I remember my first conference. It was the KFLC. It would have been 1986 or so. I was a graduate student, and the panel consisted of me and 3 other graduate students. The moderator was a prick in suit, someone already established in the field of Golden Age. There was no audience except for the panel itself, and we met in a classroom. The prick was very condescending to us and I despise him to this day for that. He said something about how we would eventually learn to do mature scholarship.
Our papers were actually very good, because we were a generation that was using theory and had a certain standard for ourselves. I still remember who one of the panelists was though I have lost track of her.
I went to other panels in the conference. I was shocked to find people doing plot summaries with a straight face and papers with the intellectual level of a high school student, a kind of rudimentary descriptive thematic summary. So I resented being condescended to by this prick. What I was presenting got to the editorial board of PMLA before being finally rejected.
1 comment:
I was in one at UCSB in the 80s that wasn't a graduate student conference, although some papers were by graduate students. It was good. I published the paper in a good journal.
I was in several at Stanford that were for graduate students. I don't remember what I presented -- maybe I just organized some panels, or went along for the ride. They were Latin American Studies conferences. I didn't like the work being done in literature. I saw some really good papers in history, and learned a lot from them. One presenter's dissertation, that I had seen him present on, became a book and I reviewed it, enjoyed writing the review too.
Post a Comment