It’s a curious contradiction that, even as language and literature departments face ongoing budget, personnel, and infrastructure reductions in administrative deference to the ruthless calculus of economic austerity, the mass media’s attention to academic matters still consistently focuses on humanities education. In the media imaginary—and perhaps only there—the objective of higher education is still expected to be the production of tasteful citizen-subjects, an objective that has been challenged on the ground, not only by neoliberal education policy, but also by charges that the privileged, romantic figure of the citizen-subject is itself unrepresentative of the majority of college students. The received, idyllic narrative of the campus as the exemplary scene of self-formation through aesthetic experience retains a seductive ideological power despite its decreasing correspondence to the material realities of literary studies.

The four 12–15-minute papers (leaving 15–27 minutes for discussion afterward) on this panel account for this non-coincidence of representation and reality by engaging a range of literary and cinematic texts which represent the profession/discipline of literary studies, from canonical middlebrow depictions to pulp fictions. Each presenter asks, in their own way, how these texts register the force of that gap between idealized representation and material realities. Texts that advance romantic accounts of aesthetic education fail to make coherent cases for that education; texts with a bleakly cynical view of the profession betray attachment to outmoded or phantasmatic promises concerning its value. Acerbically critical depictions of literature professors prove parasitic upon idealistic ones, and pathos-laden ones never quite manage to translate emotional response into material investments. The underlying contention of this panel, despite the diversity in objects and approaches of the presenters, is that getting traction on representations of literary studies can help us better understand not just why this profession remains the object of fascination among the general public, but also why accounts of the profession’s “value” continually fail to translate into improved material conditions for literary studies. The panel thus engages questions at stake in recent scholarship and media commentary on literary studies and the academy, including but not limited to John Guillory's recent book "Professing Criticism" (U. Chicago Press, 2022) and the recent New Yorker article on the decline of the English major—questions that are by definition of urgent concern to every member of the MLA.

Moberely Luger returns to one of the most famous cinematic depictions of a literature teacher, "Dead Poets Society," in order to critique the film's valorization of a poetic pedagogy dependent upon instructor charisma and pleasurable affective intensity, asking whether it might be the case that, contrary to the romantic picture of the ideal teacher presented by the film, discomfort and frustration might be more effective pedagogical starting points. Eleanor Russell takes up "Death in a Tenured Position," a pseudonymous mystery novel by the Columbia University English professor Carolyn Gold Heilbrun, and reads this pulpy paperback's satire of the conditions of academic labor for its complex intertextual relationship to Heilbrun's own life and career. Samuel Catlin treats three novels which lift their plots from the Paul de Man affair of 1988–89, arguing that these novels sublimate the ethical trouble posed by the discovery of de Man's wartime journalism into lurid tales of sadism and murder and in so doing not only fail to engage the ethical problem, but also glamorize the profession of literary studies in a way that systematically obscures the reality of both academic and journalistic work, including the reality of de Man's own career(s). Finally, Douglas Dowland discusses how John Williams's novel "Stoner" confuses sadness with sorrow, offering an aestheticized sadness that covers over the structural inequities of contemporary higher education. All four presentations are concerned with how these representations use affective intensities to either evade or initiate confrontations with unpleasant or inequitable aspects of literary studies. The session presider is Rebecca Colesworthy, a literary academic who now works as an editor at a university press, where she acquires books on the topic of higher education.

(Please note: Moberley Luger has also been attached to 2 other session submissions for the convention. We would prefer to have Dr. Luger on the 4-person panel, as the presentation topic makes a vital contribution to the overall discussion of representing the profession. However, if both of those sessions are accepted, we would ask that this submission still be considered, but as a 3-person panel with Eleanor Russell, Samuel Catlin, and Douglas Dowland, in which case the presentations would extend to 15–18 minutes in length, again leaving ample time for discussion.)