Date: Jan. 24 and 25, 2008: CIQR and the Department of English co-sponsor a Presentation in the CIQR Invited Speaker Series, to which all interested faculty, graduate students, and other parties are invited:
Presenter: Professor Michael Bérubé, Paterno Family Professor in Literature, Pennsylvania State University.
Marco Gemignani publishes in the field of multicultural psychology, qualitative research, constructivist therapy, and social constructionism. He is currently interested in exploring the socially-constructed links among migration, cultural identity, and mental health.
Presentation: "What happened to cultural studies?", and a symposium on qualitative research
Bio: Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University. He is the author of six books to date: Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Cornell University Press, 1992); Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (Verso, 1994); Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (Pantheon, 1996; paper edition, Vintage, 1998); The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (New York University Press, 1998); What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and "Bias" in Higher Education (W. W. Norton, 2006) and Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). He is also the editor of The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2004), and, with Cary Nelson, of Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (Routledge, 1995). Bérubé has written over a hundred essays for a wide variety of academic journals such as American Quarterly, the Yale Journal of Criticism, Social Text, Modern Fiction Studies, and the Minnesota Review, as well as more popular venues such as Harper's, the New Yorker, Dissent, The New York Times Magazine, the Washington Post, The Nation, and the Boston Globe. Life As We Know It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 1996 and was chosen as one of the best books of the year (on a list of seven) by Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio.
Title of Public Lecture: "What happened to cultural studies?"
Abstract:
British cultural studies reportedly "boomed" in the US during the 1990s, but, in retrospect, the boom was a bit of a bust. Stuart Hall was cited routinely and reverently, but not for his decisive rebukes of dogmatic British Marxism and its failure to come to terms with the challenge of Thatcherism; worse still, most left intellectuals in the U.S., when they hear the phrase cultural studies, think of solemn academic papers on popular culture in which the object is to show either that Disney is bad or that Star Trek fans are really quite clever in some ways. The reasons for this redefinition of cultural studies are many, and over the past two decades, some cultural studies theorists have found it tempting to replay a version of the academic-Anglophiliac line of thought in which the British manage to hand-craft very fine cultural artifacts whereas the Americans inevitably cheapen them and sell them to McDonalds to be given away in Happy Meals. But the Gramsci-Hall mode of cultural analysis posed, from the very outset, a compelling and underrecognized challenge to the Chomsky-Herman propaganda model of manufacturing consent,which was and is dominant in American studies of mass media. Precisely because this challenge went unrecognized, communications theory on the American left went right along developing the two strands of argument to which cultural studies opposes itself -- the first of which argues that mass media have a bad effect on people (particularly children, who are converted by television and video games into violent amoral monsters), and the second of which argues that mass media are owned by corporations, and that this is, for all practical analytical purposes, all we really need to know about them. In this paper, I'll argue that we need to reread Stuart Hall's work on Thatcherism for the post-9/11 context, and revisit the "merely cultural" debates of the 1990s.
Public Lecture: "What happened to cultural studies?"
Thursday, Jan. 24, 2008
Fisher Hall 719
Duquesne University
7:00-9:00 P.M.
Symposium:
Friday, Jan. 25, 2008
Berger Gallery
207 College Hall,
Duquesne University
10:00-12:00 Morning
All interested faculty, graduate students, and other parties are invited.
Refreshments will be served.