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Cultural Front
Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies
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 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.
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 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.
270 pages, Paperback
First published December 1, 1997
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About the author
Michael Bérubé
33 books16 followersMichael Bérubé is the director of the Institute for the Arts and Humanities and the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Penn State University.
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October 13, 2013
The theme for #MLA14 in Chicago is Vulnerable Times (http://president.commons.mla.org/2013...) particularly in the Humanities as a profession. I'm a respondent for one panel, Vulnerability and Survivalism of the Humanities, so I'm reading up on both the recent and "ancient" texts on the topic, and of course Michael Berube's 1998 collection of essays is one of them, with several essays foreshadowing the issues he took up as President of the MLA 14 years later.
I last read this collection when it was first published, when I was a relatively new assistant professor and not quite ready to care about the global concerns of our profession. I had few notes in the book---just a few post its---though I remember distinctly why a particular page had a post it. My concern then was on how to justify the English major.
Fast forward 14 years. I'm not a department chair. This time rereading it as a senior faculty member, immersed in the topic, the essays resonated. Here I was reading it to get an understanding of the context of the issue, and there, on page 68, Berube quotes a writer from 1933 (imagine that year in BOLD) saying basically what any Chronicle essayist of today would say: "Over-supply will only grow greater, even after the return of prosperity to higher education, if the present flood continues to pour out of the graduate schools" (Cedric Fowler).
I last read this collection when it was first published, when I was a relatively new assistant professor and not quite ready to care about the global concerns of our profession. I had few notes in the book---just a few post its---though I remember distinctly why a particular page had a post it. My concern then was on how to justify the English major.
Fast forward 14 years. I'm not a department chair. This time rereading it as a senior faculty member, immersed in the topic, the essays resonated. Here I was reading it to get an understanding of the context of the issue, and there, on page 68, Berube quotes a writer from 1933 (imagine that year in BOLD) saying basically what any Chronicle essayist of today would say: "Over-supply will only grow greater, even after the return of prosperity to higher education, if the present flood continues to pour out of the graduate schools" (Cedric Fowler).
Displaying 1 of 1 review