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 Berube, one of our
most eloquent and gifted critics, examines the cultural legitimacy
of literary study. In witty, engaging prose, Berube 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."
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