Published online by Cambridge University Press: 23 October 2020
I have become fond of starting sentences with I am so old that … as in, I am so old that I remember when Michelob was considered a premium beer. And, I am so old that I remember when GLBTQ was just G and L; Q was considered a threat, B apostasy, and T pathological. And, finally, I am so old that it has been more than twenty years since I wrote an MLA paper declaring, “Profession, revise thyself,” partly as a response to Stanley Fish's arguments about professional antiprofessionalism in “Profession Despise Thyself.” I delivered it at the 1992 MLA convention, in New York, and it eventually became the essay “Bite Size Theory: Popularizing Academic Criticism,” published in Social Text in 1993 and reprinted in my second book, Public Access, in 1994. Long, long ago.