Speaking from inside a shiplapped telephone booth, MLA Executive Director and all-around fabulous person Paula Krebs talks here about the difference it makes to understand that all human communication is mediated. Krebs focuses on the types of mediation typical of people (she starts with narrators, but considers police reports, political commentary, and the like), but mentions those other forms of mediation (forms, genres, material substrates) that help make any given communicative act its full intensity and force.
That’s why everyone needs to take a literature course, she says — because literature is a great place to grapple with the refracted nature of all messaging. Not because we then learn not to trust our sources, but so we can build a richer, fuller picture of what they mean: to make better sense of the world.
Bio
Paula M. Krebs is executive director of the Modern Language Association and a leading voice for literary and language studies worldwide.
Krebs previously served as the dean of the College of Humanities and Social Sciences at Bridgewater State University, where she worked closely with the college’s faculty members on strategic planning and increased connections between the campus and the community. She organized a regional consortium of employers, public humanities representatives, and higher education leaders to develop strategies for defining and measuring the postgraduation success of humanities majors. Before arriving at Bridgewater State, she was special assistant to the president for external relations at Wheaton College in Massachusetts, an American Council on Education (ACE) Fellow in the president’s office of the University of Massachusetts, and a professor and department chair at Wheaton. She has also been a regular contributor to higher education publications, including the Chronicle of Higher Education’s blog Vitae.