Editor’s Note

Editor's Note Robert P. Marzec MFS Modern Fiction Studies is now in its seventieth year of publication. The idea for MFS, as told to me by my dear friend, colleague, and the journal's previous editor, John N. Duvall, began during a conversation between some of the faculty members of the Purdue English Department, who happened to be out taking the pleasures of the day on a local golf course. I can only imagine what this conversation was like. I expect they were aware that F. R. Leavis's Scrutiny: A Quarterly Review had published its last issue only two years before, in 1953. They no doubt were reflecting on the landscape of literary criticism journals that would have been in existence in 1955—among the most prominent being PMLA, American Literature, South Atlantic Quarterly, MLH, Arizona Quarterly, The Sewanee Review, and Southern Review. Most of the journals we are familiar with today would not have published their first issues until two, three, even four decades later. I am certain they felt a profound absence in the field of literary criticism and felt intellectually compelled to start a scholarly journal that would create what had yet to exist: a stage for publishing cutting edge scholarship devoted to the best works of modern fiction. The journal and the profession underwent significant changes over the course of those many years. For just shy of a quarter of a century John helped spearhead those changes. His passionate intellectual commitment to literary, theoretical, and cultural studies was instrumental in expanding the journal's importance, impact, and scope. The new directions the journal explored during those years reflected and helped generate new scholarly developments in the End Page 203 multidisciplinary field of critical literary studies. In the course of his time as editor, John worked with hundreds of authors and dozens of guest editors, showcasing some of the best critical thought. His insistence that guest editors of special issues do their best to include work by Ph.D. students and young scholars helped create a space for the next generation of scholars to showcase their ability to write on timely and important topics. I'm pleased that John will continue to be involved in the production of the journal as one of its board members. The scholarly landscape of the twenty-first century is profoundly different from the landscape of 1955. Literary studies, and the humanities in general, are in the process of an alarming change, the antecedents of which can be traced back to sequences begun even before the founding of MFS. In the last thirty years, the academy has come to experience the full effect of the neoliberal economic paradigm. Jobs in English and the humanities have been declining since the 1970s, but they have been declining even more so each year since the 2007–2008 recession, with the most severe declines due to the impact of COVID-19: "a 27.45 decline" (Lusin and Hunt)in 2020–2021, "the steepest since the 27.0% decline in 2008–09." The slow erosion of tenure lines and the increasing legislative attacks on tenure add to this, impacting job security, academic freedom, and academic scholarship. In the course of the last four decades neoliberalism has become a defining ontological framework for cultural production, bequeathing us a cultural sphere where creativity is brigaded through the avenues given to us by entrepreneurship and corporate demands. As Bill Readings argued almost thirty years ago, the university has "progressively abandoned its cultural claim" (150) in favor of the corporate-infused idea of "excellence" (12). The social and behavioral sciences are not immune to these developments, and neither are the hard sciences. Over the past thirty years research and development funding for the sciences by the federal government remained on a plateau, whereas business sector funding accelerated, with the share of funding ranging "from 61% to 72% yearly" (National Science Board). The federal government is still the largest source of funding for basic science research, but business sector funding, now nearly four times that of federal, favors applied research and development. Certain STEM disciplines and programs win out over others, and enrollments in these disciplines are growing. Whereas enrollments...