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Presidential Address 2007: The Scandal of Literacy

As I was preparing to leave for Chicago, I read the latest PMLA special-topic issue, Remapping Genre, coordinated by Wai Chee Dimock and Bruce Robbins. So, impressed once again by the power of the concept of genre, I begin by remarking the form of what I am doing here tonight. That genre is, of course, something called an MLA presidential address. There have been 116 such addresses since 1883, when forty professors met at Columbia to found the MLA. As the 117th president in this long line, I prepared for this evening by doing a small study of what my predecessors have written for the occasion over more than a century. Such a study, I might add, is very much part of the genre. Certain features of the canon are persistent enough to catch the eye of even the most casual student of the form. The dominant structure of an MLA presidential address is an arrangement that goes back at least to the Sophists: it is an argument arranged as a contest between two antitheses. Over the years, the dichotomies have changed, but the template of binary opposition has remained improbably constant.