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"Once adjunct teaching was considered a temporary solution to faculty shortages in institutions of higher education. Now it a permanent and indispensable feature of such institutions, not just in the U.S. but worldwide. This book takes stock of this new development, concentrating primarily on the situation in the humanities. It looks at its impact on the lives of the highly-educated scholars and teachers from many parts of the world; scholars waking up to the sobering fact that higher education presents them with a two-tiered labour market in which they themselves are permanently barred from moving up to the higher tier. To them, being an adjunct teacher means experiencing frustration and hu...
“What makes the modern university different from any other corporation?” asked Columbia’s Andrew Delbanco recently in the New York Times. “There is more and more reason to think: less and less,” he answered. In this provocative book, Frank Donoghue shows how this growing corporate culture of higher education threatens its most fundamental values by erasing one of its defining features: the tenured professor. Taking a clear-eyed look at American higher education over the last twenty years, Donoghue outlines a web of forces—social, political, and institutional—dismantling the professoriate. Today, fewer than 30 percent of college and university teachers are tenured or on tenure t...
Leading voices in literary and cultural studies examine the study of literature at the college level, including the fate of theory, the rise of cultural studies, the academic “star” system, and the difficult job market.
Explores how shifts in the job market and changes in university culture and administration have influenced the "post-theory" generation of literary critics.
The Metaphor of the Monster offers fresh perspectives and a variety of disciplinary approaches to the ever-broadening field of monster studies. The eclectic group of contributors to this volume represents areas of study not generally considered under the purview of monster studies, including world literature, classical studies, philosophy, ecocriticism, animal ethics, and gender studies. Combining historical overviews with contemporary and global outlooks, this volume recontextualizes the monstrous entities that have always haunted the human imagination in the age of the Anthropocene. It also invites reflection on new forms of monstrosity in an era epitomized by an unprecedented deluge of (mis)information. Uniting researchers from varied academic backgrounds in a common effort to challenge the monstrous labels that have historically been imposed upon "the Other," this book endeavors above all to bring the monster out of the shadows and into the light of moral consideration.
The definitions of fatherhood have shifted in the twenty-first century as paternal subjectivities, conflicts, and desires have registered in new ways in the contemporary family. This collection investigates these sites of change through various lenses from popular culture - film, television, blogs, best-selling fiction and non-fiction, stand-up comedy routines, advertisements, newspaper articles, parenting guide-books, and video games. Treating constructions of the father at the nexus of patriarchy, gender, and (post)feminist philosophy, contributors analyze how fatherhood is defined in relation to masculinity and femininity, and the shifting structures of the heteronormative nuclear family. Perceptions of the father as the traditional breadwinner and authoritarian as compared to a more engaged and involved nurturer are considered via representations of fathers from the US, Canada, Britain, Australia, South Africa, and Sweden.
In this passionately argued overview, a longtime activist-scholar takes readers through the changing landscape of academic freedom. From the aftermath of September 11th to the new frontier of blogging, Robert O'Neil examines the tension between institutional and individual interests. Many cases boil down to a hotly contested question: who has the right to decide what is taught in the classroom? O'Neil shows how courts increasingly restrict professorial judgment, and how the feeble protection of what is posted on the Internet and written in email makes academics more vulnerable than ever. Even more provocatively, O'Neil argues, the newest threats to academic freedom come not from government, but from the private sector. Corporations increasingly sponsor and control university-based research, while self-appointed watchdogs systematically harass individual teachers on websites and blogs. Most troubling, these threats to academic freedom are nearly immune from legal recourse. Insisting that new concepts of academic freedom, and new strategies for maintaining it are needed, O'Neil urges academics to work together--and across rigid and simplistic divisions between left and right.
Travel writing has always been intimately linked with the construction of American identity. Occupying the space between fact and fiction, it exposes cultural fault lines and reveals the changing desires and anxieties of both the traveller and the reading public. These specially-commissioned essays trace the journeys taken by writers from the pre-revolutionary period right up to the present. They examine a wide range of responses to the problems posed by landscapes found both at home and abroad, from the Mississippi and the Southwest to Europe and the Holy Land. Throughout, the contributors focus on the role played by travel writing in the definition and formulation of national identity, and consider the experiences of minority writers as well as canonical authors. This Companion forms an invaluable guide for students approaching this new, important and exciting subject for the first time.
In Road-Book America, Rowland A. Sherrill explores how the old picaresque tradition, embodied in such novels as Henry Fielding's Tom Jones and Daniel Defoe's Moll Flanders, opens to include a number of recent American texts, both fiction and nonfiction. Sketching the socially marginal, ingenuous, travelling characters common to old and new versions of the genre, Road-Book America is a wide-ranging and sophisticated discussion of the "new American picaresque", exemplified by William Least HeatMoon's Blue Highways, John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley, James Leo Herlihy's Midnight Cowboy, Bill Moyers's Listening to America, E. L. Doctorow's Billy Bathgate, and hundreds of other narratives published in the past four decades. Open, resilient, adaptable, and perennially hopeful, the protagonist of the new American picaresque follows a therapeutic path for the alienated modern self and lays the groundwork for spiritual renewal.
Academe Degree Zero brings together ten essays that identify and critically examine the key issues facing professionals in higher education today. These include the nature and limits of anonymity in academic discourse, the ways in which affiliation and prestige temper academic judgement, and the role of collegiality in academic life. Through numerous essays, edited books and journal issues, Jeffrey R. Di Leo's cross-disciplinary work has consistently been at the edge of current thinking and critical efforts to lay bare the reality of contemporary academic life. Academe Degree Zero provides a snapshot of academic identity and relations in a time of major technological and economic transformation and in the context of growing corporatisation of higher education.