Employment of English. Michael Berube
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(each for their own reasons more concerned with return on investment than with Remembrance of Things Past), and, accordingly, traditional defenses of the humanities are no longer attempted by junior faculty or graduate students. And year after year, thousands of new Ph.D.s in the field find that amid the myriad debates over the practices and prospects of the profession, there are no teaching jobs for them, regardless of what they think of the function of criticism at the present time.
What does the future look like for departments of English literature? Does academic literary study even have a future—or should it?
This book is about the intellectual and economic status of the profession of literary study at a time when “employment” and “English” are two of the most volatile and contested terms in the business. Some of the chapters that follow address the current employment conditions in English departments, by analyzing the professional tensions created by a substantially shrunken job market; other chapters address the social functions of literary study and interpretive theory, in English departments and in the broader culture. All of them were written in response to, and are informed by, the profession’s competing (and, in some respects, mutually defining) fiscal and intellectual imperatives—the intersection of which, I argue, both constitutes and mystifies the crisis of reproduction in the modern languages. The Employment of English is thus divided, as its structure suggests, between attention to “employment in English” and the task of “employing English” (or the knowledges produced in English) outside the academy. I do not suggest any easy or predictable connection between these two senses of “employment”: I do not argue that the job market will revive in English if every member of the MIA agrees to preface his or her book with the credo “I love literature, I really do,” nor do I argue that the survival (or demise) of literary study depends on the utility of cultural studies to the professional-managerial class. But I do think literary and cultural studies can serve useful and even politically progressive ends, and I do think their ability to serve those ends is predicated in part on the economic and intellectual health of the profession. If the essays in this book prove moderately convincing, then, I hope that they will call readers to rethink how English—and English teachers—can best be employed.
Janet Lyon is my coauthor in chapter 8, but, of course, Janet Lyon is coauthor of everything I do; this time we’re simply making it official. (Janet and I also need to thank audiences at the University of Chicago and the University of Virginia for their questions and suggestions in response to our tag-team argument in this chapter.) I owe many thanks also to Cary Nelson, Robert Dale Parker, Nina Baym, Claire Chantell, Lori Newcomb, Gerald Graff, Stephen Watt, Laura Kipnis, Jay Dobrutsky, Charles Harris, Curtis White, Michael Sprinker, Jeffrey Williams, Phyllis Franklin, Michael Vazquez, M. Mark, Eric Lott, Michael Denning, Cary Wolfe, Iris Smith, Ralph Cohen, Allen Carey-Webb, Don Hedrick, and Joe Tabbi for soliciting, reading, editing, improving, or just gainsaying various portions of this manuscript. I have relied time and again on the advice, support, and intelligence of a pair of good friends and trusted counselors, the truly cosmopolitan Amanda Anderson and Bruce Robbins. Niko Pfund and Eric Zinner have managed to exceed their reputation as terrific editors; Richard Powers and Mark Rykoff have been intercontinental pillars of strength—the one in Urbana, the other in Moscow. Thanks also to the Humanities Research Board of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign for giving me the time to work on this book, and to the Cafe Kopi in downtown Champaign for being such a wonderful place to work when you’ve got a whole day to yourself. Last but first, Nicholas and James, the two most astonishing and wonderful children I know, have kept me going and buoyed my spirits in innumerable ways I can neither tally nor repay. This book is dedicated to them, and to our Boys’ Summerof ’96, with all my love.
Portions of this book have been previously published. A section of chapter 1 previously appeared as “Aesthetics and the Literal Imagination,” Clio 26.4 (1996): 439–53; chapter 2 appeared in Social Text 49 (1996): 75–95; a shorter version of chapter 3 appeared in the Centennial Review 40.2 (1996): 223–40. Chapter 4, with some modifications, appeared in the minnesota review 43–44 (1996): 131–44; a version of chapter 5, without the epilogue or introduction, appeared in Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37.3 (1996): 188–204. Chapter 7 is a revised version of an essay first published in Advocacy in the Classroom: Problems and Possibilities, ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks (New York: St. Martin’s, 1996): 186–97. Chapter 9 appeared in Transition 69 (1996): 90–98, and chapter 10 was published on-line in the second issue of ebr, the electronic book review, at http://www.altx.com/ebr (1996). I am grateful to these journals, publishers, and websites for permission to reprint, refine, improve, and redact my work here.
Champaign, Illinois
April 1997
1 CULTURAL STUDIES AND CULTURAL CAPITAL
The desire called Cultural Studies is perhaps best approached politically and socially, as the project to constitute a “historic bloc,” rather than theoretically, as the floor plan for a new discipline.
—Fredric Jameson, “On Cultural Studies”
In the past decade, cultural studies has named a desire, a desire Fredric Jameson rightly links to the aspirations of populist intellectuals and the Utopian hopes of the Left. Yet cultural studies has also been presented more “theoretically” (or prosaically) precisely as the floor plan for a new discipline—a transdisciplinary or antidisciplinary discipline that promises to remake the humanities and redraw or erase the traditional boundaries between academic fields. What is arguably the most striking feature of cultural studies in the contemporary landscape, however, is the role it has played in the collective disciplinary imaginary of literary studies: in the latter half of the 1990s, the project called cultural studies has come to name not only a desire but also, and to the same extent, a pervasive fear.
The fear is a fear of dissolution, dissolution of the boundaries, the identity, the quidditas of literary study. After all, cultural studies, according to its own most common self-representations, has neither a methodology nor an object to call its own. It is quite possible, then, to understand the advent of cultural studies in literary studies as the amorphous outcome of three decades of intellectual debate in the field: as the discipline’s notion of “text” expanded to cover a variety of materials formerly considered nonliterary or extraliterary, and as the discipline’s methodologies increased in the number and variety of what once were called “extrinsic” approaches to literature, English departments have become places where a great variety of cultural texts are studied with a host of intellectual tools borrowed and modified from neighboring disciplines like history, philosophy, and anthropology. Its borders permeable on all sides, English has become an intellectual locus where people can study the text of Sir Gawain and the Green Knight from a Christian perspective, the text of the O. J. trial from a Foucauldian perspective, and the text of the Treaty of Versailles from a Marxist perspective. Appropriately enough, while cultural studies is hailed in some quarters as the means by which literary study can intervene in the social world of power, hegemony, and human affairs, cultural studies is decried in other quarters as the means by which a new generation of scholars will eventually eradicate whatever remains distinctive and “literary” about literary study.
In the pages that follow, I will not try to determine, once and for all, the correct formula by which English departments can blend the intrinsic with the extrinsic, the literary with the nonliterary, to greatest advantage. But I think it is a mistake to treat the prospect of cultural studies as a zerosum game, as if scholars and students cannot spend their time and energy analyzing the social ramifications of a