[Review] Moo by Jane Smiley.

To dismiss Jane Smiley's mammoth and wickedly funny academic satire, Moo, as an academic satirical novel would be to consign Rabelais's Gargantua and Pantagruel to a similar fate, for like that work, it is really a great deal more than the sum of its parts

Class work: New York intellectual labor and the creation of postmodern American fiction, 1932-1962

This dissertation argues that American literary postmodernism was profoundly shaped by midcentury intellectual workers’ resistance to the bureaucratization of their labor. An Introduction establishes the significance of the dissertation to debates over both postmodernism and the New York Intellectuals, and summarizes each chapter’s contribution to the overall argument. Part I, “Class Unconsciousness,” then offers three chapters that detail the birth, growth, and eventual eclipse of a theory of “brain workers” as a class in the labor-radical circles of the New York Intellectuals. In the 1930s and 40s, authors Tess Slesinger, Mary McCarthy, and Lionel Trilling sounded an increasingly shrill alarm over what they imagined was a pro-Soviet intellectual class of bureaucratic mental workers in America. I argue that while their class-conscious fictions laid foundations for postmodernism’s arrival decades later, their increasingly indiscriminate hostility toward a class-conscious left nevertheless also hindered later recognition of the intellectual and class origins of postmodernism. Part II, “The Groves of Postmodernism,” begins with an Interlude that offers a theory of the literary and sociological meanings of the postwar campus novel in America. Three final chapters then explain how the antibureaucratic academic fictions of Trilling, McCarthy, and Vladimir Nabokov helped create the characteristic themes and even forms of this emerging genre—and thence of postmodernism itself, whose early canon includes such campus novels as Nabokov’s _Pale Fire_ (1962) and John Barth’s _Giles Goat-Boy_ (1966). I contend that these authors’ liberal satire of academia, influenced by the earlier theory of an intellectual class, was rooted in a passionate desire for intellectuals’ autonomy, and a corresponding critique of their bureaucratic labor in the academy. Thus I argue that the early postmodern, even for such avowedly apolitical writers as Nabokov, may be read as the protest of mental and professional workers against the bureaucratic confines of their work. Against recent accusations that postmodernism represented a “libertarian turn” colluding with the New Right, a brief Epilogue then insists on the importance of this early and antibureaucratic postmodernism to the successes of the New Left in the 1960s, as well as to present-day academic workers seeking their own autonomy in a rapidly proletarianizing workplace. This dissertation thus excavates a history of postmodernism’s labor-left origins, thereby challenging familiar accounts of postmodernism’s roots in a 1950s or 1980s political conservatism, as well as notions of the New York Intellectuals’ hostility toward or irrelevance to postmodernism. Along the way, it suggests postmodernism’s continuing relevance to white-collar anxiety and academic activism

Experiments in Decolonizing the University

The book addresses the need to reconsider the relation between university and society, a debate that has been going on from the Middle Ages to Kant, Humboldt, Newman, and beyond. Hans Schildermans builds on the philosophy and theory of higher education, drawing on the work of John Dewey, Donna Haraway, William James, Bruno Latour, Martin Savransky, Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead. In relation to the study practices of the Palestinian experimental university ‘Campus in Camps’, he develops the concept of an ecology of study to approach the relation between university and society from a new angle. The book avoids the two positions that are traditionally defended, namely the idea of the autonomous university where research and teaching are performed ‘in freedom and solitude’ on the one hand, and the capitalized university that produces useful knowledge on the other hand. Schildermans emphasizes the importance of study practices as a site of resistance against current neoliberal and capitalist reforms of the university and to envisage a different future for the university. The book will appeal to activists, critical academics and those interested in the fate of higher education today. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com

Experiments in Decolonizing the University

The book addresses the need to reconsider the relation between university and society, a debate that has been going on from the Middle Ages to Kant, Humboldt, Newman, and beyond. Hans Schildermans builds on the philosophy and theory of higher education, drawing on the work of John Dewey, Donna Haraway, William James, Bruno Latour, Martin Savransky, Isabelle Stengers and Alfred North Whitehead. In relation to the study practices of the Palestinian experimental university ‘Campus in Camps’, he develops the concept of an ecology of study to approach the relation between university and society from a new angle. The book avoids the two positions that are traditionally defended, namely the idea of the autonomous university where research and teaching are performed ‘in freedom and solitude’ on the one hand, and the capitalized university that produces useful knowledge on the other hand. Schildermans emphasizes the importance of study practices as a site of resistance against current neoliberal and capitalist reforms of the university and to envisage a different future for the university. The book will appeal to activists, critical academics and those interested in the fate of higher education today. The eBook editions of this book are available open access under a CC-BY-NC-ND 3.0 licence on www.bloomsburycollections.com

Československá etnografie a folkloristika v období pozdního socialismu a její vliv na formování tradice české sociokulturní antropologie po roce 1989

Předkládaná práce se snaží prozkoumat československou etnografii a folkloristiku v období pozdního socialismu a poskytnout tím základ pro pochopení postsocialistické transformace etnografie v antropologii a etnologii. Hlavní teoretický rámec, ze kterého práce vychází, představuje kritická sociologie vědy Pierra Bourdieu. Teze se převážně zaměřuje na dvě instituce, kde se etnografie pěstovala - na Katedru etnografie a folkloristiky Univerzity Karlovy v Praze a na pražskou pobočku Ústavu pro etnografii a folkloristiku Československé akademie věd v období pozdního socialismu, tedy období pokrývajícího 70. a 80. léta 20. století. Kromě intelektuálního rozměru etnografie se práce snaží rozkrýt rozmanité praktiky etnografů jako například výzkumné metody, jazykové znalosti, psací návyky, vědecké hierarchie nebo postoje ke vzájemné kritice. Hlavním argumentem této práce je, že zatímco nálepka etnografie v 90. letech 20. století vymizela, praktiky etnografů se i nadále podílely na utváření vznikající české antropologie a etnologie. Práce intenzivně čerpá z etnografických spisů, z rozhovorů s bývalými etnografy a ze sekundární literatury. V menší míře pak čerpá z dochovaných dokumentů. Klíčová slova: dějiny etnografie a folkloristiky, dějiny české antropologie, dějiny antropologie, postsocialismus, kultura...This thesis is an attempt to provide an account of the late socialist discipline of Czechoslovak ethnography and folklore studies and provide a basis for understanding of ethnography's post socialist transformation into anthropology and ethnology. The main theoretical framework of the thesis is the critical sociology of science of Pierre Bourdieu. The thesis focuses especially on two ethnography institutions - the Department of Ethnography and Folklore Studies at Charles University in Prague and the Prague branch of the Institute for Ethnography and Folklore Studies of the Czechoslovak Academy of Sciences in the late socialist period, which covers the 1970s and 1980s. Apart from providing some intellectual dimension of ethnography, the thesis aims to uncover other dimensions of ethnographers' practices such as research methods, language competences, writing habits, academic hierarchies or attitudes to mutual criticism. The thesis argues that whereas ethnography as a label disappeared in the 1990s, ethnographers' practices continued to shape the nascent Czech anthropology and ethnology. The thesis makes an intensive use of ethnographers' scholarly writings, interviews with former ethnographers and also uses some documentary evidence and secondary literature as its sources. Keywords: history of...Doktorský program Integrální studium člověka - obecká antropologiePhD General AnthropologyFakulta humanitních studiíFaculty of Humanitie