DAVID LEHMAN
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and Its Discontents" as well as "Onomastic Inventions in the
Works of T. Coraghessan Boyle." Ironists took delight in the fact
that "the Marxist Literary Group" held its "cash bar" reception at
the Marriott's Odets Room-named after the author of "Waiting
for Lefty" -at the same time as the Division on Old English was
having its do at the Empire Room. Elaine Scarry of the University of
Pennsylvania got off a pretty good quip about the convention's over–
whelming sense of simultaneity. In her paper, which discussed what
she called' 'the calisthenics of consent," she said that the MLA con–
vention was" a paradigm of the principle of exit." I'm not sure what
the argument was, but her phrasemaking kept making me reach for
my notebook.
Other presentations ranged from the edifying to the numbingly
impenetrable. Clearly, the watchdogs against sexism in language re–
main vigilant. Witness a session on "The American Critic as Person
of Letters." The colon has long been obligatory in the titles
seminarians give to their papers, but the double-edged parenthesis
keeps gaining ground. Consider the desperate cleverness that gave
rise to such allusive mouthfuls as "Class(room) Consciousness:
Tradition and the Production of Cultural Literacy . " Or take
"S(e)izing Power: Gender, Representation, and Body Scale,"
where the parenthesis is evidently meant to make the point that fat is
either beautiful or powerful or both.
More than a few speakers upstaged themselves with the titles they
had chosen, which were printed ahead of time in the convention pro–
gram . In a session on "The Discourse of Homophobia," for exam–
ple, Berkeley's Christopher Craft told the audience that he couldn't
live up to his announced title-"Discharging Wilde: Seminal
Writing and Prophylactic Reading" -so he was jettisoning it in
favor of what he proceeded to read, which was, to paraphrase the
speaker, a tour of our culture's "anal itinerary." AIDS, said Craft,
citing a bit of Berkeley grafitti, has become in the public mind an
acronym for "anally injected death syndrome . " But to conclude
that AIDS (or "AIDS discourse") amounts to a "brutally
homophobic fetish" is to combine words craftily for the sake of a
political point (in this case, an important one) that gets blurred in
the process. AIDS has indeed provoked a lamentable new round of
homophobia, but to call the disease (or the reaction to it) a fetish is to
allow self-delighting language to get in the way of clear exposition.
Perhaps that's the point-to stimulate the free flow of ideas without
necessarily attaching oneself to any or all. If so, however, you might
