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• W4285704690 abstract "Introduction: In the Middle John (Jack) D. Kerkering and Michelle Medeiros The spring issue of the Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association is typically edited by one or more guest editors and dedicated to addressing a special topic, and this 2020 spring issue largely follows that precedent. We are two of five guest coeditors of this issue, and we are grateful to our colleagues—Justin Hastings, Chris Kendrick, and Sheila Liming—for their efforts in preparing this issue and for granting us the opportunity to write its introduction. This spring issue deviates slightly from its predecessors, it should be noted at the outset, in being split between two sets of essays, the first organized under the special topic “In the Middle,” and the second reflecting more general concerns. We begin this introduction by offering some preliminary thoughts elaborating upon this special topic of being “in the middle,” and we then present summaries of both the “In the Middle” essays and the additional essays included here. The idea of being in the middle has an obvious relevance to the Midwest Modern Language Association: the MMLA is located in and dedicated to serving the Midwest region, which is itself in the middle of the United States. As the “flyover” space between the east and west US coasts, the Midwest occupies a [End Page 5] middle ground, where “ground” is understood both geospatially and figuratively. The Midwest’s geographic situation, however, is just one way in which the topic of being in the middle applies to the MMLA. A second way becomes apparent when we shift our attention from the first adjective in the association’s name, Midwest, to the third adjective, Language. Because language is essentially a tool for mediation, it is always effectively in the middle, occupying the space between those who use it to transmit information. The MMLA is especially concerned with this mediating function of language and with literature as a distinctive and privileged form of linguistic mediation. But if linguistic mediation joins Midwest geography as a second way for the MMLA to be implicated in the phrase “in the middle,” this does not exhaust the possibilities of thinking about the MMLA’s concern with middle positions. A third way of locating the MMLA in the middle involves the second adjective in its name, Modern, which, as a modifier of Language, identifies the association’s concern specifically with modern languages. In one sense, this declared focus on modern languages sets the concerns of the MMLA apart from classical studies (dead languages, as it were), and this historical orientation would seem to associate the MMLA exclusively with languages of the modern age, likewise distinct from the historically in-the-middle languages of the Middle Ages (a misnomer, of course, since the MMLA—like its MLA parent—warmly welcomes scholarship on medieval languages and literature, as the fourth essay in this issue demonstrates). If this historical sense of modern language evokes modernity’s leading edge, we want to suggest a different sense in which modern, when it modifies language, involves being in the middle. This entails understanding modern to mean not modernity but Modernism, a movement that locates persons in the middle by, as Walter Benn Michaels has prominently argued, ascribing to them an “identity” or (to use the language of Modernism’s successor movement, Postmodernism) attributing to them what is called a “subject position.”1 This third, Modernist version of being in the middle suggests (by contrast to the geographical and communicative versions mentioned above) that to be concerned with modern language— as the MMLA most certainly is—is to be concerned with the self as defined by its position in the middle of language. Modern language, according to this Modernist understanding of it, actually defines selves—rather than merely transmitting [End Page 6] messages between them—because it puts persons in the middle in the following way: instead of language being located in the middle between people (so that they might use it to communicate with each other), people are located in the middle between languages. There are two primary ways in which persons might be understood to be located in this middle space between languages. The..." @default.
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• W4285704690 title "Introduction: In the Middle" @default.
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