“It is a melancholly object to those, who walk through this great [country] or travel in the [world], when they see the Streets, the Roads and Cabbin-doors crowded with [would-be authors] importuning every Passenger for Alms.” Thus Jonathan Swift, but now I want to make my modest proposal to you. I propose that modesty be our guide. Once I sought to make my way in the world by publishing articles and books and teaching and thereby winning tenure, and my heart goes out to all those who crowd the aisles of the book exhibits at the MLA annual meeting and the corridors of the hotels where interviews are taking place. Those corridors, where you cannot make eye contact with anyone, I will never forget. But does the current system for granting tenure make sense, based as it is in large part on the imperative that those who would win tenure publish one and often two books? I think not, and I think the members of the MLA should rise up and insist that these expectations be demolished and that other, more modest expectations be erected in their place.

Each meeting at the convention has been assigned a number, roughly corresponding to the order in which the meetings occur. In these lists, the numbers in parentheses refer to the meeting numbers within the chronological listing in the Program. (meetings 1-72 take place on Wednesday, 27 Dec; meetings 74-424 take place on Thursday, 28 Dec.; meetings 426-706 take place on Friday, 29 Dec; and meetings 707-825 take place on Saturday, 30 Dec).

Forums and special events are open to registrants and nonregistrants alike; in addition, because MLA members have asked about the possibility of having undergraduate students attend other, more specialized meetings, the MLA Executive Council voted to select a number of meetings that will be open to the general public (registrants and nonregistrants are welcome to attend). Because of the demand for space, other meetings are not open to nonregistrants.

Punch in sexuality as a search word in the MLA online bibliography, and you'll come up with well over three thousand items published since 1981. By my estimate, at least ten percent of the journal and book articles and dissertations in this list are concerned with sexuality in texts written before 1800. Add to that the scores of books on sexuality in medieval and early modern literature that have been published during the past fifteen years, and you have quite a pile of reading to do if you want to keep up-to-date. Not bad for a subject that didn't even exist when the literary texts in question were written—and still may not exist, at least in words.

Where has french theory gone? But what was “french theory”? A misnomer for the vicissitudes of a certain number of French readings of German-language texts once they arrived on North American shores? Or was it, at its most succinct, the fate of reading itself as mediated by all that attracted a half century of French thinkers to confront the limit case of Mallarmé? It was the latter proposition that attracted me in Literary Debate: Texts and Contexts: Mallarmé wending his way through postwar French thought like a radioactive tracer through the tissue of an organism. If “theory”—or philosophy—in France had in some sense gone “literary,” it was, it seemed to me, in and through a relation to the writing of Mallarmé. But our interim, PMLA's question suggests, is in some ways a posttheoretical one. What that probably means is that with the passing of certain major figures from the “theoretical scene,” we are living in a period in which the most revealing genre might well be literary biography: a dogged and occasionally humbling reality check against the headier excesses of speculation. It was with that thought in mind that I turned to Jean-Luc Steinmetz's recent biography of Mallarmé and ended up spinning this fable—of literature and life—around the single greatest surprise his work afforded me. In its effort to assemble an array of peripheral data into what Roger Caillois used to call a “cohérence aventureuse,” what follows, I would suggest, bears an essential relation to what is still, in some quarters, called theory.

The october 1999 job list prepared by the society for cinema studies has just appeared: fifty-one teaching positions involving film. What does it mean that only ten of these are situated in designated film programs, while thirty-six are hosted by departments of literature, primarily English? It means, among other things, that departments of literature are redefining and deregulating themselves. They may have cautiously welcomed film for a half century but hardly at this scale: fifty-one open positions suggest hundreds of positions permanently in place and thousands of students studying this subject each year. The confidence the humanities shows in this field is shared by most of my students, who are younger than cinema studies and must sense it to be, if not august, at least well established, rather as English seemed when I majored in it and assumed it to be as old as England. However, any census of course catalogs reveals cinema's uncertain location and function from campus to campus, posing questions of general expectations and standards—indeed, putting in question the definition of cinema studies. Evidently universities want to offer film. Bravo! But in what manner and for what purpose? What “qualifies” the hundreds of applicants applying for these fifty-one positions? Where did they gain their expertise or self-confidence?