2019 Presidential Theme: Textual Transactions
The presidential theme of the 2019 MLA convention is Textual Transactions. I hope it will generate lively conversations among colleagues who take different approaches to texts, so that our meeting in Chicago will create new networks of intellectual engagement among our members.
Textual transactions are the mutually constitutive engagements of human beings, texts, and contexts. Transactions are more than mere interactions, in which separate entities act on one another without being changed at any essential level. In transactions all elements are part of an organic whole and are transformed by their encounters, the way various organisms in an ecosystem shape and are shaped by one another.
This theme, then, invites us to move beyond simple dichotomies that can limit the ways we think about texts: those we read and write about, those we teach our students, and those we require our students to write. It presents an opportunity to rethink the theoretical and institutional structures that reinforce divisions between the production and consumption of writing, between learning languages and understanding the cultures in which they are embedded. It invites questions like these:
- In what ways are reading and writing mutually constitutive?
- Does engaging with language through textual transactions enhance the learner’s study of a language other than English?
- How might the concept of textual transactions shape the ways we introduce students to new tools of textual analysis?
Such questions, and others like them, signal that many of us are teachers, guiding our students toward interpretative reading and persuasive writing and helping them make sense of the cultural forces that shape texts and transactions. We are also, of course, scholars who might ask questions such as these:
- What does the concept of textual transactions contribute to our thinking about translation?
- How do we articulate relations between composition and critical analysis?
- What transactions are embodied in transnational cultural studies?
- What roles do categories such as race, gender, and mother tongue play in textual transactions?
In addition to being teachers and scholars, many of us are citizens of a nation that does not always understand or value our work. The theme of textual transactions also invites questions about two ways in which we read our own writing: by focusing on what we have written—testing it against our evolving purpose—and by considering the text from the perspective of potential readers. The latter speaks to considerations of how, and if, we communicate with the public.
Keeping that public in mind and recognizing that our work is not always legible to colleagues in our capacious association, this call for proposals also invites attention to the means by which we share our ideas with one another. Accordingly, I encourage you to look at the New Session Formats at the Convention as you plan your proposal. The well-crafted conference paper, reflecting the value the MLA places on careful thought and on precise, aesthetically pleasing language, remains the dominant form at our conventions, but the 2018 convention added working groups and poster sessions to the roundtables and workshops that had been part of previous conventions. For the 2019 convention we are organizing a special event that invites participants to describe their research briefly in terms comprehensible to those outside their fields. I look forward to greeting you in Chicago and to learning about the many ways you have given meaning to textual transactions.
Anne Ruggles Gere