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.
