JAC Volume 15 Issue 1

As the cover of this collection says, no other American book provides multiple models of actual practices and functioning programs in cultural studies instruction.¹  This collection's 19 pictures of departmental and individual efforts to realize cultural studies in English departments consequently are valuable not only as a memorial realization of the leftist project Jim Berlin variously crafted throughout his career. These essays certainly include his progress, from his earliest public school teaching through his historical books and especially the article that simultaneously named and instituted "socio-epistemic" rhetoric as a model for composition teaching. But like Berlin's spirit, this book is also very alive, an active intervention in practice for those who may know about cultural studies as academic hearsay, but who move directly into using it as a gimmick, without, as it were, passing "Go." Many, that is, think that showing their classes a movie; requiring them to write family and community narratives for later, obviously unfair, comparison with published literature; or piously assigning anthologized texts that glimpse women, African-Americans and various additional designated Others are methods that "count" as a cultural studies teaching agenda. But this volume's contributors, Berlin, and certainly co-editor Michael Vivion, who energized this pedagogic project and worked with teachers in South Africa well before it was on the post-apartheid American economic agenda to do so, all understand the premise beyond voyeurist looks at cosmopolitan multi-culturalism: cultural studies is a diverse but, as Kenneth Burke says of rhetoric, an "always addressed" politics.

Owning their commitments to cultural studies means to these authors foregoing the "just the facts, ma'am" neutrality that disguised the politically mesmerizing politics of schooled humanism over the first century of government-sponsored mass and higher education., Because this fieldnever hides its own cultural constructions-in fact, too often parades its development as a his-story of great, usually male drum majors like Raymond Williams and Stuart Hall-cultural studies as represented in this volume is openly revisionist. A great deal of work is done here around the vexations attending professional "change," which culturalism has already evoked and may further expand. This collection thereby also makes visible the agendas of ethnocentric "English" departments' traditional classist literary studies and positivist, evaluative composition programs, by its many forms of deference to them, including open critique. As a result, this volume is itself a significant historical moment in the profession around reading and writing. Its deference to tradition, of course, leaves open the question of whether the primary trope for our teaching about culture remains "comparison/contrast" or will become an equally but very differently political figure, "difference."

Cultural Studies in the English Classroom is organized in two sections, "Cultural Studies Programs" and "Cultural Studies Courses," which are introduced by Berlin and Vivion in turn. In the first section, a lead essay by Michael Blitz and C. Mark Hurlbert explores contested definitions of culture by strategically problematizing "knowledge" --both as the abstraction imagined in Hegelian mentalist terms and as the business of universities--a commodity we imagine to be either packaged in Saran-wrap to signify the supposed objectivist neutrality of hegemonic centrism, or wrapped in these coauthors' alternative, visibly labeled mode. Their alternative, they say, would "acknowledge our teaching and our classes and ourselves as subjects of culture, of history, of eco-politics, economics, and ideologies." Blitz and Hurlbert take on statements made by Maxine Hairston against the proposed English 306 syllabus at the University of Texas-Austin. They point out how objections to that course begged the question of the politics of those who raised them. By labeling the course's content as "political conformity" with the nationally popular strategy that denies the cultural management achieved by entrenched intellectual conformity, such critics narrow the "range of possibilities for knowing what has happened in the world." Brodkey and Penticoff s later essay describing the course makes it clear that there is more of what "students know" and more of rigorous rhetoric in a course based on cultural documents than in one based on expensive handbooks prescribing “convention" in all its senses.

The essays that follow in this section describe and interpret cultural studies curricula instituted at Carnegie Mellon (Alan Kennedy), the University of Pittsburgh (Philip Smith), Syracuse (Ma'sud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton; James Zebroski) and Northern Arizona University (Delores K Schriner). Each of these essays foregrounds a local politics of deciding to undertake department-wide curricular revisions, suggesting to the rest of us in university teaching that even if we do not want the notoriety attending similar events at Syracuse, Stanford, or Texas, we should propose reevaluations of our own English curricula because such discussions, whatever their outcomes, accomplish needed self-educational faculty development at the end of this century. Certainly these essays should be circulated to deans, department chairs, and graduate and undergraduate studies directors in departments of English and Educational Studies across the country. This part of the book additionally includes an essay on writing across the curriculum as a way of exposing disciplines as cultural inventions (Christine Ferris); the essay in which Linda Brodkey and Richard Penticoff explain the decidedly rational, situated, and pedagogically even conservative reasoning that shaped the proposed UT-Austin 306 pedagogy; and Anne Balsamo's exploration of the historical formation of cultural studies and how its theories have produced a series of undergraduate courses she has taught. Again, it is tempting to insist, admittedly with hyperbole, that no graduate student in English who has not read these essays be granted a degree. I say this not because I would expand current "my politics is better/bigger than yours, but there are two-sides to every argument" liberalism, a pseudo-intellectual position that is precisely illusory persuasion. But these essays represent current conversations around the humanities that are themselves embedded in increasingly consequential discussions of the status and mission of American universities. Especially flagship state institutions, the type discussed here, are now often and accurately charged with programmatic curricular unresponsiveness, a failure to re-imagine the shape of education for post-colonial societies in the next century. Academic culture is in a social and economic transition to which these essays grant access for its novice as well as established citizens, and texts that embody local versions of this conversation toward our future should be made widely available.

Clearly, I lack the jaded "this is a fad" attitude that might assign this collection to the category in which possibilities for any topic reified between book covers are, by definition, "over." Economic reality, millennial energy, and both the Old Guard's and the New Pragmatists' obvious failures to erase either diversity or difference all make it unlikely that cultural studies and its politics will disappear from re-formed discussions of what it means to include texts in any understanding of being "fully human." As Michael Vivion explains in his introduction to the second part of this volume, "Courses in Cultural Studies," the rich panoply of experiments in teaching represented by the last ten essays shows that "teachers with courage" neither always have nor inevitably will tie their success to stable "reputation," a commodity that these course descriptions suggest English-with-courage can do without. Paul Smith and Cathy Fleischer's essays lead off this section of the book, in two descriptions of reinvented courses in interpretation (once "literature") and writing (once "composition"). Smith's essay is a model simultaneous presentation of particular students' experience and one teacher's agendas. "A Course in 'Cultural Studies’” reviews the theoretical reading and objects to which it is applied in a cultural studies course that sequentially unfolded traditionally unfamiliar concepts: "'disciplinary ideology,” “the subject," “resistance,” “negotiated meanings" and others. The course resulted in what he calls an "astonishing array" of collaborative projects. But Smith's most telling pedagogic move, which marks the intellectual politics of cultural studies in its strong forms, is to insist that "we recognize that all academic disciplines--including cultural studies--function politically and ideologically." He agrees with many of its proponents that this insistence necessitates involving students in the material workings of knowledge-making, specifically by assigning and discussing theory, not hiding it to enable a teacher's disingenuous brilliance.

Cathy Fleischer's "Forming an Interactive Literacy in the Writing Class- room" might be seen as a parallel piece. It describes how cultural studies theory and practice can transform regulatory composition to engaged writing. Fleischer describes one student's painfully mechanical oscillation between her own accomplished pre-collegiate writing and flat imitation of what she hears in the academy's "voices," and offers an alternative: "Rather than seeing our classrooms as places where students primarily are introduced to the various academic discourses we are convinced they need in order to survive in college writing, we might do better to imagine our classrooms as literacy sites ... where students are encouraged to let their internally persuasive discourses ... serve ... their necessary interaction with academic talk and writing." We should not offer "introduction after introduction to various authoritative discourses," but allow students' in-formed literacies to be celebrated models for analyses that become applicable to academic encounters as well. Her writing course proceeds from focusing on students' indigenous literacy practices (e.g., the discourses of cheer leading and race track talk) to group description of classroom discourse in high school, to reading about academic literacy and applying these readings to collegiate literacy events. The course's oscillation between undertaking ethnographic description and sharing the application of this method among class members accomplishes students' right to their own language without falsely denigrating academic expectations; it puts students in charge of more literacy, not in a conflicted and hardly empowering bounce between their own and "Other" language.

Fleischer's approach obviously undoes the modernist categories characteristic of composition, especially its dichotomizing of a "public" and "personal" too often imagined as insincerity versus authenticity. But it additionally reveals modern composition's reliance on an intimidating bifurcation of academic and non-academic discourses,, a definitive split that denies their mutually generative relationship and estranges students from the socially constructed powers of either realm. This and the Brodkey/Penticoff description of English 306 in the first section of the book might well focus an entire conference on teaching writing in the next century, when we may reimagine its students as the multiply literate adjudicators of old hierarchies that postmodern economic, social and interpersonal lives will demand that they be. Neither course description denies students the cultural leadership so often excluded from their identities in traditionally regulatory composition instruction.

The other essays in this section, with more and less commitment to these introductory culturalist assumptions, take up specific opportunities in teaching. Diana George and Diana Shoos recommend using ambiguous, "unread" texts to expose "Issues of Subjectivity and Resistance"; Kathleen McCormick refigures teaching research papers by exposing points of Contradiction in textbook treatments of research, which render it a conservative exercise, and then describes a course in which students were encouraged to expose the ideological biases of the sources they relied on. Lori Robison (“‘This Could Have Been Me’”) shows how she attempted to encourage students to place themselves in their own culture by studying the 1960s, their parents' youthful era. Joel Foreman and David Shumway address using visual texts to expose cultural contestations, particularly the move on the part of the dominant who do not "simply express their interests, but behave as though their interests were shared by everyone." Their course asks about where and when a visual text was produced, its purpose and audience, its generic and commodity status, its key elements and their organization, its hailing of a reader, and the ideological work it accomplishes. Richard E. Miller and Peter Carino in turn demonstrate culturalist approaches to Les Liaisons Dangereuses and Carver's "What We Talk About When We Talk About Love," while Alan France proposes a "Post-Sexist Rhetoric," thereby completing a cluster of essays directing attention to the separate topics of sex and gender always under-represented in orthodox culturalism. Mark Fortier inadvertently shows how each of the section's essays is itself assuming a cultural position in his brief closing essay on Canadian teachings of Shakespeare in a culturalist context.

As Vivion says, these exemplars for leaching may suggest that cultural studies is too diffuse to be to be sold as a pedagogy with a difference. But, he points out, teachers who are overtly sensitive to issues of authority, to the student's identity as an institutional apprentice, to how culture and knowledge-making are identical, and to democratic critique all learn from these essays to engage the dynamics, not the fixity, of the good course that may be taught only once, in the time and the place where it is most appropriate. I wish that these essays had included greater attention to what counts as "failure" in any innovative teaching, and that the notorious opposition of rightist students to cultural studies agendas had been demonstrated. But I am even more aware that none of this collection's talk about culture, students, curricula, and teaching includes discussion of the core resistance of English professionals to the politics of culturalism, a belief that the relation between student and teacher is exempt from the very concerns their new curricula and methods may highlight. What remains unproblematized in this volume is the teacher/student "couple," the constructed "personal" dyad that teachers of composition especially retain from model(?) pedagogues like Socrates. This trope imagines potential identification and bonding between student and teacher, connection that is assumed to be transparent and untouched by the agendas of patriarchal institutions or traditional families. In all of these essays, teacher and student are two open consciousnesses--teachers on the right or the left simply have "beliefs," and students scurry around them, simply "accepting" or "resisting" the content of a course without reference to their socially-constructed relationships to its teacher. Pedagogy itself, what I take to be the images teachers have of who their students are, is a matter of more than one kind of "class difference" in public institutions. But it remains untreated in this otherwise comprehensive and relentlessly self-reflexive address to it.

I have postponed discussing what is clearly a third part of this volume, Berlin and Vivion's theoretical introduction to it, but the editors' "A Provisional Definition" of cultural studies is certainly the most highly crafted contribution to the book. The essay systematically breaks down distinctions on which English has been grounded. It shows how to deconstruct the hierarchy in the pairs of action versus contemplation, which has privileged political passivity as a marker of class status; public versus private, the neat categories that must disappear if subjects are believed to be constituted in discourses; and poetic versus rhetorical texts, an opposition that becomes moot when "English" examines textual production, aesthetic practices, and the cultural work accomplished by any reading and writing. Additionally, the essay reasons that if these pairs are joined, English may become the analysis of signifying practices, a socially active discipline. Literate production constitutes subjectivities and is a discursive action, not a mere container for prior universal values or "thought." I have a quibble with the editors' noting that class stratification imposed the historically constructed split between high and low culture, for if discursive practice is active, it is more reasonable to investigate how designating highbrow and "other" or "mass" cultures in the nineteenth century strategically created new class distinctions, not how these designations simply "validated" them. As Berlin and Vivion say, subjectivities are "the effects of signifying practices," so class identity does not determine such practices, but results from them.

This point of course raises the issue of vulgar Marxism, which the editors take on quite directly: "There is clearly a difference between the politics of critique that argues existing institutions must become part of the dialectic of examination, and the politics of revolution that argues existing institutions must be changed in preordained ways.... Teaching students the methods of critical inquiry peculiar to cultural studies while expecting them to arrive at predetermined conclusions offers only the pretense of critique." Cultural studies, at least in their view, does not situate itself as a science beyond critique, but raising this well-founded objection to Marxism leaves us wishing we could interrogate the editors' own, if different, constitutive dichotomy. The politics of critique, that is, does require change, if not dictatorships by now comparatively cheerful American "proletariats." Yet in the understandable interest of persuading the conservative, "those who have been central to the work of English studies," Berlin and Vivion establish an opposition between critique and revolution that comforts the liberal pluralist, leaving her capable of a cosmopolitan multi-culturalism that neither editor would promote, especially not on the heels of their deconstructions of hierarchic binaries that seemingly non-judgmental comparison/contrast re- lies on.

Berlin and Vivion may, however, have answered my criticism in their scrupulous comments about teachers', not students', difficult negotiations with the signifying practices of cultural theorists. 'Me editors say they sought but did not obtain contributions from teachers in community colleges, people of color, and elementary and secondary teachers. Our graduate- student reading group at the University of Utah wondered why this was so and why it was mentioned. They speculated that Berlin and Vivion's complaints about the opacity of much writing about cultural theory suggest that the groups whose contributions were unsuccessfully solicited may not have access to dense culturalist texts, are overworked, may oppose culturalist teaching, and perhaps make a choice to avoid professional subject positions they do not code as "teacherly. " These and other possibilities remind us that this book is itself situated in the discursive retraining of the twenty-first century worker, in this case the teacher, an undertaking that has strategically allowed space in late-century universities for radical critiques by leftist cultural studies. 'Rat fact, which to my mind is an enormously vexing possibility for oppositional complicity in hegemonic educational managements of culture, needed attention it did not receive here. Berlin and Vivion do note that cultural studies may become an academic commodity, but theirs is a professional worry, not a concern about how education, now especially education in cultural studies, can manage the vernacular in the interests of the regulated pious "diversity" that is becoming a new cultural norm. This norm, so easily mistaken for the politics of social justice, needs vigilant attention, especially by those who write theoretical texts that people of color and teachers in schools and community colleges are self-excluded from writing themselves.

I would be remiss if I did not, finally, assess this volume's greatest strength in light of James Berlin's recent death. Like all of his work, this collection intentionally opens a space for the projects of others. My personal gratitude for that gift of a new place in which to think, which I again am fortunate to occupy here, will continue to be shared by many--these contributors, I am sure; Jim's close friend Michael Vivion; and readers of this volume. They will findit evoking productive conversation, quibbles like mine, and further risks that Jim would have honored, as he always honored the courage to move.