An account of the Modern Language Association's annual meeting in the Washington Post, December 30, 1996:

For years, there have been grumbles from the old guard about what they see as a predominance of presentations on feminism, "queer theory," canon reformation. As one of these fellows put it this weekend under the cloak of anonymity: "It's very difficult to find a session with a paper that even mentions a text."

But what's happening is that the texts that do get mentioned are often by very contemporary multicultural writers. The record for this is probably the paper on "A Special Haunting: Gus Lee's 'Tiger's Tail.' " The novel was published last April. So much for letting the passage of time determine the classics.

"Why should books written in the contemporary moment be deprivileged, seen as less in what they communicate, simply because their authors aren't dead?" Paschal asks. But the paper she delivered here was not quite as breathlessly up-to-the-minute.

Called "Dramatizing the Intellectual," it was about three '60s playwrights. "Everyone has a bad memory about the '60s," she says. "It all blurs—the texts into the events into where you were at the time." Usually, she both reads and, where necessary, performs her talks. This time, suffering from the flu, she merely read.

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