The MLA Job Market: A Teacherman Dreambild
by Paul Stephens and Robert Hardwick Weston
An administered academic milieu loosely frames the dream sequence. It is about time for me to deliver a paper on a panel of fellow Germanists. Professor H. and other Frankfurt Schoolers are sharing the panel. We are all to present papers on the Dialectic of Enlightenment. Spread out in front of me, a series of false starts and incomplete drafts. No time to bring them together. The event looms inexorable, a kairotic injunction to punctuality and performance. Ready or not, it is going to happen, right then, right there. No way around it. A gripping stress of urgency and professional obligation. I imagine myself winging it from these tenuous sketches and start to panic. To panic here and now at the thought I might panic then and there. I remember the backup beta-blockers. Didn’t I pick them up at the pharmacy? Yes, I did. There they are, right where I left them. In the bag with the wrapping paper and J’s eye-drops. The canister of pills is still in its waxy Rx bag. I set it down on the table.
Outside my house, in their well-appointed car, the German professors are already waiting for me. Somehow I understand they are comfortable and willing to wait. I hope to use the extra minutes to pull together my talk. I can’t do it. Visiting Assistant Professor P. shows up. I describe my situation. I want to pull out at the last minute. Yet to just not show up at all, we agree, seems an impossible breech of protocol. P. and I are to present together. He has prepared some material, part lecture, part invented dialogue between two scholars, A and B. It is an experimental mock interview. I read over the material. The interview consists in questions directed by Gentleman A to Gentleman B, with B’s responses left blank. P is to play A and I am to improvise B on the panel. I am reluctant to participate. How will I know what to say?
At the Hotel conference center. The German professors are very angry that I made them wait all that time in their car. But I don’t understand, I thought…. A series of dirty looks and chilly introductions. One professor engages me in politely aloof conversation. He hands me his latest book in hardcover: it is a monograph on some concept in Zizek. I offer some praise, confess ignorance of this aspect of Zizek’s work—though I did profit, I explain, from Zizek’s lectures on Schelling when he taught in my department at Columbia. Oh, that must have been when he was on leave from our institution, the professor informs me. It is all rather embarrassing. My interlocutor looks off in terror toward the lake. I turn my head, startle in my bed, and wake up.
–Monday, December 24, 2007 1:30 p.m.
Copyright 2008 by Paul Stephens and Robert Hardwick Weston