that as I've come to see the academic publishing environment as more conservative, as well as less capable of affecting social change, I've become under-enthused about entering it.

Goodbye Academia Part 3: The Work (Teaching)

In my last post about academia, I noted that the absurdity of the job market is one of the things that had deterred me from entering the profession. Another thing was the work itself. 

There are a couple of big things professors do: teach, and publish research. Obviously there are a lot of other, somewhat smaller things they do, but those are the biggies. In this post I'll talk about the teaching, and in the next post I'll tackle publishing and other aspects of the profession.

To begin, I should say that I love teaching. It's like putting on a performance. I love the kind of confident, self-deprecating humor that fits so well in the humanities classroom. I love when students run with a topic and actually seem engaged. Much of the time I also enjoy conferencing with students, particularly when we don't have to focus on specific assignments, but rather talk more abstractly about ideas.

Overall, I think I could be very happy being a teacher of English, film, and other humanities related topics. On the other hand, there are some terrible aspects of the job.

Like grading. I truly despise grading. I hate it because it's un-enjoyable, and I hate it because I don't like the idea of grades in the first place. My ideal university wouldn't concern itself with quantifiable measures of success like grades; rather people would learn what they want and be tested by how they apply their skills, debate their ideas, and critique their environment. 

Obviously that's overly utopian and simplistic (especially today, when education increasingly values "results" as opposed to learning), but that doesn't change the fact that hate to grade papers. Usually when I get papers I weigh the value of throwing them all away and telling my students they were incinerated in terrible car wreck on my way home (which I miraculously survived). I've never resorted to that, but the point is that grading is a big deterrent to becoming a teacher. 

More broadly, however, I've also been surprised at how different a student-teacher relationship looks from the latter position. As a student, I've always enjoyed debating and coming to new conclusions. In many ways, that was the only way I could learn. However, I didn't realize that the vast majority of student ideas are old news to teachers. (I think I understood this vaguely, but I didn't realize how quickly it got monotonous). 

When I was teaching English 150, for example, I'd read the textbook many, many times by my final semester. That meant that students reading it for the first time were going to have a hard time thinking of or saying something that I hadn't either heard or thought of first. Or that was even very interesting. 

That's not to say that it didn't happen, it just didn't happen that often. And, I don't think that's a reflection on my students. I had just been thinking about the topics for so much longer, and talked to so many more people about them, that it was rare for something new to come up in class or student-teacher conferences. 

I remember one time a student did come in to a conference with some amazing ideas. It was invigorating and we talked passionately and at length about those ideas. When the conference ended I was simultaneously exhilarated, but also wondered if I had crossed the line of what was appropriate; I had simply been sharing and debating opinions as a person, without objectivity and or any attention to how it helped the student with any particular task (I also momentarily ceased to be concerned with towing any particular party line—which was always a struggle at BYU—and was just honest about what I thought about things). 

The point is that my teachers have frequently opened my eyes to new ideas, but my students rarely have. Maybe that's my problem, I don't know. But that's the way things have gone. (My students at SLCC frequently amaze me, but that has more to do with their life stories and has little connection to what I'm actually supposed to be teaching them.) 

There are also other things about teaching that I don't want to do. For example, I dislike teaching writing and composition. I would actually have emphasized in rhetoric as a master's student at BYU, except that that option's most obvious career trajectory led to teaching writing classes. For me, the prospect of a life spent teaching First-year Writing or (worse) Advanced Writing was ineffably depressing. Many of my good friends have chosen that path and love it, but for some reason, I just don't.

So all in all, there are aspects of teaching that I like, and that I don't like. Like the job market, this fact led me only to apply to a few really good schools, because I felt that that decision would lead to a career in which I had more control over which classes I taught, how I taught them, and how often. On the other hand, if I was going to have to teach too many classes (and thus have more grading), or classes I dislike and/or fundamentally disagree with (like composition courses), I wasn't interested.

Goodbye Academia Part 1: Rejection

It looks like I won't be doing a PhD, at least in the immediate future. I was going to write a single post explaining why and what I thought, but it got very, very long. So, I've decided to break it up into parts. Also, I'd be lying if I didn't say that doing a multipart series on my blog wasn't at least partially inspired by a friend's fantastic discussion of his beard-related problems at BYU, which you can read here.

After finishing a master's degree at BYU last year, I decided to apply to grad school to do a PhD. There's not many careers that require—or even value—an MA in English, so teaching at a university seemed like a good thing to shoot for. 

So, all through fall of 2009, my primary "occupation" was applying to PhD graduate programs (I did other things, but saw them as secondary). Though I initially planned to apply to around 15, I only ended up submitting applications to 9. Six were in film, and three in English. They were:

Film: 

NYU

USC

UCLA

University of Wisconsin, Madison

Brown

University of Michigan, Ann Arbor

English:

University of Pennsylvania

Northwestern

University of Washington.

I chose these schools based on simple criteria: 1) Programs that appealed to me based on their focus/faculty specialties, 2) Programs with enough prestige to get a good job after finishing, with at least a remote possibility of it turning into a really good job down the road, 3) Location, 4) Other assorted factors. 

It's also worth mentioning that though my current degrees are already in English, I almost didn't even apply to any English programs. I have a lot more work experience in film, am more interested in it as an art form, and liked the film programs more. In the end, however, I decided that I'd love to live in Washington state (hence that school), UPenn has great placement and is an Ivy League (and I had a good contact there), and I also had a good contact at Northwestern.

I also think I had a pretty strong application. I had a number of conference presentations, a good writing sample (according to some professors), a published film review in a scholarly journal (and a number of non-scholarly publications with varying pertinence to the field), strong letter's of recommendation (also according to the people who wrote them), etc. Overall, my letter recommenders told me that I was a strong candidate. 

Nevertheless, I have been rejected by all but the University of Michigan, and I don't have high hopes for that school. I have no idea why I've been rejected, but the most basic reason is that the schools I applied for received more suitable applications. I also didn't apply very broadly (as I was advised to do by many people). Three schools in English and six in film hardly ensures entrance into either field. Plus, I mostly only applied to top tier programs (Washington and Michigan aren't necessarily the very top in those respective fields, but they're still very good). 

Because I'm not dying to undergo the financial, emotional, and psychological bludgeoning that the PhD application/rejection process entails, my many years of school are likely at an end. The application for each school cost between $60 and $90. Plus, I retook the GRE (big mistake, btw), which cost over $100, and I had to pay $20 to have my scores sent to more than few schools. There were also a bunch of other expenses along the way which made the application process very expensive. 

More importantly, no matter how nice the rejection letters are, they might as well be a blank piece of paper with the words "you're worthless" scribbled on them. (Or better yet, they could be one of those audio cards that I think are made by Hallmark and play a song when you open them. Except in this case, they could just scream obscenities and insults and leave you to figure out the rest.) Though I don't actually believe I'm worthless, I had no idea how difficult it would be to receive 8 (soon to be 9) consecutive rejection letters. Seriously, it takes a toll.  

Of course, there is still the possibility that I'll get accepted into Michigan. It's slim, I think, but it exists. However, at this point, I may not accept an offer to go to Michigan, as I'm increasingly content with the way things are turning out. Since I've been out of school I've cultivated some new career possibilities, and my qualms with academia are stronger than ever. So stay tuned for the next installment of this series to find out why getting rejected might actually be a really good thing.

MLA

A few days ago Laura and I discovered that we could look up many of Provo’s historic buildings online.  Even more surprising was the fact that one of our favorite old houses, the Reed Smoot House, we could actually look at the paper work that was filed in 1970’s that allowed the house to become an historical landmark. 

 

Among the many interesting things on this paper work were some research citations, which I was astounded to see were done with MLA formatting.  As an English major and then master’s student, I’m very familiar with MLA, having had to use it to cite all of my research.  Initially, then, I was vaguely pleased that I was able to immediately recognize MLA formatting on a document more than 30 years old.  Quickly however, I became even more astonished that MLA had changed so little in all that time.  Though there were slight differences, was basically the same.

 

This experience points out to me the idiotic backwardness of all things MLA today.  In the 30+ years since the Smoot House papers were filled out the world has experienced a digital revolution that arguably has changed the world as much as the printing press centuries before.  Texts themselves are different, people’s access to information is different, and the way we think about information is different.  Unfortunately (or fortunately if you’re a lazy old scholar), MLA has chosen to disregard all of those changes and pretend like typewriters are still an author’s weapon of choice.  This is somewhat akin to monks continuing to make illuminated manuscripts into, say, the 1600s; nice, but not really relevant anymore.

 

As a teacher of writing I often tried to get my students to understand that citation styles served a very real purpose.  Superficially, they obviously give different researchers a codified way of understanding and retracing others’ footsteps.  More importantly, however, they reflect the values of their discipline; each style implicitly makes an argument about what information is important, and where that information should go.  This, in turn, reflects the values of the people working in the particular discipline.

 

Today however, texts themselves are bucking the values that MLA embodies.  When was the last time you saw a website with an author?  Sure, certain websites include authors for particular articles, but who is the custodian of the entire cite?  Where is the website “published?”  How do you cite a Youtube video that has been embedded on a Facebook profile and was originally pirated from a DVD extra features disc?

 

The point is that in the digital age much of the information that MLA values is either nonexistent or irrelevant. That doesn’t mean that a reader doesn’t need any citation information, it just means that the information they need is different. Accordingly, why not just hyperlink everything?  It would be easier, less disruptive to the reading experience, and potentially much more fruitful.  Any old English professors who couldn’t handle this could be forced into early retirement for becoming irrelevant.

 

Obviously I’m fairly critical of MLA, but I say these things as someone who uses it all the time and who feels fairly comfortable with it.  I see its usefulness, but nearly all of the research that I’ve done would be better suited to a more contemporary citation style.  I also believe that the kinds of people who use MLA, people who are supposed to be on the cutting edge of cultural criticism and analysis, are stuck oddly in the past when it comes to documenting their research.