HUIN305: Week 10

Hello all:

Just a reminder that HUIN305 will be meeting tomorrow, Wednesday March 4, at 10:15.

A number of you are preparing literature reviews and/or annotated bibliographies. Please send these and any and all new material that you have concerning the progress you're making on your projects out by this evening.

I'd like tomorrow's session to run like a true graduate seminar, i.e. with everyone providing comments on and constructive criticism about each other's projects.

For that to happen, you'll need to get your documents circulating in time for everyone to read them. In your email you might include questions or ideas that you'd like us to take up during the meeting. If there are materials to download from the course "My Space" that can't be send as attachments, let us know.

Also, I encourage you to familiarize yourself with the Humanities, Arts, Science, and Technology Advanced Collaboratory (HASTAC) website and group. Take a look at some of the project descriptions posted on the site; they might provide useful models or inspiration. As you write your proposals and eventually your research, you might think of this scholarly community, and/or some of the digital humanities sub-groups affiliated with the site, as one of your target audiences. In fact, you might be interested in joining the organization and, once your practical project is nearly compete, posting information about it there.

I suspect the HASTAC network would be pleased to have more members from outside North America, and through the forum you might just make some valuable professional contacts.

Finally, please bring an extra hard copy of your paper for me to keep.

See you in the a.m.

French Theory in America

TOPICS IN LITERATURE, CRITICISM & THEORY:
FRENCH THEORY IN AMERICA

Aim:
From the late sixties to the end of the twentieth century, a disparate group of French intellectuals greatly influenced Anglo-American arts and culture. Once imported to and disseminated in US universities, philosophical ideas and writing by figures such as Michel Foucault, Jacques Derrida, Roland Barthes, Julia Kristeva, Jean-Francois Lyotard, Jean Baudrillard, Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari came to exert tremendous force both inside and out of the American academy. Rather quickly, a diverse and radical body of thinking was codified, first as intellectual movements (e.g., structuralism, deconstruction, poststructuralism) and eventually as simply “French theory.”

This course studies the reception of French theory in the US. Our aim will be to understand why and how it became such an integral part of American culture, shaping academic disciplines (especially literary theory, cultural studies, and media studies), sociocultural trends (e.g., identity politics, new historicism), and artistic practices (minimalism, L=A=N=G=U=A=G=E poetry, surfiction).

In assessing French theory’s American influence, we will consider how it has been interpreted differently in the US and France, trace iterations of significant concepts (différance, discipline, abjection, simulation, minor literature, etc.), and evaluate the inflection of these concepts by US-based literary scholars (e.g., Edward Said, Judith Butler, Stanley Fish, Henry Louis Gates Jr., Walter Benn Michaels, J Hillis Miller, Gayatri Spivak, Fredric Jameson) and writers (Charles Bernstein, Raymond Federman, Shelley Jackson, Lynne Tillman, Gerald Vizenor, David Foster Wallace, Curtis White). Not least, we will speculate about theory’s relevance to twenty-first-century praxes.

Teaching Method: Short lecture followed by moderated seminar discussions and weekly presentations by seminar participants.

Requirements: One class presentation (5 pages), annotated bibliography (10–12 secondary sources), research paper (12–16 pages).

Reading List:
Cusset, Francois. French Theory: How Foucault, Derrida, Deleuze & Co. Transformed the Intellectual Life of the United States. Trans. Jeff Fort. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota Press, 2008.

Deleuze, Gilles. Essays Critical and Clinical. Trans. Daniel W. Smith and Michael A. Greco. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1997.

Derrida, Jacques. Limited Inc. Evanston, IL: Northwestern UP, 1988.

Foucault, Michel. The Foucault Reader. Ed. Paul Rainbow. New York: Pantheon, 1984.

Harari, Josué, ed. Textual Strategies: Perspectives in Post-Structuralist Criticism. Ithaca: Cornell UP, 1979.

Leitch, Vincent, eds. The Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. New York: Norton, 2001.

An Old School Professor Asks Students to Think

The Thinker is an inspiring profile of a philosopher at Auburn University who has resisted the imperative to instrumentalize higher education, which is undermining humanities departments and cheapening the value of college degrees. A true practitioner of the liberal arts, Professor Jolley challenges his students, first-year undergraduates included, to think through difficult philosophical problems with him. In the process, his best students learn to do philosophy, which they come to appreciate and understand as a way of living, curiously, in the world, rather than just another subject to be mastered on the way to a degree.

Summer Reading (ENGL 105: English & American Fiction)

A list of what we'll be reading in my English and American Fiction course this summer: Books for ENGL 105, Summer 2007

Writing and Resistance: A Response to Coetzee

It is naive to think that writing is a simple two-stage process: first you decide what you want to say, then you say it. On the contrary, as all of us know, you write because you do not know what you want to say ... Writing, then, involves an interplay between the push into the future that takes you to the blank page in the first place, and a resistance. Part of that resistance is psychic, but part is also an automatism built into language: the tendency of words to call up other words, to fall into patterns that keep propogating themselves. Out of that interplay emerges, if you are luckly, what you recognize or hope to recognize as the true.

(J.M. Coetzee, Doubling the Point).

Coetzee's deconstructive account of the writing process directs attention to the materiality of language, the linguistic automatism that is a function of language's materiality, and the writer's stuggle to harness the autopoetic energies inherent to language during the act of writing. In this way, his remarks help explain why writing (and especially teaching composition) can be so challenging.

Writing, as George W. Bush might put it, is "hard work." The successful writer (and here I will resist constructing an extended metaphor of writing as war) must be prepated to encounter opposition and resistance throughout the writing process. Novice writers, and some experienced ones who forget what they've learned, tend to approach writing naively, as the direct expression of a preformed thought or idea.

However, as thoughtful and honest writers will tell you, writing - with a few instrumentalized exceptions (such as, perhaps, writing a grocery list, though Derrida's theory of differance makes even this act of writing more complex that it would initially appear) - is rarely, if ever, so straightforward a procedure.

If, to deploy a familiar trope, writing is a journey towards the truth, or at least some sort of knowledge, the route that the writer must take is a circuitous one in which the available pathways are not immediately recongizable. Indeed, the writer will frequently be disoriented and discover that what appeared to be the safest and most direct path is filled with obstacles that necessiate a rerouting.

Writing is a matter of resistances. Like thinking, or cognition, with which it is virtually synonymous, writing is a recursive process. As we write, the very transcription and inscription of our thoughts, which do not exist independent of the linguistic forms, words, in which they are materialized, makes it possible for thinking to continue into the future.

Coetzee characterizes this compositional proces as a kind of "interplay" during which linguistic pattern formation in which words come to cohere into units that are positioned or arranged in a recognizable and thus sensible and coherent shape. Coetzee's account of writing as a kind of linguistic pattern formation identifies two types of resistance with which the writer struggles.

Both of these types of resistance include an affective dimension.

The first type of resistance is "psychic," Coetzee's term for the psychological obstacles - doubts about one's authority, anxieties about being original, clever, aversions to exposing oneself to the gaze of the Other, etc. - that can generate writer's block and impede the process of composition. Here, then, the affective dimension involves the emotions the writer experiences when facing the space of writing, figured by Coetzee as the blank page.

Lacan and Zizek, not to mention numerous literary writers who offer testimony to the anguish and suffering (jouissance) involved in writing, remind us that these negative affects are a necessary component of writing. The writer must 'tarry with the negative' and work through these affects, which, particularly if one is excessively egocentrically oriented, can become debilitating obstacles. However, when the writer risks becoming a dupe of language and recognizes the impossibility of not falling into error, nonsense, or madness (the terrifying "night of the world" in which relations to the other are literally severed), these negative affects can shift valence. The extreme anguish writers feel when tarrying with the desubjectifying and inhuman force of language can morph abruptly into ecstatic jouissance.

Such shifts occur when these negative affects are not registered immediately as signs of one's personal failure but are instead posited externally as an element immanent to the act of writing. When looked at awry, from a dialectical perspective, these affects appear as obstacles that create productive resistances that exercise and test the writer's constitution or will to power in a way that ultimately makes him or her stronger. In this way the affects can act as catalysts, not obstacles.

The second type of resistance is material. It has to do with the machinic quality of words, which are always and already endowed with significance and meaning that is beyond our control. The connotative and denotative force inherent to language puts constraints on the writer's ability to make use use of them, to shape them into sensible utterances, the meaning of which is fixed within a particular composition.

In another post I will say more about the affective aspects of this second type of resistance.

Commodify your Dissent and Conformity

Here's an informal, but effective analysis of the convoluted ideological messages conveyed in the current "This is Our Country" Chevy Truck. I'd refrain from describing it as a work of deconstruction, but I do want my American Literature and American Culture students, who read a piece by Rosa Parks earlier in the semester and are currently in the process of learning about various conceptions of ideology, to ask themselves "Can Rosa Parks Sell Pickup Trucks?"

Alternative Interrogation Techniques

Students in my American Literature and Culture class are busy compiling examples of various tropes, figures of speech, that turn up in their readings, both novels and nonfiction. Although I'm confident that most have a fairly firm grasp on euphemism, I'll have to refer them to the following article by Andrew Sullivan to demonstrate why the ability to identify tropes is no purely 'academic' exercise.

Sullivan's article addresses the ongoing debates in the United States regarding the legality of torturing terror suspects by drawing attention to the way ethical considerations have been circumvented. The torture debates have degenerated into battles over the Bush Administration's efforts to redescribe "torture" as "alternative interrogation techniques," "coercive interrogation," or "harsh interrogation methods." Could we find a more pressing, or dangerous, instance of euphemism?

In general, I'm no fan of Sullivan, a gay Republican whose endorsement of the GOP's homophobic platform seems awfully opportunistic and cowardly, but it's refreshing to hear a conservative citing Orwell's "Politics and the English Language" in opposition to Bushco's use of doublespeak. In contrast to the obfuscating rhetoric on torture issued from the likes of Rumsfeld and Bush, Sullivan's argument is straightforward: Torture by any other name is just as vile.

The problem is that the very act of debating publicly whether, in some instances, torture should be tolerated and permitted changes the parameters of what actions are permissible in liberal-democratic states. The unthinkable--state-sponsored torture--has now become a viable option.

Now that the Bushies have effectively legitimized torture, it will require a concerted political effort to make the practice taboo again. This effort will require people from across the political spectrum to collaborate. Most likely, in a familiar political paradox, in the United States it will be a conservative politician like John McCain, who has acquired a certain kind of political capital that will prevent him from being branded as being "soft on terror," that will be most effective in leading the opposition to state-sponsored torture.

Damned to Fame

Leland de la Durantaye comments on Samuel Beckett's cult of impersonality and the surprisingly enduring popularity of Beckett's art of subtraction.

File a copy for students to read the next time I teach Beckett.

The $2.97 Gallon of Pickles, Sam Walton's Neoliberal Reality

In my English and American Fiction class this semester, one of the ideas we're returning to regularly is the claim - often identified with postmodern, or post-Nietzschean theory - that 'reality' (as opposed to the Real) is inherently fictional. Variations of this claim - which understandably sounds rather esoteric to some ears, a piece of New Age obscurantism - I try to explain informs the way many people go about their business in a neoliberal world in which The Market is revered and feared like Zeus or some other fickle Greek god.

The following quote, from "The Price of Pickles" an essay by John Lanchester on Wal-Mart
illustrates how economic fictions shape our reality in mundane and profane ways:

Wal-Mart is about price, so much so that it has created a reification of cheapness, in which cheapness becomes a mystical quality, a Ding an sich or fundamental essence, separate from questions about utility or practicality or how on earth a thing can be put on sale for such a price. Charles Fishman, in his punchy and valuable book The Wal-Mart Effect, cites the example of Vlasic pickles, the most popular brand in the US. Wal-Mart talked Vlasic into pricing the pickles so that a gallon jar was on sale for $2.97. That is a bizarre, surreal price for a gallon of pickled cucumbers; no one had ever seen such a jar outside a deli, and no one had any real use for it, since even if you’re a pickleholic you’ll only manage to eat about a quarter of a gallon before the remaining pickles go mouldy. It had never occurred to anybody that there was such a thing as a market for a gallon jar of pickles. Even so, priced at $2.97, there was something so magnetising about this Brobdignagian vat of pickles – something so alluring about the way it embodied the Platonic ideal of cheapness, in and for itself – that Wal-Mart was soon selling 200,000 gallons of pickles a week. The ‘scary part of the Vlasic story’, as Fishman points out, is that:

The market didn’t create the $2.97 gallon of pickles, nor did waning customer demand or a wild abundance of cucumbers. Wal-Mart created the $2.97 gallon jar of pickles. The price – a number that is a critical piece of information to buyers, sellers and competitors about the state of the pickle market – the price was a lie. It was unrelated to either the supply of cucumbers or the demand for pickles. The price was a fiction imposed on the pickle market in Bentonville. Consumers saw a bargain; Vlasic saw no way out. Both were responding not to real market forces, but to a pickle price gimmick imposed by Wal-Mart as a way of making a statement.

Wal-Mart is so big and so powerful that it is in effect defining its own reality – creating its own products, and a market for them, by sheer act of will.

And the Wal-Mart reality, as critics have explained, is all about maximizing profits, which often means that people, particularly workers, and the environment must be exploited.

Recombinant Culture and Literary Remixes

In a short essay for Wired magazine, William Gibson characterizes our current historical moment as "a peculiar junction, one in which the record (an object) and the recombinant (a process) still, however briefly, coexist," although the latter is rapidly becoming the cultural dominant. Gibson's observation and his corresponding claim that our new recombinant technologies are redefining what it means to be human are, of course, familar assertions in postmodern and media studies.

I'm archiving this piece for future use in the classroom because it concisely introduces several ideas, not all of which I agree with entirely, in no-bullshit prose: (1) Burroughs' innovative cut-up method differs from plagiarism (2) from the perspective of a recombinant artist "[m]eaning...seemed a matter of adjacent data," and (3) the notion of copyright and intellectual property that developed in the 20th-century has become obsolete, a burden to new creativity.

Thanks largely to arguments presented by Walter Benn Michaels, I've come to believe that idea #2 is wrong because it confuses intentional meaning with signifying effects (see his The Shape of the Signifier). And as Burroughs' writing about his use of the cut-up method makes clear, the juxtapositioning and arranging different texts (or data) is an intentional act that is not purely random.

Spring Teaching at UIC

There's almost a month left in the Fall semester, but I've been planning for my Spring courses for some time now. For those not in the bidness, you'd be amazed at how much time goes into drafting these course descriptions. At least for those of us who are relatively young and new to the game.

The sad truth of the matter is that for 100-level courses, many students enroll blindly, taking a class simply because it fulfills a gen-ed requirement and is available. Nonetheless, I generally expend a great deal of intellectual energy crafting my descriptions, in part because it helps me to narrow my focus, both in the classroom and in my research and writing.

Here, then, are the two courses I'll be teaching next semester.

Engl 105: English and American Fiction (Call #s 14334, 20942)
Eric Dean Rasmussen
11:00 AM-12:15 PM TR / 307 SH

Narrative, Textuality, Subjectivity: The Transatlantic Postmodern Novel from 1950 to 2001

A sampling of some of the most innovative and critically acclaimed novels written in the English language during the last half century, with a focus on (1) the narrative techniques deployed in these texts and (2) the questions about subjectivity these texts raise. We will explore, in depth, how five exemplary modern/postmodern novels play with readers’ expectations, foreground the extent to which our experience of reality is thoroughly textualized, and—through their narrative experiments—suggest different models (grammatical, politico-legal, and philosophical) of the human subject.

This class will help you understand what narratives are, how they are constructed, how narratives act upon us and vice versa, how narratives are transmitted, how a narrative’s significance (though not its meaning) can change when its medium or cultural context changes, and why all these topics are so relevant to our sense of selfhood. By the end of this class, you will be smarter, more thoughtful readers, better equipped to identify and respond to the ways in which our subjectivities emerge in, through, and because of our engagement with language.

Beckett, Samuel. Molloy, Malone Dies, The Unnamable. 1951–3. New York: Grove, 1995.

Burgess, Anthony. A Clockwork Orange. 1962. New York: W. W. Norton, 2004.

DeLillo, Don. The Body Artist. New York: Scribner, 2001.

Fowles, John. The French Lieutenant’s Woman. 1969. Boston: Little, Brown, 1998.

Hall, Donald. Subjectivity. New York: Routledge, 2004.

Hughes, George. Reading Novels. Nashville: Vanderbilt UP, 2002.

Nabokov, Vladimir. The Annotated Lolita. New York: Vintage 1991.

Pifer, Ellen, ed. Vladimir Nabokov’s Lolita: A Casebook. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Students should read Nabokov’s The Annotated Lolita over the Christmas break.

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Engl 109 : American Literature and American Culture (Call # 14338)
Eric Dean Rasmussen
12:30-01:45 PM TR / 316 SH

Novel Ideologies: Mapping the Social and Political in Postmodern American Literature

This reading-intensive course offers an introduction to postmodern American prose literature with a focus on four acclaimed authors—Don DeLillo, Joan Didion, E.L. Doctorow and Thomas Pynchon. These authors share a fascination with post-WWII cultural paranoia and political hysteria and an interest in interrogating various American ideologies in their writings. We will read both fiction and non-fiction by these authors, aiming to discern how their texts assert or imply positions about politicized issues: how meaningful or significant communication occurs, how knowledge and power are interrelated, how beliefs and values are transmitted, and how we can exert our agency given various systemic constraints.

If you’re uncertain what is meant by ‘ideology,’ that’s fine. One of our primary goals will be to understand different uses of this loaded term and to recognize the ways in which we produce, consume, and transmit ideologies all our lives. The following literary and theoretical texts will be our guides in this endeavor.

Belsey, Catherine. Poststructuralism: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2002.

DeLillo, Don. Underworld. New York: Scribner, 1997.

Didion, Joan. Vintage Didion. New York: Vintage, 2004.

Doctorow, E.L. The Book of Daniel. 1971. New York: Plume, 1996.

Doctorow, E.L. Reporting the Universe. 2003. Cambridge, MA: Harvard UP, 2004.

Freeden, Michael. Ideology: A Very Short Introduction. New York: Oxford UP, 2003.

Pynchon, Thomas. The Crying of Lot 49. 1965. New York: Harper Perennial, 1986.

Students should read the first 272 pages of Underworld over the holiday break.

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Yes, I know that the bit about reading over the holiday break is wishful thinking, but there might be a couple serious students who will dig in early.

Tips on Teaching Lolita

The following remarks were originally posted on Scott Rettberg's blog in response to comments he made about teaching Lolita this semester. Scott's reflections were prompted, in part, by his reading of Mark Edmunson's essay "All Entertainment, All the Time."

Scott,

I taught Lolita last spring and experienced the same difficulty you describe: getting the students to get beyond their impulse to condemn Humbert Humbert's reprehensible behavior and to reflect upon Nabokov's artistry.

Here’s what I found worked well to overcome this obstacle.

1. Read the annotated edition. We read The Annotated Lolita, edited by Alfred Appel Jr. Appel's introductory essay and his useful annotations cue students in to things such as Nabokov's intricate wordplay. This edition costs a bit more, but is worth every penny.

2. Beware the Morality Fallacy. Explaining why reading literature for a moral lesson is lame. Every semester, I typically give a lecture in which I explain what I like to call the 'morality fallacy,' which is based on the premise that art and literature differ from a sermon and that it is a critical error to evaluate art or literature as though they were merely models for right, proper or 'politically correct behavior.

3. Explain your affective reaction. I asked students to reflect carefully upon their feelings toward Humbert. In which passages did they find him most reprehensible, and where did they find themselves feeling some pity for him? After pinpointing some of these passages, including, of course, the account of the first seduction, we discussed how the narrative strategies Nabokov deployed via his unreliable, pompous, but nonetheless rhetorically savvy narrator, encouraged particular emotional or affective responses.

4. Read smart literary criticism. We read several essays from Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook, edited by Ellen Pifer that do a great job of addressing issues such as (1) how the novel can be read as a romance in a parodic mode ("Parody and Authenticity in Lolita) (2) why Humbert is only partially successful in his rhetorical manipulations ("The Art of Persuasion in Lolita") and (3) how Humbert's attempts at self-exoneration lead him to denigrate America ("The Americanization of Humbert Humbert").

5. Screen both versions of the film. We watched both Stanley Kubrick's and Adrian Lyne's film versions of Lolita and discussed how the two movies approached the novel differently, particularly in the extent and manner in which each film leads us to identify with Humbert. I argued that Kubrick treated the book as a black comedy and emphasized the outrageous humor in the novel, whereas Lyne emphasized the more melodramatic aspects of the narrative. The result, as I saw it, was that Lyne's Humbert, played by Jeremy Irons, seemed more authentic and elicited more pathos from viewers, due in part to his awkwardness, whereas Kubrick's Humbert, played by James Mason, emphasized the cultivated aloof, somewhat arrogant European. I highly recommend screening both versions, in part because doing so will demonstrate how time constraints and the need for a certain cinematographic consistency require filmmakers to adhere more strictly to one genre than novelists, who are more free to vary the 'tone' of their work.

6. Discuss Lolita as a popular culture phenomenon. We also read Michael Wood's essay "Revisiting Lolita (also in Vladimir Nabokov's Lolita: A Casebook) which was written as a response to the 1997 media controversy surrounding Adrian Lyne’s film. Wood addresses important issues including how filmic constraints are both limiting and enabling when remediating a work of fiction into a film and how the term "Lolita" has entered our vocabulary and why the colloquial use of the term signifies something vastly different from Humbert and Nabokov's use of the term.

7. Let the master have his say. Finally, before beginning the novel, I familiarized students with some of Nabokov’s views on aesthetics and literature.

• “I do not give a damn for public morals, in America or elsewhere.”

• “Now if we want to pin down poshlost in contemporary writing, we must look for it in Freudian symbolism, moth-eaten mythologies, social comment, humanistic messages, political allegories, overconcern with class or race, and the journalistic generalities we all know.”

• “Let me suggest that the very term ‘everyday reality’ is utterly static since it presupposes a situation that is permanently observable, essentially objective, and universally known.”

I look forward to hearing or reading more about your students’ responses to Lolita. Good luck!

Here We Are Now, Entertain Us

I'm taking the liberty of posting the following essay All Entertainment All the Time by Mark Edmunson, which pinpoints many of the challenges facing professors in the contemporary university, particularly professors who teach in the humanities.

The following essay is excerpted from Why Read? by Mark Edmunson, which was published in September by Bloomsbury.

I can date my sense that something was going badly wrong in my own teaching to a particular event. It took place on evaluation day in a class I was giving on the works of Sigmund Freud. The class met twice a week, late in the afternoon, and the students, about fifty undergraduates, tended to drag in and slump into their chairs looking slightly disconsolate, waiting for a jump start. To get the discussion moving, I often provided a joke, an anecdote, an amusing query. When you were a child, I had asked a few weeks before, were your Halloween costumes id costumes, superego costumes, or ego costumes? Were you monsters—creatures from the black lagoon, vampires and werewolves? Were you Wonder Women and Supermen? Or were you something in between? It often took this sort of thing to raise them from the habitual torpor.

But today, evaluation day, they were full of life. As I passed out the assessment forms, a buzz rose up in the room. Today they were writing their course evaluations; their evaluations of Freud, their evaluations of me. They were pitched into high gear. As I hurried from the room, I looked over my shoulder to see them scribbling away like the devil’s auditors. They were writing furiously, even the ones who struggled to squeeze out their papers and journal entries word by word.

But why was I distressed, bolting out the door of my classroom, where I usually held easy sway? Chances were that the evaluations would be much like what they had been in the past: They’d be just fine. And in fact, they were. I was commended for being “interesting,” and complimented for my relaxed and tolerant ways; my sense of humor and capacity to connect the material we were studying with contemporary culture came in for praise.

In many ways, I was grateful for the evaluations, as I always had been, just as I’m grateful for the chance to teach in an excellent university surrounded everywhere with very bright people. But as I ran from that classroom, full of anxious intimations, and then later as I sat to read the reports, I began to feel that there was something wrong. There was an undercurrent to the whole process I didn’t like. I was disturbed by the evaluation forms themselves with their number ratings (“What is your ranking of the instructor?—1, 2, 3, 4 or 5") which called to mind the sheets they circulate after a TV pilot plays to the test audience in Burbank. Nor did I like the image of myself that emerged—a figure of learned but humorous detachment, laid-back, easygoing, cool. But most of all, I was disturbed by the attitude of calm consumer expertise that pervaded the responses. I was put off by the serenely implicit belief that the function of Freud—or, as I’d seen it expressed on other forms, in other classes, the function of Shakespeare, of Wordsworth or of Blake—was diversion and entertainment. “Edmundson has done a fantastic job,” said one reviewer, “of presenting this difficult, important and controversial material in an enjoyable and approachable way.”

Enjoyable: I enjoyed the teacher. I enjoyed the reading. Enjoyed the course. It was pleasurable, diverting, part of the culture of readily accessible, manufactured bliss: the culture of Total Entertainment All the Time.

As I read the reviews, I thought of a story I’d heard about a Columbia University instructor who issued a two-part question at the end of his literature course. Part one: What book in the course did you most dislike; part two: What flaws of intellect or character does that dislike point up in you? The hand that framed those questions may have been slightly heavy. But at least it compelled the students to see intellectual work as confrontation between two people, reader and author, where the stakes mattered. The Columbia students were asked to relate the quality of an encounter, not rate the action as though it had unfolded across the big screen. A form of media connoisseurship was what my students took as their natural right.

But why exactly were they describing the Oedipus complex and the death drive as interesting and enjoyable to contemplate? Why were they staring into the abyss, as Lionel Trilling once described his own students as having done, and commending it for being a singularly dark and fascinatingly contoured abyss, one sure to survive as an object of edifying contemplation for years to come? Why is the great confrontation—the rugged battle of fate where strength is born, to recall Emerson—so conspicuously missing? Why hadn’t anyone been changed by my course?

To that question, I began to compound an answer. We Americans live in a consumer culture, and it does not stop short at the university’s walls. University culture, like American culture at large, is ever more devoted to consumption and entertainment, to the using and using up of goods and images. We Americans are six percent of the world’s population: We use a quarter of its oil; we gorge while others go hungry; we consume everything with a vengeance and then we produce movies and TV shows and ads to celebrate the whole consumer loop. We make it—or we appropriate it—we “enjoy” it and we burn it up, pretty much whatever “it” is. For someone coming of age in America now, I thought, there are few available alternatives to the consumer worldview. Students didn’t ask for it much less create it, but they brought a consumer Weltanschauung to school, where it exerted a potent influence.

The students who enter my classes on day one are generally devotees of spectatorship and of consumer-cool. Whether they’re sorority-fraternity denizens, piercer-tattooers, gay or straight, black or white, they are, nearly across the board, very, very self-contained. On good days, there’s a light, appealing glow; on bad days, shuffling disgruntlement. But there is little fire, little force of spirit or mind in evidence.

More and more, we Americans like to watch (and not to do). In fact watching is our ultimate addiction. My students were the progeny of two hundred available cable channels and omnipresent Blockbuster outlets. They grew up with their noses pressed against the window of that second spectral world that spins parallel to our own, the World Wide Web. There they met life at second or third hand, peering eagerly, taking in the passing show, but staying remote, apparently untouched by it. So conditioned, they found it almost natural to come at the rest of life with a sense of aristocratic expectation: “What have you to show me that I haven’t yet seen?”

But with this remove comes timidity, a fear of being directly confronted. There’s an anxiety at having to face life firsthand. (The way the word “like” punctuates students’ speech—“I was like really late for like class”—indicates a discomfort with immediate experience and wish to maintain distance, to live in a simulation.) These students were, I thought, inclined to be both lordly and afraid.

The classroom atmosphere they most treasured was relaxed, laid-back, cool. The teacher should never get exercised about anything, on pain of being written off as a buffoon. Nor should she create an atmosphere of vital contention, where students lost their composure, spoke out, became passionate, expressed their deeper thoughts and fears, or did anything that might cause embarrassment. Embarrassment was the worst thing that could befall one; it must be avoided at whatever cost.

Early on, I had been a reader of Marshall McLuhan, and I was reminded of his hypothesis that the media on which we as a culture have become dependent are themselves cool. TV, which seemed on the point of demise, so absurd had it become to the culture of the late sixties, rules again. To disdain TV now is bad form; it signifies that you take yourself far too seriously. TV is a tranquilizing medium, a soporific, inducing in its devotees a light narcosis. It reduces anxiety, steadies and quiets the nerves. But also deadens. Like every narcotic, it will be consumed in certain doses, produce something like a hangover, the habitual watchers’ irritable languor that persists after the TV is off. It’s been said that the illusion of knowing and control that heroin engenders isn’t entirely unlike the TV consumer’s habitual smug-torpor, and that seems about right.

Those who appeal most on TV over the long haul are low-key and nonassertive. Enthusiasm quickly looks absurd. The form of character that’s most ingratiating on the tube, that’s most in tune with the medium itself, is laid-back, tranquil, self-contained, and self-assured. The news anchor, the talk-show host, the announcer, the late-night favorite—all are prone to display a sure sense of human nature, avoidance of illusion, reliance on timing and strategy rather than on aggressiveness or inspiration. With such figures, the viewer is invited to identify. On what’s called reality TV, on game shows, quiz shows, inane contests, we see people behaving absurdly, outraging the cool medium with their firework personalities. Against such excess the audience defines itself as wordly, laid-back, and wise.

Is there also a financial side to the culture of cool? I believed that I saw as much. A cool youth culture is a marketing bonanza for producers of right products, who do all they can to enlarge that culture and keep it humming. The Internet, TV, and magazines teem with what I came to think of as persona ads, ads for Nikes and Reeboks, and Jeeps and Blazers that don’t so much endorse the powers of the product per se as show you what sort of person you’ll inevitably become once you’ve acquired it. The Jeep ad that featured hip outdoorsy kids flinging a Frisbee from mountain top to mountaintop wasn’t so much about what Jeeps can do as it was about the kind of people who own them: vast, beautiful creatures, with godlike prowess and childlike tastes. Buy a Jeep and be one with them. The ad by itself is of little consequence, but expand its message exponentially and you have the central thrust of postmillennial consumer culture: buy in order to be. Watch (coolly) so as to learn how to be worthy of being watched (while being cool).

To the young, I thought, immersion in consumer culture, immersion in cool, is simply felt as natural. They have never known a world other than the one that accosts them from every side with images of mass-marketed perfection. Ads are everywhere: on TV, on the Internet, on billboards, in magazines, sometimes plastered on the side of the school bus. The forces that could challenge the consumer style are banished to the peripheries of culture. Rare is the student who arrives at college knowing something about the legacy of Marx or Marcuse, Gandhi or Thoreau. And by the time she does encounter them, they’re presented as diverting, interesting, entertaining—or perhaps as object for rigorously dismissive analysis—surely not as goads to another kind of life.

As I saw it, the specter of the uncool was creating a subtle tyranny for my students. It’s apparently an easy standard to subscribe to, the standard of cool, but once committed to it, you discover that matters are different. You’re inhibited, except on ordained occasions, from showing feeling, stifled from trying to achieve anything original. Apparent expression of exuberance now seem to occur with dimming quotation marks around them. Kids celebrating at a football game ironically play the roles of kids celebrating at a football game, as it’s been scripted on multiple TV shows and ads. There’s always self-observation, no real letting-go. Students apparently feel that even the slightest departure from the reigning code can get you genially ostracized. This is a culture tensely committed to a laid-back norm.

In the current university environment, I saw, there was only one form of knowledge that was generally acceptable. And that was knowledge that allowed you to keep your cool. It was fine to major in economics or political science or sociology, for there you could acquire ways of knowing that didn’t compel you to reveal and risk yourself. There you could stay detached. And—what was at least as important—you could acquire skills that would stand you in good financial stead later in life. You could use your educations to make yourself rich. All of the disciples that did not traduce the canons of cool were thriving. It sometimes seemed that everyone of my first-year advisees wanted to major in economics, even when they had no independent interest in the subject. They’d never read an economics book, had no attraction to the business pages of the Times. They wanted economics because word had it that econ was the major that made you look best to Wall Street and the investment banks. “We like economics majors,” an investment banking recruiter reportedly said, “because they’re people who’re willing to sacrifice their educations to the interest of their careers.”

The subjects that might threaten consumer cool, literary study in particular, had to adapt. They could offer diversion—it seems that’s what I (and Freud) had been doing—or they could make themselves over to look more like the so-called hard, empirically based disciplines.

Here computers come in. Now that computers are everywhere, each area of inquiry in the humanities is more and more defined by the computer’s resources. Computers are splendid research tools. Good. The curriculum turns in the direction of research. Professors don’t ask students to try to write as Dickens would were he alive today. Rather, they research Dickens. They delve into his historical context; they learn what the newspapers were gossiping about on the day that the first installment of Bleak House hit the stands. We shape our tools, McLuhan said, and thereafter our tools shape us.

Many educated people in America seem persuaded that the computer is the most significant invention in human history. Those who do not master its intricacies are destined for a life of shame, poverty, and neglect. More humanities courses are becoming computer-oriented, which keeps them safely in the realm of cool, financially negotiable endeavors. A professor teaching Blake’s “The Chimney Sweeper,” which depicts the exploitation of young boys whose lot is not altogether unlike the lot of many children living now in American inner cities, is likely to charge his students with using the computer to compile as much information about the poem as possible. They can find articles about chimney sweepers from 1790s newspapers; contemporary pictures and engravings that depict these unfortunate little creatures; critical articles that interpret the poem in a seemingly endless variety of ways; biographical information on Blake, with hints about events in his own boyhood that would have made chimney sweepers a special interest; portraits of the author at various stages of his life; maps of Blake’s London. Together the class might create a Blake—Chimney Sweeper Web site: www.blakesweeper.edu.

Instead of spending class time wondering what the poem means, and what application it has to present-day experience, students compile information about it. They set the poem in its historical and critical context, showing first how the poem is the product and the property of the past—and, implicitly, how it really has nothing to do with the present except as an artful curiosity; and second how, given the number of ideas about it already available, adding more thought would be superfluous.

By putting a world of facts at the end of a key-stroke, computers have made facts, their command, their manipulation, their ordering, central to what now can qualify as humanistic education. The result is to suspend reflection about the differences among wisdom, knowledge, and information. Everything that can be accessed online can seem equal to everything else, no datum more important or more profound than any other. Thus the possibility presents itself that there really is no more wisdom; there is no more knowledge; there is only information. No thought is a challenge or an affront to what one currently believes.

Am I wrong to think that the kind of education on offer in the humanities now is in some measure an education for empire? The people who administer an empire need certain very precise capacities. They need to be adept technocrats. They need the kind of training that will allow them to take up an abstract and unfelt relation to the world and its peoples—a cool relation, as it were. Otherwise, they won’t be able to squeeze forth the world’s wealth without suffering debilitating pains of conscience. And the denizen of the empire needs to be able to consume the kinds of pleasures that will augment his feeling of rightful rulership. Those pleasures must be self-inflating and not challenging; they need to confirm the current empowered state of the self and not challenge it. The easy pleasures of this nascent American empire, akin to the pleasures to be had in first-century Rome, reaffirm the right to mastery—and, correspondingly, the existence of a world teeming with potential vassals and exploitable wealth.

Immersed in preprofessionalism, swimming in entertainment, my students have been sealed off from the chance to call everything they’ve valued into question, to look at new forms of life, and to risk everything. For them, education is knowing and lordly spectatorship, never the Socratic dialogue about how one ought to live one’s life.

These thoughts of mine didn’t come with any anger at my students. For who was to blame them? They didn’t create the consumer biosphere whose air was now their purest oxygen. They weren’t the ones who should have pulled the plug on the TV or disabled the game port when they were kids. They hadn’t invited the ad flaks and money changers into their public schools. What I felt was an ongoing sense of sorrow about their foreclosed possibilities. They seemed to lack chances that I, born far poorer than most of them, but into a different world, had abundantly enjoyed.

As I read those evaluation forms and thought them over, I recalled a story. In Vienna, there was once a superb teacher of music, very old. He accepted a few students. There came to him once a young violinist whom all of Berlin was celebrating. Only fourteen, yet he played exquisitely. The young man arrived in Austria hoping to study with the master. At the audition, he played to perfection; everyone surrounding the old teacher attested to the fact. When it came time to make his decision. The old man didn’t hesitate. “I don’t want him,” he said. “But, master, why not?” asked a protégé. “He’s the most gifted young violinist we’ve ever heard.” “Maybe,” said the old man. “But he lacks something, and without this thing real development is not possible. What that young man lacks in inexperience.” It’s a precious possession, inexperience; my students have had it stolen from them.

But what about the universities themselves? Do they do all they can to fight the reign of consumer cool?

From the start, the university’s approach to students now has a solicitous, maybe even a servile tone. As soon as they enter their junior year in high school, and especially if they live in a prosperous zip code, the information materials, which is to say the advertising, come rolling in. Pictures, testimonials, videocassettes, and CD-ROMs (some hidden, some not) arrive at the door from colleges across the country, all trying to capture the students and their tuition dollars.

The freshman-to-be sees photographs of well-appointed dorm rooms; of elaborate physed facilities; of expertly maintained sports fields; of orchestras and drama troupes; of students working joyously, off by themselves. It’s a retirement spread for the young. “Colleges don’t have admissions offices anymore, they have marketing departments,” a school financial officer said to me once. Is it surprising that someone who has been approached with photos and tapes, bells and whistles, might come to college thinking that the Shakespeare and Freud courses were also going to be agreeable treats?

How did we reach this point? In part, the answer is a matter of demographics and also of money. Aided by the GI Bill, the college-going population increased dramatically after the Second World War. Then came the baby boomers, and to accommodate them colleges continued to grow. Universities expand readily enough, but with tenure locking in faculty for lifetime jobs, and with the general reluctance of administrators to eliminate their own slots, it’s not easy for a university to contract. So after the baby boomers had passed through—like a tasty lump sliding the length of a boa constrictor—the colleges turned to promotional strategies—to advertising—to fill the empty chairs. Suddenly college, except for the few highly selective establishments, became a buyers’ market. What students and their parents wanted had to be taken potently into account. That often meant creating more comfortable, less challenging environments, places where almost no one failed, everything was enjoyable, and everyone was nice.

Just as universities must compete with one another for students, so must individual departments. At a time of rank economic anxiety (and what time is not in America?), the English department and the history department have to contend for students against the more success-ensuring branches, such as the science departments, and the commerce school. In 1968, more than 21 percent of all the bachelor’s degrees conferred in America were humanities degrees; by 1993 that total had fallen to about 13 percent, and it continues to sink. The humanities now must struggle to attract students, many of whose parents devoutly wish that they would go elsewhere.

One of the ways we’ve tried to be attractive is by loosening up. We grade much more genially than our colleagues in the sciences. In English and history, we don’t give many D’s, or C’s either. (The rigors of Chem 101 may create almost as many humanities majors per year as the splendors of Shakespeare.) A professor at Stanford explained that grades were getting better because the students were getting smarter every year. Anything, I suppose, is possible.

Along with easing up on grades, many humanities departments have relaxed major requirements. There are some good reasons for introducing more choice into the curricula and requiring fewer standard courses. But the move jibes with a tendency to serve the students instead of challenging them. Students can float in and out of classes during the first two weeks of the term without making any commitment. The common name for this span—shopping period—attests to the mentality that’s in play.

One result of the university’s widening elective leeway is to give students more power over teachers. Those who don’t like you can simply avoid you. If the students dislike you en masse, you can be left with an empty classroom. I’ve seen other professors, especially older ones, often those with the most to teach, suffer real grief at not having enough students sign up for their courses: Their grading was too tough; they demanded too much; their beliefs were too far out of line with the existing dispensation. It takes only a few such incidents to draw other professors into line.

Before students arrive, universities ply them with luscious ads, guaranteeing them a cross between summer camp and lotusland. When they get to campus, flattery, entertainment, and preprofessional training are theirs, if that’s what they want. The world we present them is not a world elsewhere, an ivory tower world, but one that’s fully continuous with the American entertainment and consumer culture they’ve been living in. They hardly know they’ve left home. Is it a surprise, then, that this generation of students—steeped in consumer culture before they go off to school; treated as potent customers by the university well before they arrive, then pandered to from day one—are inclined to see the books they read as a string of entertainments to be enjoyed without effort or languidly cast aside?

So I had my answer. The university had merged almost seamlessly with the consumer culture that exists beyond its gates. Universities were running like businesses, and very effective businesses at that. Now I knew why my students were greeting great works of mind and heart as consumer goods. They came looking for what they’d had in the past, Total Entertainment All the Time, and the university at large did all it could to maintain the flow. (Though where this allegiance to the Entertainment-Consumer Complex itself came from—that is a much larger question. It would take us into politics and economics, becoming, in time, a treatise in itself.)

But what about me? Now I had to look at my own place in the culture of training and entertainment. Those course evaluations made it clear enough. I was providing diversion. To some students I was offering an intellectualized midday variant of Letterman and Leno. They got good times from my classes, and maybe a few negotiable skills, because that’s what I was offering. But what was I going to do about it? I had diagnosed the problem, all right, but as yet I had nothing approaching a plan for action.

I’d like to say that I arrived at something like a breakthrough simply by delving into my own past. In my life I’ve had a string of marvelous teachers, and thinking back on them was surely a help. But some minds—mine, at times, I confess—tend to function best in opposition. So it was looking not just to the great and good whom I’ve known, but to something like an arch-antagonist, that got me thinking in fresh ways about how to teach and why.

From the book Why Read? by Mark Edmundson. Published by Bloomsbury USA.Copyright (c) 2004 by Mark Edmundson. Reprinted courtesy of Bloomsbury Publishing. Available wherever books are sold.

Mark Edmundson is a professor of English at the University of Virginia. A prizewinning scholar, he has published a number of works of literary and cultural criticism, including Literature Against Philosophy, Plato to Derrida, and Teacher: The One Who Made the Difference. He has also written for such publications as the New Republic, the New York Times Magazine, the Nation, and Harper's, where he is a contributing editor.