"The MLA is the Big Daddy of conferences. A megaconference. A three-ring circus of the literary intelligentsia. This year it is meeting in New York, in two adjacent skyscraper hotels, the Hilton and the Americana, which, enormous as they are, cannot actually sleep all the delegates, who spill over into neighbouring hotels, or beg accommodation from their friends in the big city. Imagine ten thousand highlyeducated, articulate, ambitious, competitive men and women converging on mid-Manhattan on the 27th of December, 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. For the MLA is a market as well as a circus, it is a place where young scholars fresh from graduate school look hopefully for their first jobs, and more seasoned academics sniff the air for better ones. The bedrooms of the Hilton and the Americana are the scene not only of rest and dalliance but of hard bargaining and rigorous interviewing, as chairmen of departments from every state in the Union, from Texas to Maine, from the Carolinas to California, strive to fill the vacancies on their faculty rolls with the best talent available. In the present acute job shortage, it's a buyer's market, and some of these chairmen have such long lists of candidates to interview that they never get outside their hotel rooms for the duration of the convention. For them and for the desperate candidates kicking their heels and smoking in the corridors, waiting their turn to be scrutinized, the MLA is no kind of fun; but for the rest of the members it's a ball, especially if you like listening to lectures and panel discussions on every conceivable literary subject (...)."
David Lodge, Small World, p. 313.
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