Abstract: For someone who finds himself in my situation?that is to say, a philoso pher fallen among students of imaginative literature?the traditional starting point is the age-old quarrel of philosophy and poetry. The stan dard accusation made by philosophy in the course of that quarrel is that poetry does not tell the truth, whereas philosophy tries to. But one can ask straight off: the truth about what} What is it that poetry allegedly doesn't tell the truth about? This question acquires special force when one goes back to the original Platonic setting for the quarrel. According to Plato, the poets and those who loved their creations labored under an error that was only a more extreme version of one made by most of us all the time?the error of mistaking ordinary empirical, political, social, and personal life for reality. So the falsehood of the poets, as it was under stood by the philosopher who started the quarrel, was simply a brighter version of a falsehood shared by everyone, and it was a falsehood about everything. I suppose that my disposition has always been to take the other side in this famous Platonic quarrel?or, rather, I should say, one of the other sides, since there are clearly many directions in which one can move away from this famous doctrine (some of them taken by Plato himself). I think that some fictions can tell the truth in ways that give the lie to a lot of phi losophy, and I think this despite being a philosopher, or, rather, I suppose,

Abstract: PROFESSION 2003 “What has been your engagement with literature?” Stephen Greenblatt asked me. “Why do you keep coming back time and again to Rabelais?” I pondered, and realized that the answer was not straightforward. I have always found Rabelais a pleasure to read and have marveled at the surprises in each new reading. But over the years I changed in my relation to those surprises and to their use in my work. So my answer is a history, a personal history, but one, I think, characteristic of the experience of other social historians of my generation or younger who began to relate to literature in a new way. As a graduate student and in my first decade as a social historian, I used texts of all kinds to get at the history of the Reformation in Lyon. I wanted to find out why printing workers, other artisans, and women joined the Protestant movement and whether Karl Marx or Max Weber was right. I wanted to find out whether religion played a role in the reform of charitable institutions the way R. H. Tawney had claimed. To these ends I looked in archives, at tax records, militia lists, poor-relief rolls, and much more. In the libraries I considered tracts and sermons, polemical songs, popular plays and poems, arithmetic books, medical books—anything relevant in the outpouring of vernacular books from the printing presses of sixteenthcentury Lyon and elsewhere. And there were what I would have called the literary texts, the fictional or nonfictional writings of educated persons The Historian and Literary Uses

Abstract: The literary engagements of psychoanalysts are legion. Indeed the ques tion of whether psychoanalysis was itself a form of literary engagement? of whether the writing of psychoanalysis was more akin to what used to be called literature than to the languages of science?began to occur to Freud once he started writing (and publishing) case histories: storytelling created uncertainty about the kind of story being told. In his discussion of the case of Fraulein Elisabeth von R., in his Studies on Hysteria of 1895, Freud wrote:

Abstract: "Teaching-oriented" sounds like second best. The lucky graduate students get jobs in top research universities. This paper calls into question the value system underlying these two statements. I was a lucky new PhD in 1984, landing my first job at a Research I institu tion, Carnegie Mellon University. And while I spent eight highly productive and successful years working there, I left voluntarily, in part because of the limits that the institutional values of a research university put on assumptions about the undergraduate classroom and the faculty's teaching habits and practices. In how many research universities would a scene like the following be characteristic? A promising assistant professor of English with positive teaching evaluations and a strong record of scholarly publication is sched uled to come up for tenure and promotion. The dean of the college calls the young faculty member in for what is to be a reassuring chat, since the dean is in the happy position of being able to say that a positive outcome is all but certain. Let's suppose that this soon-to-be associate professor has strong in terests in composition and undergraduate teaching and has worked as part of the faculty leadership group administering and teaching in the university's freshman English program. How lucky, the dean offhandedly observes, that the candidate has such a strong record of scholarly publication, so that the two freshman textbooks and extensive consulting with the local schools that

Abstract: Among the many problems plaguing the field of cultural studies, one of the least pressing yet most consequential is that a sense of looming crisis so thoroughly governs discussions about the field as to block virtually all paths of reflection. Given the magnitude of our woes, this mental paralysis is not entirely surprising. Departments of cultural studies, especially those focused on foreign languages, are confronted with an array of by now fa miliar difficulties: undergraduate students find ever fewer reasons to ac quaint themselves with languages other than English; our field, like much of the rest of the humanities, has lost considerable prestige and clout; its institutional status in the university remains uncertain; and the increasing replacement of its faculty by a seasonal labor force drains programs and clouds the prospects of the next generation of scholars. Sometimes it seems the field is being dismantled before our very eyes. Still, I would like to bracket discussions of these pressing problems, because, like an immense magnet, they reorient all thought and all speech in their vicinity toward the goal of protecting what is taken to be under attack: enrollments, faculty positions, entire domains of knowledge. This defensiveness hampers our ability to recognize not only what is of value in our field but also problems that may be less urgent but are ultimately more important. Let me begin with what is good. Rather than cite statistics or reports from professional organizations, I rely instead on my admittedly subjective

Abstract: As I participate on search committees and in job interviews, I am increas ingly struck with the following thought while listening to candidates dur ing the interview event: "How could he (or she) give us that answer? Hasn't anyone explained what interviewers expect in a screening inter view?" Of course, at these moments I know I should be listening more closely to what the candidate is actually saying. But I am prevented from doing so by the formal aspects of the response, aspects that only draw at tention when candidates lack a clear understanding of interviewers' expec tations. Let me add, though, that the issue of candidates' awareness is equally one of their mentors' responsibility for providing proper orienta tion before candidates enter the intricate maze of the job search. This essay is an effort to assist that mentoring process and to reflect on the relation between form and substance in the screening interview from the perspec tive of one seasoned participant who has been on both sides of the process. Certainly, this reflection is neither new nor unique: an extensive corpus of volumes and essays on the job search and interview strategies has emerged in the past few decades. Limiting a review of these texts to the midto late 1990s, the investigator discovers a range of concerns and foci. Notably, one collection of essays about the job search in the fields of English and modern languages, On the Market (Boufis and Olsen), offers many valuable insights about the vagaries of the job market, without discussing important details

Abstract: I've learned a few things about practicing tolerance after teaching for three years at an urban institution in rural Appalachia. I learned that my ideas of a tolerant society, formed by a liberal, Jewish, northeastern upbringing, were

Abstract: Although I didn't realize it at the time, the best piece of advice I received before going on the job market came in the form of an anecdote from a former professor of mine. Having graduated from a small college in Iowa (2,200 students at the time), I'd spent my seven years as a graduate student working hard to prepare myself for a career as a small-school professor: I'd enjoyed my undergraduate experience and wanted to replicate it for others. Talking on the phone, my former professor, now a friend, told me the story of a colleague in another department who received a Fulbright to work and study in Europe for a year. At the end of the appointed time, the Fulbright Foundation selected this historian as one of a few scholars to receive a sec ond year. The scholar called the chair of his home department back in the States to tell him the good news. The chair congratulated him, told him he'd done good work, then asked him to come home. The historian was stunned. Certainly, he said, this is an honor, and doesn't it speak well for the college? "Indeed," replied the chair, "but while you're away, the rest of us are doing your work. Come home." This story came back to me while I was reading Profession 2002, particu larly the report of the MLA Ad Hoc Committee on the Professionalization of PhDs. Implicit throughout that article is the recognition that differences exist between the Research I model and other types of academic institu tions?namely, two-year colleges, MA-granting universities, and small lib eral arts institutions. At one point, for instance, the committee comments

Abstract: I read with interest not long ago in the pages of the ADE Bulletin Katie Conboy's article "What Can You Do with an English Major?" I found it engaging and useful but general. She reports what we all kind of know in tuitively: that English majors can do anything they want to do and that they work in all sorts of professional fields, from banking to engineering to teaching to librarianship to manufacturing to editing to whatever. I decided that it was time to try to find more specific data on what English majors who graduated from the Lehigh University English department in the past two decades are doing to make a living and how they feel about having majored in English. Others in the profession may be inter ested in the methods we used, the results that we found, and the issues we now face. In March 2002 we sent questionnaires to all 477 of Lehigh's English major alumni who had graduated between 1980 and 2000. The question naire was phrased similarly to one reported in 1985 in College English that we sent out to the 151 English majors who had graduated between 1960 and 1980. Our goal then as now was to learn what kinds of jobs our gradu ates were actually doing in the real world, how they felt about having ma jored in English, and what benefits they saw from their degree. Those questions led to more difficult ones: Given the jobs that our majors are ac tually doing, should we attempt to restructure the English major or our teaching of specific courses in ways that might better prepare them for

Abstract: In spring 1997,1 taught a graduate seminar on Roland Barthes. I had a pro found sense, week after week, of loving Barthes. Book after book, I loved his writing?loved reading it, talking about it in class, getting into and ap preciating the detail of it. The more we looked at it, the more I loved it. Immediately after the semester ended, I set to work on an essay I had agreed to write for a volume called The Familial Gaze, an essay on my boyfriend's photographs. Uncomfortable with a topic in which my exper tise was personal rather than professional, I began by turning to Barthes's book on photography, La chambre claire, translated as Camera Lucida. The book provided me with the framework I sorely needed, and I showed my gratitude in typical fashion. I determined where Barthes had faltered, had dropped the ball, and I positioned myself as going him one better. Al though such positioning is probably deeply familiar to all of you, I'd like to give its flavor by quoting a bit from this 1997 essay. From the first page: "I want here to pick up the position Camera Lucida briefly assumes and then drops." From the second page: "there may be something about the second point of view that is most troublingly personal, anecdotal, self-concerned. . . . Perhaps that is why Barthes drops it like a hot potato." From the third page: "the son flees this position and attaches it defini tively to his mother. ... I want to pick up the perspective Barthes drops, to

Abstract: 28 The author is Professor Emeritus in the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in Princeton, New Jersey. A version of this paper was presented at the 2002 MLA convention in New York. Puzzled, as I’m sure my fellow panelists were as well, when Stephen Greenblatt conscripted them to this peculiar, somewhat whimsical enterprise, about just what the topic of discussion was supposed to be, I thought to begin, in good Empsonian style, with a reflection on the ambiguities of his title. Was this to be my own engagement with literature and the language arts as subjects of study—what a cultural anthropologist had to say about modernism, postmodernism, structuralism, poststructuralism, cultural studies, the new historicism, hermeneutics, and the other veerings and insurrections of recent theory, having lived through all of them? Or was it to be how my engagement with anthropology was itself literary—what role my involvement with my literary tradition, rather intense for a social scientist, played in my half-century effort to understand how Javanese, Balinese, and Moroccans went about earning a living, governing themselves, and making sense of their existence? Should I be professional ethnographer as amateur critic or amateur critic as professional ethnographer? The two are connected, of course, and both involve a certain presumption and some fairly serious trespassing, as well as what the psychoanalysts would call exaggerated self-reference. But it is the second that seems to me the more relevant in my case. What I have to say about the ups and downs of recent literary scholarship or criticism is not, even to me, very interest

Abstract: 44 Ernest L. Boyer’s study Scholarship Reconsidered, written for the Carnegie Foundation in 1990, initiated a profound shift in the ways professionals in higher education thought about and assessed academic life, particularly in terms of the connections among teaching, learning, pedagogies, and varying forms of research and intellectual endeavor. In 2002, the American Association of Higher Education (AAHE) ran a follow-up study of administrators and faculty members that was intended to measure the effects Boyer’s report has had on the structures of scholarship and rewards at institutions of higher education both large and small; the book of reports based on this study will be titled Encouraging Multiple Forms of Scholarship: Experienced Voices .I am a faculty member and study participant at a small college that was invited to be part of the AAHE’s second-stage, in-depth assessment process, which involved eight institutions that have incorporated aspects of Boyer’s paradigm for reassessing scholarship. During the assessment process, each school conducted analyses and interviews in order to determine how Boyer’s redefinitions of scholarship in terms of “discovery, integration, application, and teaching” (16) have affected and reflected both faculty work and its recognition at each institution. The assessment process took place in the spring of 2002. Although the book of reports has not yet appeared, early results indicate that implementing such changes has brought to light particular kinds of faculty attitudes and responses pertinent to discussions of gen