What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce, and how can that criticism be «employed» in the culture at large? In recent years, debates about the role and direction of English departments have mushroomed into a broader controversy over the public legitimacy of literary criticism. At first glance this might seem odd: few taxpayers and legislators care whether the nation's English professors are doing justice to the project of identifying the beautiful and the sublime. But in the context of the legitimation crisis in American higher education, the image of English departments has in fact played a major role in determining public attitudes toward colleges and college faculty. Similarly, the changing economic conditions of universities have prompted many English professors to rethink their relations to their «clients,» asking how literary study can serve the American public. What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce, and how can that criticism be «employed» in the culture at large? In The Employment of English, Michael Bérubé, one of our most eloquent and gifted critics, examines the cultural legitimacy of literary study. In witty, engaging prose, Bérubé asserts that we must situate these questions in a context in which nearly half of all college professors are part-time labor and in which English departments are torn between their traditional mission of defining movements of literary history and protocols of textual interpretation, and their newer tasks of interrogating wider systems of signification under rubrics like «gender,» «hegemony,» «rhetoric,» «textuality» (including film and video), and «culture.» Are these new roles a betrayal of the field's founding principles, in effect a short-sighted sell-out of the discipline? Do they represent little more that an attempt to shore up the status of–and student enrollments in–English? Or are they legitimate objects of literary study, in need of public support? Simultaneously investigating the economic and the intellectual ramifications of current debates, The Employment of English provides the clearest and most condensed account of this controversy to date.
Оглавление
Michael Berube. Employment of English
About NYU Press
THE EMPLOYMENT OF ENGLISH
CONTENTS
PREFACE
1 CULTURAL STUDIES AND CULTURAL CAPITAL
NOTES
2 THE BLESSED OF THE EARTH
NOTES
3 PROFESSIONAL OBLIGATIONS AND ACADEMIC STANDARDS
4 PEER PRESSURE POLITICAL TENSIONS IN THE BEAR MARKET
NOTES
5 STRAIGHT OUTTA NORMAL NONPROFIT FICTION PUBLISHING ON THE MARGINS
EPILOGUE: FC2, THE DALKEY ARCHIVE, AND THE UNIT FOR CONTEMPORARY LITERATURE
NOTES
6 ENGLISH FOR EMPLOYMENT
NOTES
7 PROFESSIONAL ADVOCATES WHEN IS “ADVOCACY” PART OF ONE’S VOCATION?
NOTES
8 FREE SPEECH AND DISCIPLINE THE BOUNDARIES OF THE MULTIVERSITY
NOTES
9 EXTREME PREJUDICE THE COARSENING OF AMERICAN CONSERVATISM
10 CULTURAL CRITICISM AND THE POLITICS OF SELLING OUT
NOTES
WORKS CITED
INDEX
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
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We (I) cannot answer these questions directly, because they admit of no definitive answer; but we (I) can describe their parameters and suggest what’s at stake in trying to grapple with them. Fortunately, the reason the questions are not directly answerable is intimately tied to those parameters: the potential constituencies of the field depend largely on what the discipline of English means institutionally as a subject in college and high school courses, and what English means institutionally is dependent in turn on a congeries of social and economic movements well beyond the control of any one professor, department, or syllabus.
To grasp the relation between the subject matter of the field and its public legitimation, then, we need to inquire into the status of literature as cultural capital, as John Guillory has done in his landmark Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation. Guillory says almost nothing about cultural studies in nomine, but his book does theorize the relative “decline” of literary studies so provocatively as to afford us an explanation of why cultural studies might have become, for much of the discipline, the ideal self-description du jour. For Guillory, the status of literary study is inseparable from the larger social conditions that make literary study either valuable or superfluous as cultural capital:
