Published in the Fall 2025 Newsletter.
Last month I participated in my last Executive Council meeting; soon, right after the convention, I’ll be passing on the gavel representing the MLA presidency to my friend and brother Herman Beavers. I am both sad and happy, a combination of feelings familiar to all of us who are veterans of graduation ceremonies. Indeed, nothing is more core to our identity—as teachers, as students, as MLA members—than entrusting what we value to those to come.
But things are different now. We are living in an age of radical disruption. The unthinkable happens on a daily basis, it seems, existential threats so pervasive we can only brace ourselves for the next blow: a list of names that includes friends and mentors handed over to the Department of Education, museums and national parks censored, a barrage of book bans. If you have followed our lawsuit, you know where the MLA stands, and I know many of you have been grateful for the resources we have gathered and the fellowship we offer.
Every other loss these days feels compounded. I write this shortly after the death of the great Jonathan Lear, who moved over the course of his lifetime from hermeneut to psychoanalyst to elegist for our age of climate change. Lear wrote, about the infinite losses that we face with our changing climate: “In response to loss, we make meaning: re-creating in memory and imagination what we have lost and reanimating forms of life that might otherwise disappear” (16). I have been thinking of Lear’s words for a season of loss, how so many of us are engaged in the making of meaning, and how that work (which we usually understand as scholarship and writing) is more pressing than ever.
But I have also been thinking about another way to make meaning, how to attempt, in the magical alchemy of teaching and learning, to turn loss into some form of remembrance. Recently I had the honor of visiting McGill University to give a talk and host a roundtable: it is always wonderful to share one’s ideas, but one of the keenest pleasures of the visit involved meeting Dan Huang, a student of Guojun Wang, one of my own beloved former students. Dan is working on topics far outside my ken—women’s poetic writing and sociality in late imperial China—but connected by family resemblance to Guojun and perhaps even to me.
It got me thinking of my own teachers’ teachers, my “grandteachers,” if you will: a Belgian poststructuralist, a Manchu prince, a Canadian Miltonist, a Jewish philologist who fled the Nazis, a brilliant commentator who had his home ransacked during the Cultural Revolution, and so many, many more. Of course, I recognize that some of the grandteachers whose impact is the deepest have been forgotten: Who taught my quietly radical Arkansan high school history teacher? Who were the language teachers who taught my many language teachers? I invite you to partake in this exercise, which I have found comforting. It doesn’t take much to realize that each of us, in and of ourselves, is a big tent already, housing all sorts of disagreement but also conversation.
Each of us is a conglomeration of teachings passed down by teachers, teachings that we ourselves have the privilege of passing down. That’s the true family that we are. Let me end by quoting Northrop Frye, MLA president almost exactly fifty years ago and longtime Torontonian: “The knowledge that has been entrusted to you is the food of the spirit. It must be shared with others; if hoarded for yourselves, it will spoil. With the knowledge you have, you will often feel as though you had to feed thousands with only five loaves and two fish, but still what you have must be shared.” Listen and share. Do not worry that it is not enough. It will be.
I hope I’ll see many of you in January. The family reunion is more important than ever.
Works Cited
Frye, Northrop. “Baccalaureate Service (III).” Northrop Frye on Religion, edited by Alvin A. Lee and Jean O’Grady, U of Toronto P, 2000, p. 371. Vol. 4 of The Collected Works of Northrop Frye.
Lear, Jonathan. Imagining the End: Mourning and Ethical Life. Belknap Press, 2022.