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(The above was some other thread I can't figure out which, so...)
I left off Cusset about page 120 where it seemed to get bogged down. It looks to pick up later. I just re-opened it today. Most of my writing and my learning to write in college was directed at the draft board and involved a lot of law and philosophy about democratic societies at war. I really enjoyed that writing. I tended to dread term papers and studiously avoided the English department. On the other hand the German and Russian lit and Philosophy departments had good reputations back then.
It's interesting to think back on the difference. I had no real stake in the academic writing. It was completely different to write about refusing to go to a meaningless war. I could get myself pretty damned excited on the latter.
And then there are the WBM threads, a forbidden subject. Thanks for posting the Michael Berube piece. I do have a comment on Berube. Berube falls into the same problem as WBM in that he argues from the basis of what was or wasn't going on in the novel (The Great Gatsby). Well, they are English teachers, so of course they are dealing with their field.
In my opinion, that's not the way to get at the points to be made over culture, class, race, and heritage. This approach uses the fiction as a social document. I think the better way to illuminate novels of the 1920s for example is by detailing out some of the major historical, social, economic, and mass media changes going on. This makes it much easier to see how the work fits with its period and becomes a social document.
Getting back to Cusset, I am beginning to sense a similar problem. He begins at about 1970 in the US. That was a big turning point, but what about the social-historical background of the academy? What about that background that makes for the changes Cusset describes? I've got to finish the book of course.
I watched a couple of interviews with Harold Bloom, partly to remember him and partly to try to refresh my memory, and refocus on what first Michaels and then Berube, and others were reacting to when they began their careers.
What had gone on at Berkeley just before their period was an attack on the academy itself as a bastion of high values, standards, preserver of truth, justice, and the American way. It was none of the above, and had been shown through a lot of student action to be an extension of the military police state system. And I don't mean that in metaphor. This had strong intellectual consequences for me. The whole idea that there was such a thing as aesthetic values that I needed to learn and master, that school represented some social system of merit, and so forth became not just hypocrisy, but something manifestly rotten. These conclusions seem trivial today, I suppose. But they sure shocked hell out of me at the time. What's missing are the intellectual climate and consequences in the aftermath. Basically the fall of the academy left a giant intellectual vacuum.
So then the turn to French Theory filled that vacuum. There was also, with the disillusioned abandonment of a liberal canon, another void filler built around `identity' based literature, or in any event, a literature of the Other. However, to my great disappointment, there were very few, very limited reforms in the actual system of education.
Meanwhile the whole administrative level, having lost all of its veneer of a liberal elite a la Clark Kerr, became its own sort of vacuum. It was a vacuum where the FBI ran its desk in the basement of Sproul, registration records were coordinated with the Selective Service System, and the university police forces were tied into mutual aid packs. What came to fill this void? The forces or mentality of corporate managers trained in the business efficiencies of higher education.
So, I just wanted to put together this well known sketch to ground Cusset in my own mind.
CG