Cultural Studies, Victorian Studies, and Graduate Education

L IKE MANY OTHER PEOPLE these days, I’m concerned about the speed-up in graduate education. The chief cause of our students’ premature professionalization is, of course, the terrible job market — which John Guillory has faulted for propagating intellectual shallowness among our students, by forcing them to become active scholars too soon. Guillory remarks, incidentally, that the social marginalization of literary studies reflected in the job crisis coincides with its strident politicization, which he reads as symptomatic of — and by no means a solution to — the decreased relevance of the discipline itself in contemporary society. What Guillory doesn’t mention, however, is the obvious role that cultural studies plays in the speed-up of graduate studies, and the way its simplistic political imperatives contribute to that speed-up. But it seems to me that the vast new territories cultural studies opens up to scholarship, along with the pressures it creates in all of us to find a hot new cultural topic (in Don DeLillo’s White Noise, one cultural studies professor to another: “I want to do with Elvis what you did with Hitler”), require a reductive politics to enable the quick consumption of knowledge that makes rapid professionalization possible. Our students are no longer surprised by our “commodify or die” ethos

Aesthetics · Art · Commodification · Consumption (sociology · Ethos · Media studies · Political science · Politics · Professionalization · Relevance (law · Scholarship · Social science · Sociology · Anthropology · Cultural Studies · Diverse Global Economic and Educational Challenges · History · Law · Literature, Musicology, and Cultural Analysis · New Zealand Economic and Social Studies

• Victorian Studies

  Maria Hewitt•Journal of Victorian Culture•2001

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