The English department I hoped to join had two tenure-track jobs going that year, and one of them looked straightforward enough. They needed a medievalist, someone to do Chaucer and Beowulf ; though later I learned the position had long been a revolving door, ever since a negative tenure decision had ended up in the courts. But the spot I applied for was a different one, even if it too spoke to a history of trouble, a department that couldn’t decide what it wanted. The ad in the MLA job list named five fields, and candidates had to have two of them. British literature of the Romantic, or modern, or contemporary periods; and then film or, finally, linguistics. I knew almost nothing about film and even less about linguistics; nor was I entirely sure about the difference between the modern and the contemporary. Still, I could cover the twentieth century, and once hired I was also told to learn as much about the movies as I needed to teach them to freshmen. A real film person would have to wait.…