"I suggest, therefore, that we try to see the intellectual challenges of contemporary literary study as enriched by rather than in competition with knowledge of the history of literary theory. In the same spirit, I suggest that we cultivate a determined antagonism to disciplinary territorialism, whether in faculty hiring, curricular design, or graduate admissions. While I have numerous complaints about the profession and various critiques of its mode of conducting business, I have not forgotten that literary study truly is a remarkable field whose appeal lies in its ceaseless intellectual delights and debates."
Michael Bérubé is an Edwin Erle Sparks Professor of Literature at Pennsylvania State University, where he teaches American literature, disability studies, and cultural studies. He is the author of several books on cultural studies, disability rights, liberal and conservative politics, and debates in higher education. From 2010 to 2017, he was the director of the Institute for the Arts and Humaniti
"Global capitalism doesn’t necessarily entail a global citizenry dedicated to relentless, free-ranging inquiry; sometimes the two can be positively antithetical — as they are in China, where multinational businesses have little sympathy for demonstrating students or organizing workers."
"Sokal was right to warn us that a certain kind of skepticism toward science could allow for a meeting of the minds between postmodernists and Creationists but was wrong to imagine that such a skepticism need necessarily flow from an attitude of epistemological relativism: as David Albert pointed out, the epistemological and political ducks just don’t always line up that way."
"One signal virtue of teaching undergraduates, then, is that it serves as a powerful reminder that pedagogy should be understood as a means of dissemination rather than a means of reproduction, even — or especially — on those bad days when you are teaching only to the six."
"The rules for literary analysis are the same rules in play for any kind of analysis: mastery of the material. Cogency of supporting evidence. Ability to imagine and rebut salient counterarguments. Extra points for wit and style, points off for mind-numbing clichés, and permanent suspension for borrowing someone else’s argument without proper attribution."
"In foreign affairs, both left and right claim to speak for the conscience of America, but on Iraq the right has no moral clarity and the left has lost its moral compass. This is not a problem for the masters of realpolitik, who have long since inured themselves to the task of doing terrible things to human beings in the course of pursuing the national interest, but it is utterly devastating to those few souls who still dream that the course of human events should be judged — and guided — by principles common to many nations rather than by policies concocted by one. The emergence of the antiwar right, however, may yet hold a lesson for the left, insofar as the antiwar right relies on Brent Scowcroft’s internationalism rather than Pat Buchanan’s isolationism: the challenge clearly is to learn how to be strenuously anti-imperialist without being indiscriminately antiwar. It is a lesson the American left has never had to learn — until now."
"The paradox is that university life can be both terrific and troubling for parents and children alike: the workplace environment is casual and accommodating on the one hand and clueless and hostile on the other. Usually all at the same time."