Ken Egan, Jr.
English, Rocky Mountain College
The title of Michael Berube's latest book plays upon two senses of "employment": How can we employ English in our daily lives as citizens, teachers, and students and, can talented individuals find meaningful employment in English? To put these issues more baldly: does English matter? And, what's the matter with English? These two questions provide a frame for a series of loosely connected essays that provoke thought, teasingly suggest solutions, and put the reader's values on the line.
I stress that this is a collection, since the book does not present a linear argument progressing from beginning to end. Instead, Berube, a professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, has spliced together in a sometimes-facile manner a set of occasional pieces, creating a collage of the current state of English studies. These essays range from an acerbic assessment of a T.A. strike at Yale, to a helpful thought-piece on improving the job market for Ph.D.s, to a whimsical look at contemporary fiction, to a too-easy destruction of Dinesh D'Souza, to a meditation on the role of the leftist public intellectual. As this partial list should imply, the articles are of variable quality, depending upon the issue at hand and the treatment rendered. Overall Berube is a skillful, amusing stylist, able to blend references to contemporary culture with allusions to high theory (Rush Limbaugh and Harold Bloom appear side-by-side in one sentence). He speaks with the current voice of criticism, at once engaged and playful, earnest and elusive. He also at times dwells at length on his own role in the contemporary debates. In this post-deconstruction era, we are far more self-conscious about our stance, our positioning in discursive struggles over the fate of the academy. But this kind of posturing can often read like self-serving gossip.
So how does Berube answer his important questions? He shows a structural relationship between the two matters by asserting that English studies struggle with a reason for being precisely because the job market for emerging Ph.D.s is so bleak: "What's happening to our professional protocols of value is that they're being squeezed by a system whose ideal image of itself promotes theoretically sophisticated, interdisciplinary work in extraliterary studies but whose material base is shrinking as fast as its superstructure is expanding" (101). At a time when newly minted dissertators arrive at a devastated market, professors must puzzle over the gap between cultural studies and the often unfair hiring practices in their own departments. Berube is led to his soul-searching as well by an apparent disconnect between the matter studied in graduate schools (including theory and specialized techniques for literary research) and the matter taught in most undergraduate curricula: literature survey courses and writing. He is also concerned about rising levels of hostility between the Moderns and the Ancients (those who received tenure and promotion in an earlier epoch that required fewer publications and less theory than the rising generation must engage). For Berube, then, the contemporary English department appears a battleground strewn with fallout from guilt, self doubt, and recrimination.
To overcome these battles of the books, Berube proposes a serious turn toward both interdisciplinarity and "heterogeneity" in English programs proper. In other words, literary studies should tear down the barricades externally and internally. He holds up as models of interdisciplinary scholarship women's studies and Afro-American studies programs at Illinois. But despite these idealistic calls for permeable disciplinary boundaries, Berube seems far more engaged with the issue of internal departmental politics (no doubt because he spends most of his scholarly, teaching, and political capital there). One can detect a bit of confusion or "indeterminacy" here, as though Berube's professional loyalties remain invested in the troubled English department, while his ideological priorities steer him toward the subversion of the place he calls home. In any case, as he surveys the contemporary English department, Berube wants to have it both ways: English should be both about aesthetic pleasure and decoding the social text, both about conformity and revolt, both about gaining a job at IBM and being positioned to critique the corporate culture undergirding IBM. He makes frequent use of the concept of "reversibility," the notion that a given technique of literary studies can cut both ways, can serve both the needs of the system and the needs of the renegade. Berube urges teachers to train their students to dance in the space between these possibilities, to "employ" skills such as critical reading and writing to make a living, and to "employ" those same skills to create a space of autonomy, even revolt within the dominant culture. It's easy to see the immediate payoff of this approach: as a profession, English studies can make a credible bid for sustained funding while preserving the leftist hope of progressive education. As Berube phrases this idea in somewhat convoluted terms, "as much as I might hate to admit it as a progressive educator, and however much it might pain the liberals and conservatives to my right and the Marxists to my left, the rhetoric of public justification for intellectual work is necessarily a rhetoric of negotiation and double-voicedness--which is not at all the same thing, I hope, as a rhetoric of accommodation and double-talk" (33).
We can glimpse another advantage to Berube's "double-voiced" approach to the curriculum: English departments can bracket intractable disagreements over theory and curriculum by declaring that "anything goes." We will continue our historical survey courses, our close reading of privileged texts, and our elevation of master writers such as Yeats, while at the same time embracing theory, cultural studies, and contemporary writing. But in this sense Berube's solution makes more sense at a large public university such as Illinois than at a small liberal-arts college such as my own. If Illinois's English Department can afford to be capacious, my program must make hard choices about emphasis and approach. We simply cannot afford to hire a literary historian, rhetorical theorist, journalist, creative writer, and cutting-edge cultural studies theorist. In fact, an attempt to fill all these niches would lead toward precisely the kind of exploitive hiring practices critiqued by Berube. In the quest to be inclusive, we would be compelled to hire adjuncts in these various subfields. For this reason, we must either choose a narrow mission (in our case, English Education), or move toward interdisciplinary programs such as Environmental Studies.
When Berube turns from "employing English" to employment in English, his commentaries are pungent and convincing. He seems on firm ground when analyzing the depression in the job market for professors-in-training: "the job of teaching college, for the majority of recent Ph.D.s trying to get that job, has more in common with the job of picking oranges than the job of practicing law" (89). The Employment of English often returns to the irony of radical theorists naively, even vindictively, ignoring the unstable working conditions of teaching assistants, part-timers, and underemployed Ph.D.s. But what is to be done? Berube's measures should sound familiar to those who read Bill Janus's review of Cary Nelson's Manifesto of a Tenured Radical in the Winter 1998 issue of The Montana Professor: develop incentives for early retirement among complacent senior faculty; reduce the number of students pursuing the Ph.D.; and compel the Modern Language Association to publish reliable statistics about the percentage of job seekers who land tenure-track, full-time positions each academic year. Berube also urges a thorough revamping of English graduate programs to prepare Ph.D.s to teach the nuts-and-bolts courses while at the same time initiating undergraduates into theory and cultural studies.
While Janus found some of these suggestions of limited utility, I think that Berube and his colleague Nelson are on to some important possibilities. Berube argues, for example, that "midlevel" graduate students could come to see high school teaching as an honorable, rewarding alternative to college-level teaching. If we can reinvigorate secondary education in the humanities by directing advanced students there, we have done those emerging teachers, their students, and colleges an enormous service. However, "the profession as it now operates seems much more interested in producing volume after volume of criticism and theory for faculty and graduate students than in disseminating some of that criticism and theory to undergraduates and high school students" (85). As part of this campaign to elevate the status of high school teaching, Berube would redefine the Master's degree in English as a substantive, self-contained program, rather than as a necessary hurdle leapt over to get to the promised land of the doctorate. Granted, no single proposal offered here will solve the overproduction of Ph.D.s in English studies. But at the very least, Berube's thoughtful notions would close the gap between the rhetoric of radical politics and the reality of unemployability driving literary studies at the present time.
I return to the two questions with which we began: Does English matter? What's the matter with English? If my students are typical of those enrolling at institutions around the state of Montana, we work with often earnest, under-prepared, pragmatic individuals who view college as a necessary credentialing process. We also work with first-generation, Native American, and working-class students who seek a place in the reward system of our economy. Viewed through this lens, English programs should strive to provide students with the skills of reading, writing, and speaking to build comfortable, meaningful lives within context of a capitalist economy. We're not talking revolution here but survival and success in the crudest economic terms. Postcolonial theory, for instance, can seem very far removed from these concerns. Yet, as Berube at times hints, it is not necessary to split off our more sophisticated theoretical operations from these more concrete matters. If a student does in fact plan to work for a regional firm doing business around the world, shouldn't that student be aware of the historical relationship between the United States and, say, Central America?
I for one remain haunted by the liberal dream of the ameliorative power of literary and rhetorical studies. While liberalism seems to be discredited from both the left and the right, many professors inhabit that uncomfortable middle space, clinging to notions of toleration, diversity, and independent thinking while acknowledging the seeming permanence of the late-capitalist ethos. It's not a happy space for one-time radical wannabes, yet it may be the sanest, most meaningful role we can perform.