COLUMN ONE : For the Sake of Humanities : The annual MLA gathering welcomes everyone from Dickens scholars to pop culture pundits. But some say the group for literary studies has sunk into self-parody.

It’s been called the annual “Gong Show” of the academic world. It’s been derided as an anxious, exploitative festival, complete with its own jargon, dress code and etiquette. But perhaps the simplest description of the Modern Language Assn. convention is the one Molly Hite once overheard in the San Francisco airport.

The time was 2:30 a.m., and Hite, a Cornell University professor, was waiting for her baggage amid a throng of other convention-bound scholars. Suddenly, a man began shouting into a public telephone.

“I can’t get anything from any of the car rentals!” he said frantically, his voice cracking as he tried to persuade the person on the other end to get up, get dressed and come fetch him. “Don’t you understand? There are 10,000 English teachers in this town!”

Today, the strange ritual that is known simply as “the MLA” begins in San Diego--a trade show of the mind where books are known as “texts” and soup stains down the front of your shirt are seen, as Hite puts it, “as a possible accessory.” Over the next four days, the nation’s scholars of English, literature, linguistics and modern foreign languages will gather to consider their craft, exchanging views about teaching, trends in scholarship and one another.

The meeting, a magnet for literary luminaries, is also known for high levels of angst, primarily because this is where graduate students in the humanities must go to be interviewed for jobs. “Not only is your future being decided, it’s being decided if you have one,” said one sympathetic professor.

But it is as a showcase for cutting-edge--and some say downright silly--scholarship that the convention has become famous. Some journalists have mocked the convention for its preponderance of papers about race, class and sexuality (some too graphic to be reprinted here). Others, such as conservative columnist George F. Will, have lamented that literary criticism--a staple of many MLA sessions--has begun to overshadow literature itself.

This year, however, the criticism is coming from within academia. In recent months, a new scholarly group has surfaced that some are calling the “Anti-MLA”: the Assn. of Literary Scholars and Critics, a Southern California-based professional society that describes itself as holding to “broad conceptions of literature rather than the narrow, highly politicized ones often encountered today.”

Ricardo Quinones, a Dante scholar at Claremont McKenna College who is president of the new society, said the group was born out of a concern that literary scholarship is becoming irrelevant because it is being “overtaken by political correctness and multiculturalism”--not to mention sex.

A quick perusal of this year’s program--which includes presentations such as “Victorian Buggery and the Sensation of Scandal,” “Ever Embodying Ambiguities: The Monkey as a Signifier in Asian American Literature,” and a three-part session on gay and lesbian themes called “Que(e)rying the Millennium”--gives Quinones all the ammunition he needs.

“Self-parody can go no further. If the MLA closed down, there’d be no business for stand-up comedians,” Quinones said, referring to what he called the “narrow agendas” reflected in such scholarly work. “All these little bits about sex--it’s just unbelievable! It’s as if these (scholars) are children who have just discovered they have sexual parts.”

Quinones stresses that his group is not strictly anti-MLA, but springs from discontent with what he calls faddish scholarship “that includes the MLA.” Literary scholarship can contain an emphasis on race, class and gender. But too often lately, Quinones says, those aspects are held in higher esteem than the work itself. The business of literature must be refocused, he says, or else “become more and more discounted.”

With only a few more than 400 members, the Assn. of Literary Scholars and Critics hardly threatens to replace the MLA, whose 31,000 members make it the largest humanities association in the country. Still, the fledgling society raises legitimate questions about the future of literary scholarship--questions that Patricia Meyer Spacks, the MLA’s president, says she welcomes.

“I think it’s splendid that there’s a new organization to talk about literature. The more the merrier,” said Spacks, who chairs the English department at the University of Virginia.

Spacks rejects the suggestion that the MLA convention--where 2,100 papers are presented on every subject from 17th-Century French literature to popular culture--has become too narrow. New ideas should be aired, she believes, and younger scholars must have a chance to try their wings. Moreover, she asserts that the gathering still has something for everyone, be they trendy or traditional.

But she agrees that the MLA cannot do everything. In addition to holding an annual convention, now in its 110th year, the MLA publishes the world’s leading bibliography of books and articles on language, literature, linguistics and folklore. It puts out the MLA Handbook, a style guide for writers. And it publishes the Job Information List--the definitive tally of openings at colleges and universities that is the bible for those entering the field.

The group is, as one professor puts it, “the mother MLA”--an umbrella organization that welcomes Dickens scholars, Old Norse language buffs, Marxists and medievalists all under the same roof. It seems inevitable, many say, that when splinter groups form, they often define themselves in opposition to the MLA.

“It’s like the psychoanalytical theory of transference,” said Spacks, who contends that her organization often seems to become “the focus of anger at whatever seems to be the Establishment of the moment.”

The convention has also been a frequent target for satirists. In the mystery novel “Murder at the MLA” by D.J.H. Jones, a non-tenured professor is driven to violence when a colleague implies that she is “professionally inert.” And in David Lodge’s popular sendup of the conference-hopping professorial set, “Small World: An Academic Romance,” the MLA is everyone’s ultimate destination.

“Imagine 10,000 highly educated, articulate, ambitious, competitive men and women converging . . . to meet and to lecture and to question and to discuss and to gossip and to plot and to philander and to party and to hire or be hired,” Lodge writes of what he calls “the Big Daddy of conferences. A megaconference. A three-ring circus of the literary intelligentsia.”

Explains one of Lodge’s characters, a self-described “post-structuralist” professor from a California university called Euphoric State: “Everybody is at the MLA. Everybody you ever knew.”

This year is no different. At a session called “20 Years of Feminism: Erica Jong’s ‘Fear of Flying’ as a Window on the History of a Political Movement,” Jong herself is scheduled to be present. The next day, Denise Levertov, one of America’s most respected poets, will give a reading.

Also scheduled are “hot” professors whose reputations for controversial scholarship are expected to draw big crowds. Among them: Andrew Ross of New York University, whose latest book of so-called eco-criticism explores literature’s relation to nature, and Harvard University’s Marjorie Garber, who has traced cross-dressing from Shakespeare to Madonna.

But a lot of the action takes place outside the formal sessions. There are casual star sightings (“I was in the elevator,” one MLA-goer was once heard to exclaim, “with Norman Mailer!”). There are reunions with friends. And at the end of each day, this year’s 10,000 attendees will have their choice of countless parties and cash bars sponsored by everyone from the Edith Wharton Society to the American Assn. of Professors of Yiddish.

“I don’t think very many people go to the MLA convention to learn,” said Robert Tracy, a professor of English and Celtic studies at UC Berkeley. “They go for jobs and they go to drink and hang around.”

Lately, the job market has been so dire it could drive a scholar to drink. Just ask aspiring professors such as Danielle Price, a 28-year-old Ph.D. candidate at UCLA whose dissertation explores gender and nature in Victorian and modern British literature.

“One of the drawbacks of going to the MLA is running into a lot of people who are very tense,” said Price, who this year found only 14 job openings in her field in the United States and Canada. “When you think about the number of jobs and the number of applicants--well, it’s better not to think about it.”

The dearth of jobs, combined with the rising number of Ph.D.s granted in English and foreign languages, has created a “miasma of despair that hangs in the air at the MLA,” said Niko Pfund, editor-in-chief of New York University Press, one of 118 academic publishers that will exhibit their wares at the convention.

The situation has grown so alarming that the MLA is kicking off the convention today with a special meeting of the heads of Ph.D.-granting English and language departments. The three-hour session will focus on what should be done to address the bottleneck that is leaving many of the nation’s newest scholars stranded without work.

“There are real questions,” Spacks said. “Should we stop training Ph.D.s? Should we cut way back?”

With such grim possibilities on the horizon, the MLA mood might be intolerably gloomy if not for a heartening discovery: The convention is developing a lighter side. MLA members, so often mocked as sober frumps, appear to be developing their senses of humor.

Listed among the 774 events in the program is a “metapanel” called “How to Stop a Long-Winded Speaker.” It features four critiques of the pomposity problem--one Marxist, one feminist, one psychoanalytic and one modeled on the work of the late French philosopher Michel Foucault, whose theories about power and control often pop up in literary criticism.

“You don’t have to be that long in this profession to get a keen sense (that) people who have been professors for decades don’t have the foggiest notion of what 10 minutes is,” said David Chioni Moore, a graduate student from Duke University who is moderating the panel. “The best medicine for these types of things is a little deflationary humor.”

And then there is “Genderless Child of Humor of the MLA: Can You Top This?”--an open “anecdotefest” about MLA and the profession, organized by the American Humor Studies Assn.

“We hope that people will rise and tell of their worst moments, or their most comic,” said Eric Solomon, an English professor at San Francisco State University who attended his first convention in 1950. “Self-parody, reflexiveness--they’re very much in vogue.”

MLA veterans say there is plenty to chuckle about. A sampling:

MLA Jargon: Geoffrey Green, an English professor at San Francisco State, notes that MLA members always use the word reread (as in, “I’m rereading ‘Middlemarch’ ”). “To say one is reading ‘Middlemarch,’ ” Green explains, “might be construed as appearing to suggest that one had not previously read the book--perish the thought!--hence we reread in order to make clear that we have read.”

MLA Etiquette: There is, apparently, only one way to board an elevator at this convention. First, you wait, sometimes for a good long time. Then, once you step on, “you speedily look around to read all the name tags,” said Mary Moore, who has just completed her Ph.D. in Renaissance poetry at UC Davis. “You need to see if there is (a) someone there from a university where you applied, (b) someone who will be interviewing you or (c) somebody famous.”

MLA Dress Code: Hite, the Cornell professor, observes that while people in other professions make fashion statements, academics “are uncharacteristically mute. Academic gear is simply there. It covers, it warms. . . It also guarantees that when 10,000 (scholars) . . . descend on a given city, the local populace can spot immediately which ones they are.”

They are the ones with the comfortable footwear, the leather-clad elbows and the stains down the front of their shirts.

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The Paper Chase

You are going to deliver an academic paper at the Modern Language Assn. convention, but first you need a title. Deadlines require that you submit your title eight months before the meeting convenes. The first problem: You’re not sure yet what you want to say. The second problem: You want to persuade your peers to come hear your paper instead of the 2,100 others on the program. The result: Many MLA paper titles sound a lot like the names of alternative rock bands. Here is a sampling:

* “@&*!”: A Pragmatic History of Cursing and Swearing in Spoken English

* Abusive Furniture: Das Ding

* An Investigation Into the Distribution of the Adverb Simply in Modern British English

* Bambi on Top

* Blood Clots and Blood Baths: Irigaray, Hegel and the Tragedy of the Ethical Order

* Coitus Interruptus and the Pardoner’s Voice

* Dandyism and Dieting: The Camp Performance of Richard Simmons

* Grunts and Groans: Cultural Memory and the Ethnocentric War Narrative

* Hemingway’s Garden: Too Radically Pruned?

* How the Grinch Saved Matthew Arnold, or Victorian Studies and Children’s Literature

* I Stand Here Naked, or Best Dressed in Theory: On Feminist Refashionings of Academic Discourse

* Intoxication and Dismemberment: Ecstasy and Violence From Dionysius to Jouissance

* King Kong vs. John F. Kennedy: Nationalism and Masculinism in Susan Swan’s “Wives of Bath”

* Kleist and Amphibian Sexuality

* “Like a Virgin”: Ruskin’s Medea as Madonna

* Of Injin Tactics, Quabag and Bloody Heads

* Rude Gals and Bawdy Song: Tradition and Transformation in Trinidad’s East Indian “Chutney” Dance Rituals

* Snickering at Incest: The Comedy of Sexual Transgression in Horace Walpole’s Early Correspondence

* The Poetic M(o)use: Teaching the Hyperpoem

* Tupi or Not Tupi: Cannibalism, Cultural Identity and Popular Cinema

* White Male Noise From Southwest Africa