According to the statement of editorial policy PMLA (Publications of the Modern
Language Association) “welcomes essays of interest to those concerned with the
study of language and literature.”
In the October 2012 issue is an article by Judith Hamera
called “The Labors of Michael Jackson: Virtuosity, Deindustrialization, and
Dancing Work.”
It begins this way:
By any
objective criterion, Michael Jackson is the closest thing to a consensual
virtuoso performer that late-twentieth-century popular culture produced. Sales
figures, fans’ affective investments, the acclaim of virtuosic peers, the
foundational contributions and innovation for which he is credited—all attest
to his command of the central paradox intrinsic to virtuosity: the ability to
appear path-breakingly original in a way that is collectively obvious. Further,
if all virtuosity can be described as “precarious excellence,” Jackson’s was
more precarious than most: veering spectacularly from an indefinably
pleasurable surplus (more talented, more charismatic, more “something” than his
brothers) to equally indefinable and untoward excesses (too many strange stunts,
too many surgeries and antics with boys, too much of too much). The narrative
arc of his virtuosity was always already entanged in multiple overlapping
narratives of difference, including raced and gendered histories of American
popular performance, the possibilities and limits of the mutable self, the
bedrock or millstone of family, the pleasures and perils of spectacle, and the
permissions and constraints of celebrity. . . .
Two decades ago I announced that belonging to MLA had become
a moral issue because it no longer had much to do with literature. I stopped
paying my annual dues. As it turns out, I had by then been a member so long
that on my retirement my membership was reinstated without charge. Now I
receive PMLA and get to see, quickly,
what the best writing on language and literature is like nowadays. I feel
compelled to share it with you.
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