New MLA Newsletter: "Lifetime Scholarly Achievement Award to W. J. T. Mitchell"--longtime editor of CRITICAL INQUIRY.

 In the 1970s the sloppy and probably senile bully Fredson Bowers used his power to ban me from the handful of journals publishing textual scholarship. I saved the articles and eventually found homes for them. This is from the Introduction to AN OKIE'S RACIAL RECKONINGS:

 In the late 1970s I was gradually being intellectually rehabilitated by younger textual program planners. I gave a talk at the new Association for Documentary Editing conference in Madison, Wisconsin, in October 1981. The next morning the Lafayette scholar Stanley Idzerda came over at breakfast to say, “You blew Greg out of the water.” I had not thought about it that way, but he was right, and I reworked my arguments into the book I was writing for Gerald Graff at Northwestern University Press. While I was drafting the preface for it, the latest issue of Critical Inquiry arrived. This was already by far the most prestigious theoretical journal in the United States. In this issue was an essay by two young theorists, “Against Theory,” though of course they were only theorizing against theory. Would Critical Inquiry even consider something by a textual scholar?

Would I risk delaying the Northwestern book? I thought about it: I had taken a bigger risk in 1959 when I gave up seven years’ seniority as a telegrapher on the railroad, a lifetime job, to go north to an uncertain future. I started writing on 28 June 1982 and mailed the essay to Critical Inquiry on 8 July. The reply from the editor, W. J. T. Mitchell, came on the 19th. He asked me not to change it because he wanted to publish it “in the earliest possible issue of Critical Inquiry.” He concluded with the kindest editorial words I had ever seen: “Let me say again how pleased I am to have received your thoughtful and challenging response to this piece; we will be proud to have it appear in our pages.” Mitchell used it in the June 1983 issue along with several other belated responses (one from a student of mine at USC), then in June 1985 he printed it in book form with still more responses, some of which cited me as saying something I had not said. Okies are frugal: I used my piece as my new preface in the 1984 Northwestern book with one change: at Critical Inquiry someone, momentarily befuddled, had altered one phrase in a way that unintentionally proved my point about editorial tinkering.

HOW LONG AGO WAS THAT? FOUR DECADES, MORE OR LESS. THE FALL 2023 MLA NEWSLETTER REMEMBERS: "MITCHELL SERVED AS EDITOR OF THE RENOWNED JOURNAL CRITICAL INQUIRY FROM 1978 TO 2020." This is the man I already wrote into my Introduction.