He also has 3 teeth, nearly 4, and pre-verbalizes, we would like to believe, in both French and English. Just in the past week he’s gone from amiable explorer of space in an eight-foot diameter to I-can-race-across-the-room-before-you-can-blink.
Emile’s credo: Here comes trouble!
While editor Jeffrey Williams is still taking queries for a new editor and institutional home, most watchers are guessing the respected journal will fold: the problem with the quality management at CMU–like the “quality management” of our government, implicating Clinton and Blair as much as Reagan-Bush-Thatcher-Bush–is its typicality, not its deviation from the norm.
When CMU cries poor (”our endowment is much smaller than Harvard’s!”) as an excuse for under-spending on undergraduates and tells Williams, “hey, we insist that you save $4500 by asking one grad student to do the work of two–or, if you can’t stomach that, give up the ten grand we pay you in summer salary,” it’s exactly the same game we’ve seen in government. Austerity for the public sphere, but plenty of cash for the “entrepreneurs” gambling with our lives.
Williams is preparing what he expects to be the final issue, the Winter 2008/09 number, scheduled to appear in March. Based on the “My Credo” symposium published in three consecutive numbers of Kenyon Review, Williams has invited Jameson, Berube, Berlant, Graff, and many others to articulate their own credos. It’ll be a very special issue indeed.
It’s terrible of the engineering-friendly management at CMU to shut down a humanities institution over what they call Williams’ failure to find independent funding for $4500 a year. But Williams has picked a great way to go out.
In Kenyon Review 12.4 (Autumn 1950)
1. Leslie A. Fiedler, Toward an Amateur Criticism
2. Herbert Read, The Critic as Man of Feeling
3. Richard Chase, Art, Nature, Politics
4. William Empson, The Verbal Analysis
In 13.1 (Winter 1951)
5. Cleanth Brooks, The Formalist Critics
6. Douglas Bush, The Humanist Critics
7. Northrop Frye, ³The Archetypes of Literature²
In 13.2 (Spring 1951)
8. Stephen Spender, On the Function of Criticism
9. Arthur Mizener, Not in Cold Blood
10. Austin Warren, The Teacher as Critic
Recently:
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- MLA Confidential, Part 1
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- Occupy the AHA!
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Comments
This entry was posted on Tuesday, September 30th, 2008 at 1:03 pm and is filed under "quality" and other fighting words, intellectuals are workers, this blogging life, youth is a category through which class is lived. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
Hey, Marc, Emile’s a cutie! Teaching you in my Intro to Grad Studies in English course next week and sending my students over to your site. Want me to try to set up some techno-whatzit so you could take questions from them? (Either in class T 4:30-7–pick your half hour or more–or through a Citizen of Somewhere Else/How the University Works book event or some other way?)
Sounds good. A speakerphone would be fine, but we can do something textual. I don’t have a webcam set-up. You choose. How about the second half-hour 5-530 pm EST? That’s 8-830pm over here, and probably as late as I’m any good these days.
Emile’s adventures today? “Oh, I went up the stairs–how hard could it be going down? Hey-ouch!” and “Hm, that fireplace poker looks smoky _and_ delicious!” Actually those were his adventures between noon and 1 pm.
How bout those Bills? The _second_ I give up paying any attention, bang, they start winning. I’m their Jonas. As long as I ignore them, they’re great.
Talk soon, M
Hey Marc, no phone lines in the classroom I’m in but we’ve almost got skype set up (just need to figure out how to hook up the mike). So we can call you if you email me a number and time to do so. If you’re busy, though, we could do some kind of cross-bloggy thing later this week.
Did I really reverse the shift in time zones? Classic. In any event, we’ve got the times and phone # squared away in a separate email. Solidarity, M
Hey Marc, thanks for taking the extra time with us and answering our questions so thoroughly. Hopefully my students will have more soon for all of us on that massive impromptu campus/community counter-protest they witnessed/documented….