Sunday Morning

One look at the line in front of Starbucks in the lobby this morning was enough to remind me that the MLA provides coffee and whatnot in its Press Room -- a quiet spot set aside for visiting high-profile journalists, but also indulging the occasional Grub Street tagalong.

Aside from nourishment, I picked up a handful of press releases. The most interesting one announces that René Girard, professor emeritus of comp lit at Stanford, is receiving the MLA's triennial award for lifetime scholarly achievement. I wrote a short piece about Girard for Intellectual Affairs some while ago.

In his book To Double Business Bound: Essays on Literature Mimesis, and Anthropology, published by Johns Hopkins University about thirty years ago, Girard pays tribute to Kenneth Burke, whose work anticipates a number of the ideas that Girard developed in his own work. (Both of them were system-builders on a grand scale.) I wrote about Burke here more recently.

Meanwhile, on a less dialectical and more quantificational note: Turnout for this year's MLA is reportedly about 9000 people, most of them now queuing up for a very expensive cup of coffee downstairs.

UPDATE: As of Monday, the MLA representative I spoke with indicated that turnout was actually about 8500 people.