The New and the Noteworthy and the Making of a Civil Society

The N ew and the Noteworthy and the Making of a Civil Society Patricia Badir Sandra Tome University of British Columbia T o answer the questions posed to us by the editors of this collec­ tion, we undertook a survey of similar efforts at reassessing the state of the discipline. Along with the Guillory and Butler collection upon which this volume is modeled, we took a look at leading theoretical journals—Critical Inquiry, Poetics Today and New Literary History—that have been engaged in efforts similar to our own. What’s in, what’s out, what’s left of literary stud­ ies? We thought we’d lay it all out in an academic fashionista’s “style file.” OUT FIVE MINUTES AGO IN representation interpellation imagination knowledge senses cognition textuality performativity poetics bodies mimics souls history anthropology neuroscience anxiety pleasure faith national postcolonial transnational matrices trajectories ecologies others selves DNA commodities things relics discourse speech myth the hegemonic the everyday the sacred ESC 29.1-2 (March/June 2003): 7-16 Patricia Badir is Associate Professor of English at the University of British Columbia. She specializes in Renaissance literature and she has published on community identity and public space in Medieval and Reformation dramatic entertainments. Her current research is on vision and image in post-medieval devotional writing. She also studies early twentieth-century Canadian drama. She has published articles in Theatre Journal, Modern Drama, Theatre Survey, TheJournal ofMedieval and Early Modern Studies, Exemplaria, BC Studies and Theatre Research in Canada and she is completing her first book: The Maudlin Impression: English Religious Writing and the Image ofMary Magdalen, 1560-1700. The contents of this handy guide to scholarly chic, not to mention the decision to produce it in the first place, suggest that if there is anything left of English Studies, it certainly isn’t the Left. The modes of critical analysis associated with the New Historicism and with Cultural Studies are, it seems, going the way of the power suit. And for those of us schooled in the 1990s by the acolytes of Derrida and Foucault, perusing the landscape of the new and the noteworthy can have the same effect on the scholarly self-image as the glossy pages of Wallpaper and InStyle have on the ward­ robe. We found ourselves feeling a bit like Reese Witherspoon’s character in Legally Blonde. “Don’t stomp your little last season’s Prada shoes at me, honey,” says the cheekily hip antagonist. And like Witherspoon’s Elle, we are tempted to gasp in defiant horror: “My shoes are n o t last season’s!” Our first response to this whole enterprise was thus predictable. Presented with the task of looking at cutting edge scholarship, we prepared to launch into a discussion of the infection of literary academia by postmodern commodity culture’s ceaseless thirst for the cutting edge—a discussion made all the more cogent, we felt, by the university infrastructure’s recent imperatives: the humanities, we keep getting told, must “change.” We must embrace “innovation.” But this first impulse to embrace “left” critique led to some questions: What guise are we wearing that makes us look so desperately in need of a change? Whose “innovative” fashions are we being asked to follow instead? The answers are not as straightforward as our “Out” modes of analysis would lead us to expect. If the rhetoric of sshrc administrators is to be believed we really are looking quite frumpy these days, like people who hang around the house in track pants, sshrc President Marc Renaud, in his address given to the 2002 Canadian Association of Graduate Studies conference (“The Human Sciences: The Challenge of Innovation”), notes that “[s]ince the Second World War, disciplinary specialization and peer-reviewed publications have framed the academic world” and as a result “scholars have come to be perceived as being lodged in ivory tower silos, driven more by their abstract interests than by a will to contribute to the larger public good. Add to this perception the massive increase in student enrolment and the drastic budgetary cutbacks of the 1980s and the 1990s, and inevitably you get a research community in which several participants feel defensive, unfamiliar...

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