Postmodern Pooh by Frederick Crews. North Point, 175pp., US $22, 10 October 2001
What are academic instincts, and are they about more than survival? For Frederick Crews, emeritus professor of English at Berkeley, literary study in the university is a Darwinian battle for power and status, with professors 'teaching the conflicts' as they claw their way up the academic ladder. For Marjorie Garber, William R. Kenan Jr Professor of English at Harvard, the university, if not a utopia, is nonetheless a satisfying environment where intellectual controversy reigns. Garber believes that academic jargon is actually 'language in action', marking 'the place where thinking has been', while Crews believes that it is the inscription on the tombstone of the place where thinking died. While they deal with many of the same issues - the star system, cultural studies, literary theory - these two writers come up with revealingly different descriptions of the profession of English in the American academy.
If anyone qualifies as an expert on academic instincts, it must be Marjorie Garber. She has been aptly described by the New York Times as 'one of the most powerful women in the academic world', and in Prospect as 'the reigning queen of cultural studies'. In a career that spans Shakespearean scholarship, cultural criticism, important administrative duties and journalistic visibility, Garber has consistently demonstrated her understanding of what makes the tenured tick, and her ability to keep a steady footing on the steepest slopes of academia. Her wide-ranging books - including Vested Interests (1992), on cross-dressing; Vice Versa (1995), on bisexuality; and Sex and Real Estate (2000), on the erotics of property - are noted for their originality, wit, erudition and tact.
Garber has described the unifying theme of her work as 'unsettling boundaries', and in Academic Instincts she attempts to blur the boundaries between such vexed oppositions as amateur/professional, specialist/generalist and jargon/plain English. She maintains that the divisions in academic life are perennial, and uses her favourite tools of etymology and deconstruction to undermine apparent differences between disputed terms, either tracing the origins of words to show that that what was once complimentary is now pejorative, and vice versa; or arguing that the disputes around polarised academic institutions, languages and identities 'depend on one another for their strength and effectiveness'. [snip]