Employment of English. Michael Berube
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in order to smuggle in some version of postcolonial cultural studies on the sly. No doubt it is possible to construct a curriculum of world literature in English around the airline-magazine proposition that because the planet is getting smaller every year, the enterprising professional-manager of the future will have to be acquainted with diverse global cultures if s/he is to open crucial new overseas markets. (Our intro course in the works of Amos Tutuola and Bessie Head will acquaint you with local African customs that will be invaluable for negotiating cultural difference to your advantage!) Nevertheless, it is hard to deny that a curriculum centered around world literature in English would necessarily bump up against some of the concerns of cultural studies, and it is entirely possible that cultural studies could be realized (in an institutional sense) all the more readily by an English department that is determinedly transnational in scope, attuned to and critical of the geopolitical imbalances of power that have made “world literatures in English” a subject available for literary study in the first place. If literary study wants to become more cultural, and cultural studies needs to become more literary, it is hard to imagine a more fitting institutional negotiation of these desires than an English department whose curriculum centers not on the British Isles but on the global ramifications of the world travels of the language first spoken on the British Isles.
There are many reasons I find this revised literary-slash-cultural studies curriculum to be compelling, but one stands out above all—the pragmatic one. At present, the profession does not have much of a public rationale for itself; that lack of a rationale, in turn, is both the condition and the product of the debate over the status of cultural studies. What rationale we have usually relies on our functions as teachers of writing—which is one reason the discipline of literary study can be said to be parasitic on the discipline of writing instruction, as composition theorists and writing studies faculty have been pointing out for some time. The writing-instruction rationale works not only because it is plausible (English departments do try to guarantee a certain kind of access to advanced literacy) but also, crucially, because it is politically reversible: it can be used to justify English as a discipline that fosters critical thinking at the same time it can be used to justify English as a discipline that fosters employability, business competence, and maybe even long-term financial security. As I’ll argue in greater detail in chapter 6, the discipline has always required a rationale that has precisely this kind of political “reversibility”; and as much as I might hate to admit it as a progressive educator, and however much it might pain the liberals and conservatives to my right and the Marxists to my left, the rhetoric of public justification for intellectual work is necessarily a rhetoric of negotiation and double-voicedness—which is not at all the same thing, I hope, as a rhetoric of accommodation and double-talk.
But in the coming years, the writing-instruction rationale may very well leave English high and dry without a base of support for either literary studies or cultural studies. The reason is RCM, which in this context stands not for Royal Canadian Mounties but for Responsibility-Centered Management. RCM, apparently the latest successor to Total Quality Management, Theory Z, PQP, and myriad other business school budget-management techniques of the 1980s and 1990s, happens to be sweeping through the Big Ten universities of late, and the University of Illinois is in the process of converting to it as I write. In one way, RCM is an improvement over the opaque bureaucratic model now in place, for it has allowed us to discover that the budget of the College of Liberal Arts and Sciences contains far less than its share of state money, and that, conversely, agricultural enterprises at Illinois are major beneficiaries of the money LAS is not getting. But in another way, RCM puts the humanities permanently on the defensive: every college, every department, is allowed a kind of block grant the amount of which is fixed by formula, and the college or department can spend that money as it sees fit—for a new faculty member or for a new photocopier or for extended building hours (since everything pertaining to instruction, including the costs of the physical plant, is now the responsibility of the department or college). A department can generate revenue in one of four ways: federal/state support, franchise fees, private grants, or tuition. Since the humanities are not often on the receiving end of major public or private grant funds, and since the humanities, unlike the football team, sell no T-shirts or logo-ridden outerwear, departments like English or French will have to depend almost entirely on enrollment numbers for their financial support. And in English, those enrollment numbers—which will in turn generate the funds necessary for faculty and graduate students—will consist disproportionately of the warm freshman bodies processed by the university’s required writing course.
In other words, in the era of RCM every English course, from Shakespeare’s Great Tragedies and Romances to Que(e)rying the Beat: Gender, Sexuality, and Transgression in Postwar “Hip” Culture, will depend for its existence on the substrate of Intro Writing that keeps the department solvent. Insofar as the existence of English will be enrollment-driven, the debate over literary and cultural studies will inevitably turn into a debate over whether English is “surviving” or “caving in” by offering courses in contemporary culture. But it will be ultimately irrelevant to the real conditions of English, in which both traditional and untraditional forms of textual study will be just two kinds of dessert, more like than unlike, made available only so long as Intro Writing is offering a sufficient number of undergraduates the meat and potatoes of English—the only courses with enough status as cultural capital to induce large numbers of students and taxpayers to believe that they might just be worth the investment of some time and money.
It is in this context, finally, that we need to find a rhetoric of justification for literary study that incorporates some of the concerns of cultural studies and refrains from relying on introductory composition for public support. I do not believe that “contemporary world writing in English” answers all these concerns; surely, if John Guillory is right, the category of “literature” will not regain its prestige and cultural authority simply by adding exotic new writers to its lineup. All the same, I am surprised that so few of my colleagues—aside, obviously, from Reed Way Dasenbrock—have considered “literatures in English” as a possible organizational rubric, particularly since the literary-slash-cultural studies debate so often makes it sound as if we must rob Peter to pay Paul: the more culture, the less literature, and vice versa. “World writing in English,” I think, at least holds out the appropriate prospect of making literary study more cultural, and cultural studies more literary, regardless of how many warm bodies are processed by Composition next semester.
To entertain this conclusion is to understand that in the university setting, disciplinary disputes, even of the most rarified kinds, are inevitably also disputes about relations of intellectual production. What we teach, and where we teach, affects how we hire; how we hire (intellectually as well as economically, from endowed chairs in cultural studies to adjuncts in introductory courses) profoundly affects what we teach. In the chapters that follow, then, I want to keep a dual focus on the employment of English—looking not only at how English can be employed (which will take up the bulk of the second half of this book) but also at the conditions of employment in English. And if we want to get a sense of the contemporary crisis in those conditions, we could not do better, at the present time, than to turn away from the competing claims of literature and culture for a moment—with the proviso that we will return to them shortly, but only after we have visited Yale.
NOTES
1. As Peter Brooks has said in his important essay, “Aesthetics and Ideology—What Happened to Poetics?”
Students are only too willing to short-circuit the aesthetic, and to perform any kind of reading, including the ideological, that you indicate to them. What is more difficult for them—and hence more necessary—is to slow up the work of interpretation, the attempt to turn the text into some other discourse or system, and to consider it as a manifestation of the conventions, constraints and possibilities of literature. . . . Students need in the work on literature to encounter a moment of poetics—a moment in which they are forced to ask not only what the text means, but as well how it means, what its grounds as a meaning-making