The subject was dirt, or perhaps I should say “Dirt.” It was spring 1996, and I was a newly minted comp-lit Ph.D. candidate thrilled to be taking part in my first academic conference. Okay, it was a conference of grad students organized by my friends in the Harvard English department, but somehow that just made it feel more authentic, like college football compared to professional. I still have the flyer, which reproduces an artsy photo of a dump truck about to discharge its load into a giant quarry. Beneath is the conference slogan, a quote from anthropologist Mary Douglas: “Dirt is matter out of place.”

The list of papers now reads like a parody of the 1990s academy, where the word “transgressive” could still be used unironically as a term of approval. “Tidy Whities: Edmund Wilson’s Inescapable Suburbs.” “Birth of the Sewer(age): Excrement and Urban Identity in the 19th Century.” “Pest Control Strategies and Their Implications for Women.” And, God help me, my own: “Sexuality and Hygiene in Fashion Magazines.” I no longer remember exactly what theories this paper attempted to express—something about the link between the beauty industry’s dual obsessions with personal grooming and sexual mores—and I am grateful, as I look through my files, that it seems to have been lost in the digital shuffle.

I might have forgotten the whole event had the conference not somehow come to the attention of my then-future (and now former) colleague James Wood, who deemed it worthy of an acerbic little “Cambridge Postcard” for TNR. Rereading James’s piece now, I’m surprised to discover that it’s neither as cruel nor as condescending as I remember. Perhaps the fact that he picked out one of my own most unfortunate lines colored my initial impression, although he did me the favor of quoting me anonymously. (Yes, that was me talking about the “iconography of the Tampax.”) The conference, James noted, was a “hit,” with an air of “prosperous jubilance.” The grad students were “smartly dressed and optimistic,” even if two of my friends, Aviva Briefel and Sianne Ngai, were unkindly dismissed as “giggly and squirmy.” Though James would finally admonish the participants for our failure to evaluate the quality of the texts under investigation (or “interrogation,” as I might have said then), he conceded that “over the course of the conference, it was possible to learn new insights about both Philip Larkin and cockroaches.”

But at the time, James’s piece caused no small anguish among the Dirt participants and occasioned an angry letter from Marjorie Garber, the faculty adviser, whom James had described—not inaptly—as “stalking around” the conference room like a “proud pirate.” (The letter, alas, seems not to have been published.) The trouble, I think, was not James’s assertion of the value of classic literature: Nobody was arguing that Judy Blume (the subject of Aviva and Sianne’s paper) ought to replace Austen in the canon. It was his dissent from the general expansionist mood. In his new novel, The Marriage Plot (which I reviewed in the current issue of TNR), Jeffrey Eugenides captures its flavor in his description of Brown English majors in the 1980s, in the thrall of semiotics. We were investigating something few others had found worthy of investigation—and finding pearls among the refuse! We were rectifying sins of omission!

What we were discovering, more seriously, was that the study of literature wasn’t limited to Shakespeare and Dickens; it could illuminate the tokens of our daily lives, from cookbooks to Vogue. This doesn’t seem revelatory anymore—the idea of cultural studies as urban anthropology is now thoroughly enshrined—but it did fifteen years ago. Or at least it did to me, coming out of a traditional undergraduate English program, where I read Shakespeare and Joyce and Woolf with elderly professors who steered me clear of the upstarts practicing “theory.” I arrived at grad school with a bad case of anxiety of influence, convinced that everything had already been said. Dirt, at the very least, was an opportunity to look at something new. To regard this as somehow threatening to the established standards felt unhealthily conservative, not unlike those defenders of marriage who would deny equal rights to gays. Leopold Bloom ultimately has more to offer than Judy Blume, but to analyze Forever does no damage to Ulysses.