More Thoughts on the PCA/ACA Conference

Now that I've told the story of my PCA/ACA Adventures, let me say a few thoughts in general about conferencing. I must admit, to start, that the $300 my university gives me to travel to conferences didn't even cover the $500+ for my plane ticket, let alone the $240 for a shared hotel room, the $50 shuttle ride, the $10+ on public transportation, and the $100+ on meals, including fries and chips so hard they left the insides of my mouth feeling like I had brushed my teeth with a dagger. One the other hand, that three hundred bucks did soften the blow a bit, and I'd gladly pay the rest to go hang out with some erudite Howardians. Part of the reason I go is also because some curious people might come over and be introduced to Howard who wouldn't otherwise pick up his work. At one of the panels, a young lady said she came because she was writing a paper about Black Mask magazine and wanted to know how people talk about the pulps, and a young gentleman said he came purely randomly. If those two leave and tell their friends how interesting that Robert E. Howard character seems, it's a job well done.

More than the actual price of being in Boston, it's the fees associated with going to the conference that bother me. We have to pay registration fees, fees to be members of the organization, and we also have to buy the journal they put out. I truly appreciate the opportunity the PCA/ACA gives us to come together and share our interests and scholarship, and I genuinely believe that a large conference like this is necessary, since it allows us to cross-pollinate and raise interest, as I mentioned above. And yet I wish it didn't come with such a prohibitive price tag.

When it comes down to it, I suspect this might be because "popular culture studies" just don't have the kind of academic heft that, say, Victorian studies or Shakespearean studies do. Maybe popular culture studies doesn't get the kind of funding support other areas do. I feel the struggle for legitimacy that we experience is a little hypocritical and short-sighted. After all, how many other disciplines have gone from "popular" to academic? In the 1800s, reading novels was considered low-brow and was even accused of corrupting peoples' morals. In Shakespeare's time, people looked down their noses at the theater, and they were considered so revolting that they stuck them on the other side of the Thames in London (I guess that was the Elizabethan equivalent of the train tracks). And yet now proper academics with patches on their tweed jackets and everything spend their time researching this stuff. Especially now, when there's such a big movement to discover and rediscover voices of minorities who have until now been ignored in the literary canon, I think that "popular" writers such as the weird fiction writers should be embraced and given the due they have so long been denied. The literary world is full of people who talk about the importance of literature and authors' voices; how can we draw a line and say whose voice is meaningful and whose isn't? We are in an age when ignored writers, those who wrote experimentally or went against the grain or were women or minorities, are being rediscovered and lauded. How can we say the contributions of writers once labeled unacceptable were unfairly dismissed and need to be honored, and then turn around and say, "But not those other writers over there!"?

Weird fiction came from a time of change, when the rise of steam, internal combustion, and electricity had all but destroyed the frontier, when social and class awareness rose in the face of the brutal factory system, when science and philosophy were rearranging the place of humans in the cosmos, and when the Great Depression made life brutal and bitter for millions. All of these are reflected in the stories of weird fiction writers. The kind of scholarship I believe will raise these writers in the esteem of academia will focus on examining their use of genuine literary talent to explore the themes of their age, not to mention more general literary analysis of their artistry, examining their work not just in terms of broad themes but looking deeper by using critical theory to analyze their work. I have been delighted to see this taking place at the PCA/ACA conference, with critical readings including gender, imagery, and the use of certain literary devices.

As I prepare for my comprehensive exams, I intend to look at the way weird fiction writers spoke to the class and economic situations of their time. I don't want to just say "they were shaped by the Great Depression" or look at the way they interacted with a mostly lower class literary form, but I rather want to look at ways they responded to this, even subverted types and played on reader expectations. For a group of men and women writing for a magazine that routinely had half-naked women writhing on the cover, they were a remarkably well-read and scholarly bunch, and their interest in history, literature, and science was amazing. They all defy what you might expect "pulp" writers to be like, but that's part of what makes them interesting. As they wrote in a "weird" genre which routinely pushed boundaries, they had the perfect form in which to explore ideas and themes that were taboo to discuss otherwise, and that allowed them to speak vitally and vibrantly to their generation and to literature as a whole.