During and Menand

During (96)

Heyday of English literature now over, replaced by cultural studies, 96

[Dept of English and Film Studies, examples from grad guide:

• teaches and researches in the areas of Canadian Aboriginal/First Nations Literatures and Native American Literatures, with an emphasis on contemporary and emergent writing and critical theory. He also has an interest in digital video production, and teaches screenwriting (Appleford)
• research and teaching interests in the areas of Holocaust Studies; theories of memory, trauma, narrative, and film; disciplinary hermeneutics; Freudian psychoanalysis; and critical theory, cultural studies, and their institutional histories (Ball)
• the surge of catastrophe narrative in the last two decades of mountaineering from the perspective of postmodern ethics, and narratives documenting the advent of women to the world of extremely severe climbing and high altitude mountaineering in confrontation with local and global, foreign and domestic, sexual double standards (Chisholm)

Berlin University founding moment, knowledge for its own sake, 96
-- students possess the love of art, become independent thinkers, 96-7
     [For discussion of this history, see Bill Readings, The University in Ruins (1996).]
Wordsworth an example of anti-academic, self-educated, 97-8
Nationalist impetus to establish English studies, 98
Nietzsche's attack on university culture, 98
Language appropriated by state system, 99
     [cf. Virginia Woolf on language and convention]
Rimbaud's letter to his teacher, "derangement of all the senses," 100
Jarry's subversive play Ubu Roi, 100
Dada: end of high value assigned to literature and culture, 101
Models of humanity upheld by universities being refused, 101
Globalization said to lie behind move from idealist to market-based models of university function, 101
Globalization encourages postcolonial, cultural studies, 102
Cultural studies: new identities and political orientations, 102

Menand (103)

Professionalization of professor in research university, 103 (headnote)
Scientistic notion of accumulating knowledge, disinterestedly, 103
That literary studies involves a special engagement with language (literariness), 104
Disciplinary paradigm dissolving just as universities being strengthened, 104
Criticism from New Criticism on, up to deconstruction, focused on language; no adjustment to literary institution needed, 105
Recognition that literature had no essence after Kuhn and Derrida, 105
Modernist assumptions about art being abandoned, genre boundaries blurred, 105
Professional claims to disinterestedness abandoned, 106
Rise in professionals from 1970s; note the MBA most rapid, 106
Humanities professor: emphasis on publishing, research, doctorate required, 106
Disciplines have lost focus; no longer possess a narrative about their development, 107
Emergence of interdisciplinarity, but this has problems too, 107
Disciplines provide focus of loyalty, as well as basis for hiring, 108
Graff's conflicts self-referential, unsustainable as a focus, 109
Literary history: has largely been done, 109
No reality check on research and publications; should open doors to other arts, ideas, 109

return to Literary Institution

Document prepared April 2nd 2005