So I’ve been taking a sort of blogging vacation, and thinking about how to respond to Kenton’s comments (yay for Kenton). In the spirit of holiday laziness, I’m posting a link to the now defunct blog of Michael Berube…engaging here in what I think is a very interesting debate with Judith Halberstam
Good find! He has such a refreshing style, the instant my brain processed the line, “OK, color me skeptical. Short of renaming the English department ‘Patriotism Studies’”, I knew I was in for a treat.
I just want to quote at length what I found to be the most useful part of the article. It’s him quoting himself at length, but I found it such a clear and concise summation of what the English department does, or ought to do that I can’t resist.
“The work of literary critics just is the work of interpretation, and the teaching and training of literary critics is the teaching and training in varieties and possibilities of interpretation. Historicizing a text, speaking its silences, making manifest its “latencies,” reading its rhetorics, interrogating its implicit assumptions or explicit propositions about race or gender or nation or sexuality or “culture”—this is what we do, and what we try to interest our students in doing. We make the promise that if you do these things, if you practice the fine arts of textual interpretation, you will “get more out of” your readings, in terms of your own symbolic economy: you will learn the process of constructing analogies, drawing inferences, making finer and firmer intertextual connections among the texts you’ve read and the texts that compose your world. In theory, you can do this in nearly any field of human endeavor, from astrophysics to sports commentary, but you can probably do it best in those fields that give the widest possible latitude to understanding the formative and “productive” aspects of language, where the interpretation of discourses and rhetorics necessarily involves interpretation of the discursive and nondiscursive work that “discourses and rhetorics” have done in the world.”
Is Berube perhaps one of the reasons you are strongly considering Penn State?