The following is a guest post from MLA Executive Director, Rosemary Feal. Rosemary asked on Twitter yesterday if anyone would be willing to post a short guest post from her on his or her blog. I volunteered, and the rest is history. If you want to play along, you can find the 2011 MLA Convention program here [PDF]. –BC
It’s easy to cherry-pick 13 sessions for the purpose of finding plays on words, references to popular culture, use of specialized vocabulary, or titles that, well, just sound alien. Or are about aliens. Zombies, even.
What would happen if I picked 13 sessions entirely at random, I wondered? So I went to random.org and asked it to choose 13 numbers between 1 and 821 (821 was the last session number on the MLA convention program). Here’s what it came up with. Try this at home, kids, and report in!
~ Rosemary G. Feal
466. Teaching Asian American Literatures
7. German in the Life of the University: A View from the Trenches
751. Writing and Curatorship: The History of the Book
249. Career Options in Translation for Language Students
67. Modernist Transnationalism and Japanese Noh: (Mis)Translating Culture in Yeats, Pound, Konishi
345. Psychoanalysis and Love
711. Literature before the Social Sciences
449. Where Are We Now? Ecocriticism and Narrative Scholarship
31. In and out of the Archive: Biography, Autobiography, and Constructing the “Self”
457. African American Literature on the Pacific Rim
115. Sephardic Resurgence!
37. Teaching the Senior Seminar
637. Narrating Lives from East to West (1400–1700)
I would love to know your results if you play this game! Thank you, Brian, for hosting my post.
Rosemary
My random 13 (and mostly what I’m struck by is how the numbers don’t seem random enough–a sure sign of randomness!):
435: Queer City Limits: Expanding Perspectives on Class and Region in LGBTQ Studies
762: So Close and Yet So Far: Close Reading and Sociology
569: Cognition, Culture, and History
698: Women’s Life Writing: Gender, Genre, Authorship
742: Lives across Borders (1400-1700): Mobility and Narrative
605: Anthropology and Objects
93: The Transnational and the Translingual
681: Writing Human Rights: Asian American Contexts
691: Our Distinctions and Our Associations, What We Can Do Together
807: Los Angeles: LIteratures of a Multiethnic Metropolis
68: Silence and Signification in Medieval and Renaissance Literatures: Formal Challenges
342: The Spanish Commedia Rewrites the Hebrew Bible
570: Current Research in Sixteenth-Century French Literary Study
Finally grabbed some time to run my own set. They’re in numerical order because I used the Random Integer Set Generator. They are still random.
35. Language in Social Networks
38. Narrating Tortured Lives in East Asia
57. Boccaccio
87. California Currents
139. Prosody in the Poetry of Ezra Pound and William Carlos Williams
170. Impact of the National Language Standards on K–16 Programs
204. Deprofessionalized?
281. Gendered Evidence: Ethics and Human Rights
355. Land and Landscape in Anglo-Saxon England
461. Disabling Race: Comparative Ethnic Approaches
605. Anthropology and Objects
653. Technology and Present-Day English
803. T. S. Eliot and Violence