In the May 1991 issue of PMLA, then editor John W. Kronik begins his “Editor’s Note” by announcing that the current volume of the journal “has elicited strong responses, praise as well as reproof, even before the year is out” (393). These strong responses pertain to perceived changes in the profession and, by extension, in PMLA that concern the move away from traditional literary study to additionally (or alternatively, for those on the side of “reproof”) engage with texts that exceed the historical, cultural, and generic parameters of established tradition. Kronik counts this move a success, pointing to the May issue’s special topic, Cinema.

Offering a short yet comprehensive account of the history of cinema studies in the United States, Teresa de Lauretis, the coordinator of the special topic, signals the marginal status of film studies in the MLA and the place of film in PMLA. Noting “the relatively small number of submissions for this special topic” (413), de Lauretis suggests that some of the journal’s peer reviewers were not quite suited to assess an important contribution to cinema studies in the pages of the journal, given their unfamiliarity not only with the field but also with how to read film as distinct from or alongside literature. Thus, while Kronik and others expressed enthusiasm over the PMLA’s increasingly capacious scholarly purview, de Lauretis offers a sobering reminder that simply including cinema in a historically literary-specific journal requires an understanding of how this “new world of film scholarship—criticism, history, pedagogy, and theory—was unbounded by the rules of propriety, methodological constraints, disciplinary traditions” (413).

Assessing its content since the Cinema special topic, I believe that the journal has taken de Lauretis’s critiques and provocations seriously. Essays focused on film, such as Robert Brinkley and Steven Youra’s “Tracing Shoah” and Amy Kaplan’s “The Birth of an Empire,” began appearing in the journal in the late 1990s, and essays firmly anchored in cinema studies proliferated in the 2000s, including pieces as wide-ranging as Samuel R. Delany’s “Joanna Russ and D. W. Griffith,” Ian Balfour’s “Adapting to the Image and Resisting It: On Filming Literature and a Possible World for Literary Studies,” Rebecca E. Biron’s “It’s a Living: Hit Men in the Mexican Narco War,” and Benjamin Kohlmann’s “Proletarian Modernism: Film, Literature, Theory.” I would also point to contributions appearing in the PMLA special features Theories and Methodologies (Rey Chow’s “A Phantom Discipline”), The Changing Profession (D. N. Rodowick’s “Dr. Strange Media; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Film Theory”), and Criticism in Translation (“Contre-jour,” by Jacques Derrida and Safaa Fathy, introduced and translated by Max Cavitch).

While there’s cause to celebrate the inclusion of film scholarship in the pages of the journal, I conclude here by insisting on the continued value of cinema studies in PMLA and therefore wish to end with the abidingly invaluable final sentence of de Lauretis’s introduction to the special topic: “The future direction of the journal will depend in part on our willingness to take active roles in PMLA as both contributors and readers and thus to redefine its scholarly focus and reshape its critical standards in a way that addresses the particular concerns of cinema and film scholarship in the context of contemporary critical studies” (418).

Links to the PMLA archive:

Balfour, Ian. “Adapting to the Image and Resisting It: On Filming Literature and a Possible World for Literary Studies.”  PMLA, vol. 125, no. 4, Oct. 2010, pp. 968–76.

Biron, Rebecca E. “It’s a Living: Hit Men in the Mexican Narco War.” PMLA, vol. 127, no. 4, Oct. 2012, pp. 820–34.

Brinkley, Robert, and Steven Youra. “Tracing Shoah.” PMLA, vol. 111, no. 1, Jan. 1996, pp. 108–27.

Chow, Rey. “A Phantom Discipline.” PMLA, vol. 116, no. 5, Oct. 2001, pp. 1386–95.

Delany, Samuel R. “Joanna Russ and D. W. Griffith.” PMLA, vol. 119, no. 3, May 2004, pp. 500–08.

de Lauretis, Teresa. “Introduction: On the Cinema Topic.” PMLA, vol. 106, no. 3, May 1991, pp. 412–18.

Derrida, Jacques, and Safaa Fathy. “Contre-jour.” Introduced and translated by Max Cavitch. PMLA, vol. 131, no. 2, Mar. 2016, pp. 540–51.

Kaplan, Amy. “The Birth of an Empire.” PMLA, vol. 114, no. 5, Oct. 1999, pp. 1068–79.

Kohlmann, Benjamin. “Proletarian Modernism: Film, Literature, Theory.” PMLA, vol. 134, no. 5, Oct. 2019, pp. 1056–75.

Kronik, John W. “Editor’s Note.” PMLA, vol. 106, no. 3, May 1991, pp. 393–94.

Rodowick, D. N. “Dr. Strange Media; or, How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love Film Theory.” PMLA, vol. 116, no. 5, Oct. 2001, pp. 1396–404.