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Author Bérubé, Michael F.

Title Employment of English : theory, jobs, and the future of literary studies / Michael Bérubé.

Imprint New York : NYU Press, 1997.

Copies

Location Call No. OPAC Message Status
 Axe JSTOR Open Ebooks  Electronic Book    ---  Available
Description 1 online resource (272 pages)
text txt rdacontent
computer c rdamedia
online resource cr rdacarrier
data file
Series Cultural Front Series
Cultural front (Series)
Contents Cultural studies and cultural capital -- The blessed of the earth -- Professional obligations and academic standards -- Peer pressure : political tensions in the bear market -- Straight outta normal : nonprofit fiction publishing on the margins -- English for employment -- Professional advocates : when is "advocacy" part of one's vocation? -- Free speech and discipline : the boundaries of the multiversity -- Extreme prejudice : the coarsening of American conservatism -- Cultural criticism and the politics of selling out. Works cited.
Summary 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.
Note Print version record.
Subject English philology -- Study and teaching -- Political aspects -- United States.
English literature -- History and criticism -- Theory, etc.
English language -- Political aspects -- United States.
English teachers -- Employment -- United States.
Interdisciplinary approach in education.
Language and culture -- United States.
Professeurs d'anglais -- Travail -- États-Unis.
Interdisciplinarité en éducation.
Langage et culture -- États-Unis.
SCIENCE -- Astronomy.
English language -- Political aspects
English literature -- Theory, etc.
English philology -- Study and teaching -- Political aspects
English teachers -- Employment
Interdisciplinary approach in education
Language and culture
United States https://id.oclc.org/worldcat/entity/E39PBJtxgQXMWqmjMjjwXRHgrq
Genre/Form Criticism, interpretation, etc.
Other Form: Print version: Bérubé, Michael F. Employment of English : Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies. New York : NYU Press, ©1997 9780814713006
ISBN 9780814723425 (electronic bk.)
081472342X (electronic bk.)
Standard No. AU@ 000055802441
GBVCP 1008656852

 
    
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