Employment of English. Michael Berube
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from a wide variety of institutions, in a wide variety of fields from medieval literature to queer theory. I hope I will not flatter my junior colleagues unduly if I insist, contra Cain, that every single one of our recent hires knows how to read a text carefully, and almost every single one of those hires has been extremely successful in the classroom; every semester, the Illinois student newspaper publishes the names of faculty and graduate students who receive particularly strong course evaluations, and since 1990 the list from English has included almost every junior faculty member we’ve hired. They must be doing something right, surely—and because our junior faculty are reviewed by their senior peers every year, I happen to know that they’re quite capable of designing courses and curricula on their own. I mention this not to brag about our good fortune, however; I mention it because even though our department has fared very well in hiring smart theorists who are also good teachers, some of my senior colleagues nevertheless perceive a disjunction between theory and pedagogy, and worry accordingly that the recent “drift” of the department has not been good for undergraduate education. If William Cain’s department is haunted by fears that it is no longer possible to hire a Ph.D. in English who’s a good reader, then, in a much milder manner, so is mine—even though we have no younger faculty who would actually justify this fear.
In my department, in other words, this fear cannot be gauged by measuring the level of happiness or discontent with regard to actually existing junior faculty; it is too nebulous to be focused on any individual person—until we come across that one job candidatewho reads poetry for the “cultural text” but doesn’t know much about prosody, that one post-something theorist whose campus-visit presentation was difficult to understand. Then the discussion begins, and people wonder what other Ph.D. programs must be thinking these days, and how will our undergraduates ever be able to learn from these incomprehensible young turks, and what will become of literary study once we titans no longer roam the earth . . . And after a while I begin to wonder, how long have people harbored these fears, waiting for them to find an object? For ten years the department hires one good undergraduate teacher after another, and most of them compose syllabi full of works of literature (as opposed to, say, videos of the O. J. trial), which they train undergraduates to read closely, and now we have an anti-theory backlash? Apparently a very few of my colleagues had been waiting a long time to vent their fears about the horrible things that are happening to the profession, but hadn’t yet found the chance.
Usually these fears circulate around hiring and tenure, and they are tied as well to the question of whether new hires, in a research university, should be driven by the needs of the undergraduate curriculum (a Miltonist hired for a Miltonist retired) or by the research developments in theory and criticism (a queer theorist hired for an Augustan scholar retired). But on one occasion in the spring of 1994, when the department was charged with rewriting its bylaws (a job I regarded, at the time, as the intellectual equivalent of cleaning out the basement), we suddenly found ourselves in the midst of a substantive discussion over the content of our self-description: was it fair, we wondered, to describe ourselves as offering instruction in English and American literature, or should we say “literature in English,” even though we offer so few courses outside the Anglo-American specsrum? Should we say “literature and criticism” or “literature, criticism, and interpretive theory”? How should we describe our offerings in film? And last but first, should we amend “literary studies” to “literary and cultural studies,” and if so, how shouldwe recognize cultural studies in the curriculum?
These questions become all the more urgent when we turn to graduate study, where, indeed, Illinois has seen a good deal of variety in recent dissertations, and a great deal of speculation about the relation between dissertation topics and jobs. As I’ll explain in more detail in chapter 4, the job market is such that graduate students feel compelled to write extremely specialized dissertations even as they will likely be asked, if and when they get a job, to teach fairly general, unspecialized courses. But even among our graduate students whose work is most specialized and/or most inflected by critical theory, Illinois dissertations have been (like the popular T-shirts) largely literary. One of our most talented students did write a dissertation on British music halls and the emergent discourses of professionalism and propriety at the turn of the century, and got a job only after a number of frustrating years of searching; two of our other students whose work might fall under the cultural studies heading wound up writing on contemporary gay and lesbian literature, in one case, and contemporary anthologies of erotica marketed to women of various ethnic groups, in the other case. The vast majority of the rest of our students have been writing more or less traditional dissertations on novels, poetry, and drama of various periods; some are influenced by new historicism, some by feminism, some by Marxism, some by reception theory. None, so far as I know, are inclined to suspect literature of complicity with the enemy. And as for our new departmental self-description, it now reads like this: “The Department of English is organized to provide instruction in literatures in English, literary theory and criticism, the English language, expository and creative writing, writing studies, English Education, film, cultural studies, and closely related fields.” Those last four words represent all the minor compromises left over after the department had hashed out (in many committee sessions and then in a full faculty meeting) the relative place of linguistics, teacher training, theory, creative writing, business and technical writing, film, and (oh yes) literary and cultural studies; but the most controversial items, which not coincidentally are the focus of my attention here, were “literatures in English” and “cultural studies.”
So much for my contrary local report. For what it’s worth, it may serve as evidence that many departments of English may be troubled in one way or another, but are not quite as absurd as Cain or Posnock suggest. And yet it cannot be denied that the disciplinehas been indelibly changed by the past ten years alone, ever since deconstruction moved from the avant-garde of the field to the lingua franca of the culture, ever since Foucault and Gramsci (via new historicism, queer theory, and cultural studies) became the major discursive options for theoretically inflected cultural analysis. The discipline’s critics are not entirely wrong to suggest that in the present regime, one’s theoretical allegiances can determine one’s critical conclusions: either you believe in the forces of containment and recuperation, in which case it becomes your job to show how the seemingly “liberatory” or “progressive” aspects of the culture ultimately serve the conservative purpose of perpetuating a political order in which “freedom” is but a name for a particularly deceptive form of self-policing, or you believe in hegemony and resistance, in which case it becomes your job to show how the seemingly “repressive” or “reactionary” aspects of the culture ultimately can be made to serve surprisingly (yet reassuringly) liberatory or progressive ends.
In this dispensation it should come as no surprise that literary texts are commonly treated as pieces of cultural evidence rather than as artifacts to be explicated on their own terms (however their “own terms” may be construed). In and of itself, there is nothing wrong with treating literary texts in this way: they undoubtedly are, among other things, important pieces of evidence about the culture(s) from and to which they speak, and any reasonable historicist, feminist, reader-response, or psychoanalytic critic will say so. (Even myth critics, if there are any left on the planet, will agree.) On the other hand, there may indeed be something wrong with forms of cultural analysis that seem to dictate their conclusions in advance of their evidence, and there may indeed be something wrong with analytical procedures that fail to attend to the specific details of what kind of evidence is placed on the table. It may be folly to claim that English departments are places where graduate students hold literature under suspicion, and where jejune junior faculty are incapable of constructing a literature syllabus. Nevertheless, it is possible to ask a skeptical question about English in a different register: is the discipline dominated by reading practices that so determinedly overlook the specificity of textual genres (be they novels, verse satires, Hollywood screwball comedies, sonnets, epistles, mystery plays, manifestos, billboards, or laws) that, for the purposes of those reading practices, professors of English could just as well be reading anything at all?
George Levine’s edited collection Aesthetics and Ideology speaks directly to this question; one might even say that the book is itself,