Michael Bérubé
Biographic Data
| ID | 311398 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Michael Bérubé |
| GIVEN NAMES | Michael |
| FAMILY NAME | Bérubé |
| SIGNATURE | BÉRUBÉ M |
| AFFILIATIONS | Pennsylvania State University |
| VERIFIED | No |
| TOTAL WORKS | 38 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 39 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 38 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 1989 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2023 |
| H-INDEX | 3 |
Academic Labor, Shared Governance, and the Future That Awaits Us
This essay draws on the author’s experiences in the Faculty Senate at Pennsylvania State University and cochairing a committee on COVID-19 and shared governance for the American Association of University Professors
Crip Theory: Cultural Signs of Queerness and Disability
A bold and contemporary discourse of the intersection of disability studies and queer studies Crip Theory attends to the contemporary cultures of disability and queerness that are coming out all over. Both disability studies and queer theory are centrally concerned with how bodies, pleasures, and identities are represented as "normal" or as abject, but Crip Theory is the first book to analyze thoroughly the ways in which these interdisciplinary f…
It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom
The University Is Not a Public Square: An Interview with Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth About It's Not Free Speech: Race, Democracy, and the Future of Academic Freedom
Giving Up
In response to the COVID-19 pandemic, this essay examines a variety of visions of apocalypse and civilizational collapse, asking how we can imagine a world without us (as in Alan Weisman’s book of that title), or whether we will merely eke out a post–climate disaster existence like the one predicted in Ursula K. Le Guin’s 1974 novel The Dispossessed
At Penn State, a Bitter Reckoning
The essay looks at the Sandusky scandal from the perspective of Penn State faculty members, and places it in the context of the erosion of shared governance and faculty oversight of athletic programs at Penn State and elsewhere
The Futility of the Humanities
Research Article| June 01 2011 The Futility of the Humanities Michael Bérubé Michael Bérubé Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Qui Parle (2011) 20 (1): 95–107. https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.20.1.0095 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Bérubé; The Futility of the Humanities. Qui Parle 1 June 2011; 20 (1): 95–107. doi: https://doi.org/10.5250/quiparle.20.1.0095 Download citati…
Equality, Freedom, and/or Justice for All: A Response to Martha Nussbaum
This chapter contains sections titled: Postscript: Exchange with Peter Singer References
Equality, Freedom, and/or Justice for All: A Response to Martha Nussbaum
This essay is a reply to Martha Nussbaum's “Capabilities and Disabilities.” It endorses Nussbaum's critique of the social‐contract tradition and proposes that it might be productively contrasted with Michael Walzer's critique of John Rawls in Spheres of Justice . It notes that Nussbaum's emphasis on surrogacy and guardianship with regard to people with severe and profound cognitive disabilities poses a challenge to disability studies, insofar as …
The Left at War
The terrorist attacks of 9/11 and Bush’;s belligerent response fractured the American left—partly by putting pressure on little-noticed fissures that had appeared a decade earlier. This book revisits and reinterprets the major intellectual debates and key players of the last two decades, covering the terrain of left debates in the United States over foreign policy from the Balkans to 9/11 to Iraq, and over domestic policy from the culture wars of…
Crip theory: Cultural signs of queerness and disability
Foreword: Another Word Is Possible, by Michael Berube Acknowledgments Introduction: Compulsory Able-Bodiedness and Queer/Disabled Existence 1 Coming Out Crip: Malibu Is Burning 2 Capitalism and Disabled Identity: Sharon Kowalski, Interdependency, and Queer Domesticity 3 Noncompliance: The Transformation, Gary Fisher, and the Limits of Rehabilitation 4 Composing Queerness and Disability: The Corporate University and Alternative Corporealities 5 Cr…
The Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush: Campaign 2004 as Tragedy and Farce
Research Article| January 01 2006 The Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush: Campaign 2004 as Tragedy and Farce Michael Bérubé Michael Bérubé Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google South Atlantic Quarterly (2006) 105 (1): 161–173. https://doi.org/10.1215/00382876-105-1-161 Views Icon Views Article contents Figures & tables Video Audio Supplementary Data Peer Review Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn Email Tools Icon To…
Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities
Reviewed by: Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities Michael Bérubé (bio) Paulson, William . Literary Culture in a World Transformed: A Future for the Humanities. Ithaca and London: Cornell University Press, 2001. Literary Culture in a World Transformed is a heartfelt, well-meaning, and profoundly confused book. Though William Paulson wants desperately to define a mission for the humanities and to preserve literary cu…
Disability and Narrative
After a decade of working in disability studies, I still find myself surprised by the presence of disability in narratives I had never considered to be “about” disability—in animated films from Dumbo to Finding Nemo ; in literary texts from Huckleberry Finn to Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays ; and, most curiously, even in the world of science fiction and superheroes, a world that turns out to be populated by blind Daredevils, mutant supercrips, …
Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
Research Article| January 01 2005 Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature? Michael Bérubé Michael Bérubé Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2005) 42 (2): 125–129. https://doi.org/10.2307/40247472 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Bérubé; Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature?. Comparative Literature Studies 1 January 2005; 42 (2): 125–…
Case Study: Deciding for the Patient
The Loyalties of American Studies
In the America of George Bush and John Ashcroft, Fox News television and Clear Channel radio, political dissent has not been criminalized, but it has been widely stigmatized. The master trope of the Bush administration is that of loyalty: criticism and dissent, for this White House, are simply forms of disloyalty and must be punished. This trope governs the Bush administration's approach to governance regardless of whether its critics are former …
The Utility of the Arts and Humanities
Artists and humanists who work in universities are generally ambivalent about the idea of defending their enterprises in terms of social utility: on the one hand they do not want to claim that the Arts and Humanities are such exalted and selfjustifying endeavors that no one need bother explainingwhy such things are worth pursuing, yet on the other hand they are rightly skeptical that cost-benefit analyses of academic labor will do justice to disc…
The Utility of the Arts and Humanities
Anxious Academics
Review Article| March 01 2003 Anxious Academics Michael Bérubé Michael Bérubé Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2003) 75 (1): 169–178. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-75-1-169 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Bérubé; Anxious Academics. American Literature 1 March 2003; 75 (1): 169–178. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-75-1-…
Life Stories: In Response to Deborah Minter
Literature and Medicine - Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2002
Reply to Mark Bauerlein
Research Article| February 01 2000 Reply to Mark Bauerlein Michael Bérubé Michael Bérubé Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2000) 27 (1): 217–221. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-27-1-217 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Bérubé; Reply to Mark Bauerlein. boundary 2 1 February 2000; 27 (1): 217–221. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-27-…
Autobiography as Performative Utterance
My participation in this forum is oddly--but pleasantly--overdetermined. I presume that I might be considered a plausible contributor to a discussion of autobiography and disability if we employ a capacious definition of autobiography and biography as "life writing," whereunder it could be said that I have contributed to the genre of life writing about disability by writing about my second child, Jamie, who is now eight years old and was born wit…
Pillow Talk and the Politics of Representation
Come Back to the Text Ag'in, Huck Honey
Come Back to the Text Ag’in, Huck Honey Michael Bérubé (bio) Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. By Jonathan Arac. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. 254 + ix pages. $18.95. The past twenty years have witnessed a remarkable series of misadventures for Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In 1982, John Wallace, a black teacher at (where else but) the Mark Twain Intermediate School …
Higher Education under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities
The contributors to this collection explore why--and how--higher education in America under attack
The Utility of the Arts and Humanities
Artists and humanists who work in universities are generally ambivalent about the idea of defending their enterprises in terms of social utility: on the one hand they do not want to claim that the Arts and Humanities are such exalted and selfjustifying endeavors that no one need bother explainingwhy such things are worth pursuing, yet on the other hand they are rightly skeptical that cost-benefit analyses of academic labor will do justice to disc…
The Loyalties of American Studies
In the America of George Bush and John Ashcroft, Fox News television and Clear Channel radio, political dissent has not been criminalized, but it has been widely stigmatized. The master trope of the Bush administration is that of loyalty: criticism and dissent, for this White House, are simply forms of disloyalty and must be punished. This trope governs the Bush administration's approach to governance regardless of whether its critics are former …
Autobiography as Performative Utterance
My participation in this forum is oddly--but pleasantly--overdetermined. I presume that I might be considered a plausible contributor to a discussion of autobiography and disability if we employ a capacious definition of autobiography and biography as "life writing," whereunder it could be said that I have contributed to the genre of life writing about disability by writing about my second child, Jamie, who is now eight years old and was born wit…
The Utility of the Arts and Humanities
Pillow Talk and the Politics of Representation
Bite Size Theory: Popularizing Academic Criticism
In the course of this essay I'm going to argue three things: one, popularizing the work of academic cultural criticism is something we absolutely must do, something we cannot not want; two, there isn't a chance in the world that academic criticism will ever be popular; and three, the kind of criticism known as critical theory already is popular. In other words, one of the primary things I want to address here is the question of what we mean by po…
Hybridity in the Center: An Interview with Houston A. Baker, Jr
The following interview was conducted in the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, February 29 and March 1, 1992. Berube: It's ironic to me that you have, at this point, something like twenty titles to your credit - three books of poetry, eight books of criticism, eight or nine collections of essays, more than I can keep up with myself, and the one sentence that gets circulated more than any other…
Avant-Gardes and De-Author-Izations: Harlem Gallery and the Cultural Contradictions of Modernism
It be premature to speak of on work of Melvin Tolson; so few academic critics have paid him any attention that it is more accurate to speak of than consensus -unless, indeed, neglect is itself critical consensus. Still, what little attention he has received has nevertheless tended to strike a common chord: most critics who write on Tolson feel compelled to deal with reasons for his consignment to a nearly universal critical oblivion, and most cri…
Avant-Gardes and De-Author-Izations: Harlem Gallery and the Cultural Contradictions of Modernism
It be premature to speak of on work of Melvin Tolson; so few academic critics have paid him any attention that it is more accurate to speak of than consensus -unless, indeed, neglect is itself critical consensus. Still, what little attention he has received has nevertheless tended to strike a common chord: most critics who write on Tolson feel compelled to deal with reasons for his consignment to a nearly universal critical oblivion, and most cri…
No Respect: Intellectuals and Popular Culture
Hybridity in the Center: An Interview with Houston A. Baker, Jr
The following interview was conducted in the Center for the Study of Black Literature and Culture at the University of Pennsylvania, February 29 and March 1, 1992. Berube: It's ironic to me that you have, at this point, something like twenty titles to your credit - three books of poetry, eight books of criticism, eight or nine collections of essays, more than I can keep up with myself, and the one sentence that gets circulated more than any other…
Technoculture
Marginal Forces/Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon
Bite Size Theory: Popularizing Academic Criticism
In the course of this essay I'm going to argue three things: one, popularizing the work of academic cultural criticism is something we absolutely must do, something we cannot not want; two, there isn't a chance in the world that academic criticism will ever be popular; and three, the kind of criticism known as critical theory already is popular. In other words, one of the primary things I want to address here is the question of what we mean by po…
Love and Theft: Blackface Minstrelsy and the American Working Class
The Blessed of the Earth
Not long after graduate students at the University of Kansas voted to unionize, affiliating themselves with the American Federation of Teachers, I was invited to speak at Kansas on the future of graduate study in the humanities. In the course of my talk, I not only endorsed the unionization of graduate students at KU and elsewhere, but also referred, in passing, to what I called the bad faith attempt of administrators and faculty at Yale Universi…
Intellectual inquiry and academic activism
Higher Education under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities
The contributors to this collection explore why--and how--higher education in America under attack
American Anatomies: Theorizing Race and Gender
In this brilliantly combative study, Robyn Wiegman challenges contemporary cliches about race and gender, a formulation that is itself a cliche in need of questioning. As part of what she calls her disloyalty, she turns a critical, even skeptical, eye on current debates about multiculturalism and difference while simultaneously exposing the many ways in which white racial supremacy has been reconfigured since the institutional demise of segregati…
First-Person Microethics Deriving Principles from below
conventional claim made for first-person accounts of illness--a term loosely applied to present collection--is that such stories can teach professionals illness feels like as an experience of suffering and professional behavior looks like to those being treated. That claim can certainly be made for each of these books. authors have little interest in describing illness as pathology; instead they emphasize living with suffering, though that suffer…
Pistols for Two
Come Back to the Text Ag'in, Huck Honey
Come Back to the Text Ag’in, Huck Honey Michael Bérubé (bio) Huckleberry Finn as Idol and Target: The Functions of Criticism in Our Time. By Jonathan Arac. Madison, Wisc.: University of Wisconsin Press, 1997. 254 + ix pages. $18.95. The past twenty years have witnessed a remarkable series of misadventures for Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In 1982, John Wallace, a black teacher at (where else but) the Mark Twain Intermediate School …
Reply to Mark Bauerlein
Research Article| February 01 2000 Reply to Mark Bauerlein Michael Bérubé Michael Bérubé Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google boundary 2 (2000) 27 (1): 217–221. https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-27-1-217 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Bérubé; Reply to Mark Bauerlein. boundary 2 1 February 2000; 27 (1): 217–221. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/01903659-27-…
Autobiography as Performative Utterance
My participation in this forum is oddly--but pleasantly--overdetermined. I presume that I might be considered a plausible contributor to a discussion of autobiography and disability if we employ a capacious definition of autobiography and biography as "life writing," whereunder it could be said that I have contributed to the genre of life writing about disability by writing about my second child, Jamie, who is now eight years old and was born wit…
Pillow Talk and the Politics of Representation
Life Stories: In Response to Deborah Minter
Literature and Medicine - Volume 21, Number 1, Spring 2002
The Utility of the Arts and Humanities
Artists and humanists who work in universities are generally ambivalent about the idea of defending their enterprises in terms of social utility: on the one hand they do not want to claim that the Arts and Humanities are such exalted and selfjustifying endeavors that no one need bother explainingwhy such things are worth pursuing, yet on the other hand they are rightly skeptical that cost-benefit analyses of academic labor will do justice to disc…
The Utility of the Arts and Humanities
Anxious Academics
Review Article| March 01 2003 Anxious Academics Michael Bérubé Michael Bérubé Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google American Literature (2003) 75 (1): 169–178. https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-75-1-169 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Bérubé; Anxious Academics. American Literature 1 March 2003; 75 (1): 169–178. doi: https://doi.org/10.1215/00029831-75-1-…
Case Study: Deciding for the Patient
The Loyalties of American Studies
In the America of George Bush and John Ashcroft, Fox News television and Clear Channel radio, political dissent has not been criminalized, but it has been widely stigmatized. The master trope of the Bush administration is that of loyalty: criticism and dissent, for this White House, are simply forms of disloyalty and must be punished. This trope governs the Bush administration's approach to governance regardless of whether its critics are former …
Disability and Narrative
After a decade of working in disability studies, I still find myself surprised by the presence of disability in narratives I had never considered to be “about” disability—in animated films from Dumbo to Finding Nemo ; in literary texts from Huckleberry Finn to Joan Didion's Play It As It Lays ; and, most curiously, even in the world of science fiction and superheroes, a world that turns out to be populated by blind Daredevils, mutant supercrips, …
Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature
Research Article| January 01 2005 Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature? Michael Bérubé Michael Bérubé Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Comparative Literature Studies (2005) 42 (2): 125–129. https://doi.org/10.2307/40247472 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Twitter Permissions Search Site Citation Michael Bérubé; Cultural Studies and Comparative Literature?. Comparative Literature Studies 1 January 2005; 42 (2): 125–…
Sociology (24 works) · Art (20 works) · Political science (20 works) · Law (15 works) · History (14 works) · Aesthetics (12 works) · Computer Science (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Politics (8 works) · Psychology (8 works)