I attended three large scholarly conferences this past season: The American Studies Association meeting in Albuquerque (by invitation), The Modern Language Association meeting in San Francisco (by accident), and the American Historical Society’s meeting in New York (by misadventure).
There were extraordinary insights and nervous candidates, “spirited disputes” and nodding heads, plenary sessions a-plenty and ill-considered invitees. There was even a ball. But in my peregrinations I uncovered just one authentic phenomenon, a phrase that was used to excess in more than half of the 15 or so panels that I attended on subjects ranging from ‘zine culture to holocaust memory: “The elephant in the room.”
Of course, I myself never did see an actual elephant inside a room (I did see a mouse in the East Ballroom of the Sheridan New York), which is a pity, as several of these otherwise excellent events may have been profitably enlarged by the presence of truly weighty intellect.
But it occurs to be that there may be a deeper psychological reason for what we might call the “pachyderm turn” in scholarly oratory. Perhaps the elephant inside the room is that there are so few elephants outside the room – or that there are practically no elephants at all, anywhere.
Now, why do you suppose that academia is troubled by thoughts of extinction?
