Communication 5930
The Role of the Critic:
Intellectuals, the University and the Public Sphere
Summer 1998 (session A)


Prof. Gil Rodman
Office Hours: by appointment
CIS 3040 // 974-3025 // grodman@chuma.cas.usf.edu

This course will examine the various roles that intellectual work plays in contemporary culture and society. In particular, we will wrestle with the following questions:

Office hours

Given the collapsed timeframe of a six-week session and the fact that we'll already be seeing each other for nearly seven hours every week, I won't be holding formal office hours this summer. I am more than willing, however, to meet with folks outside of our regular class sessions as need be. To set up such a meeting, you can call me, drop me an e-mail note (at either gbr@kcii.com or grodman@chuma.cas.usf.edu), or simply tackle me after class one day and force me to pull out my date book.

Required course materials

(1) Books

Available at Inkwood Books, 216 S. Armenia, Tampa (253-2638). See separate handout for directions and store hours.

(2) Photocopied essays

Given the limits to the number of copies I can reasonably make available on reserve, I would strongly encourage y'all to engage in a photocopying "co-op" (which we'll discuss and, hopefully, set up during our first meeting). Barring such an arrangement, required readings will be made available in the Communication Department Library (CIS 3026).

(3) An e-mail account and some form of internet access

Participation in the listserv (CRITIC-L) that has been set up for this course will require you to have (and use) an e-mail account. Students without e-mail accounts should make arrangements with their department or college about getting one ASAP.

Papers

You will write three 2000-2500 word (roughly 8-10 pages) critical essays over the course of the six-week session. Topics and due dates are as follows:

Due dates are non-negotiable, partially because the short session doesn't permit us the luxury of extra time, but mostly because inflexible deadlines fit well with the nature of the assignments. Think of these as if you had to write them to meet the demands and deadlines of a tight publication schedule of a for-profit magazine/newspaper.

Listserv participation

The primary purpose of the listserv is to provide an additional forum for discussing the issues raised by the assigned readings and our thrice-weekly sessions. Prompts intended to spur on the dialogue will be posted as necessary.

Given that listservs tend to evolve in amorphous and chaotic fashion, there will be no formal bookkeeping procedures used to assess your contribution to the list. As a rough guideline, I would estimate that six substantial (i.e., more than a paragraph long) posts per person over the course of the six-week session would constitute a reasonable contribution to the discussion.

Occasionally, the list may be used to make course-related announcements (e.g., "please add the collected works of Marshall McLuhan to Monday's reading") or to pass word on about other topics that may be of interest to the class (e.g., calls for papers, upcoming conferences, recently published articles and books, etc.). So check your e-mail often.

To join the list, send an e-mail message to LISTSERV@nosferatu.cas.usf.edu in which the body of the message (not the subject) consists of:

	subscribe CRITIC-L yourfirstname yourlastname

To post to the list, send an e-mail message to CRITIC-L@nosferatu.cas.usf.edu

Additional information about the list and how to use it will be sent to you when you subscribe.

Grading policy

Those of you who've had classes with me before know that I'm not a big fan of grades at the graduate level. Presumably, your main concern here is your genuine desire to learn something, not whether you can maintain a 4.0 GPA. Assuming you show up for class consistently, participate in our discussions (in class and online) regularly, and complete the assigned papers in satisfactory fashion, you should get an A. That being said, in cases where people seem to be slacking off, I do reserve the right to go deeper into the alphabet when I fill out my final grade sheet. Under such unfortunate circumstances, how deep into the alphabet I go will be based on the following grade schedule:

	Attendance/participation	20%
	Listserv			20%
	Essays				60% (20% each)

the role of the critic

11 May
no reading

13 May
John Leo, "Intellectuals Get the Blame"
Bill Maxwell, "Ph.D.s Don't Have What It Takes"
Bruce Bawer, "Public Intellectuals: An Endangered Species?"
Jeffrey Williams, "Spin Doctorates: From Public Intellectuals to Publicist Intellectuals"
Umberto Eco, "Preface to the American Edition" [from Travels in Hyperreality]
Michael Bérubé, "Bite-Size Theory: Popularizing Academic Criticism"
Michael Bérubé, "Cultural Criticism and the Politics of Selling Out"
Michael Eric Dyson, "It's Not What You Know, It's How You Show It: Black Public Intellectuals"
Gerald Graff, "Academic Writing and the Uses of Bad Publicity"

15 May
Edward Said, Representations of the Intellectual


the role of the university

18 May
The TABLOID Collective, "Disciplining the University: How Universities Became Prime Battlegrounds in the Reagan Revolution"
Phyllis Franklin, "The Academy and the Public"
James Carey, "Political Correctness and Cultural Studies"
Henry A. Giroux, "Beyond the Ivory Tower: Public Intellectuals and the Crisis of Higher Education"

20 May
Henry A. Giroux, "Public Intellectuals and Postmodern Youth"
Lawrence Grossberg, "Bringing It All Back Home: Pedagogy and Cultural Studies"
Mark Edmundson, "On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As Lite Entertainment for Bored College Students"
Earl Shorris, "On the Uses of a Liberal Education: As a Weapon in the Hands of the Restless Poor"

22 May -- no class

25 May -- no class


speaking in (lay) tongues

27 May
paper #1 due
Rius, Marx for Beginners
David Cogswell, Chomsky for Beginners
Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt, Introducing Postmodernism

29 May
Michael Bérubé, "Pop Goes the Academy: Cult Studs Fight the Power"
Michael Bérubé, "Just the Fax, Ma'am: Or, Postmodernism's Journey to Decenter"
George Lipsitz, "What Counts as Culture?"
Greg Seigworth, assorted "Fear of a Blank Planet" columns


intellectual work and/as/or politics

1 June
Meaghan Morris, "Politics Now (Anxieties of a Petty-Bourgeois Intellectual)"
Andrew Ross, "No Respect: An Introduction"
Cornel West, "The Dilemma of the Black Intellectual"
bell hooks, "Dialectally Down With the Critical Program"

3 June
Raymond Williams, "The Future of Cultural Studies"
Stuart Hall, "Cultural Studies and Its Theoretical Legacies"
Lawrence Grossberg, "Cultural Studies: What's in a Name (One More Time)"
Meaghan Morris, "A Question of Cultural Studies"

5 June
paper #2 due
Cornel West, "The Postmodern Crisis of the Black Intellectuals"
Herman Gray, "Is Cultural Studies Inflated?: The Cultural Economy of Cultural Studies in the United States"
Gilbert B. Rodman, "Making a Better Mystery Out of History: Of Plateaus, Roads, and Traces"
Gilbert B. Rodman, "Subject to Debate: (Mis)Reading Cultural Studies"


who's an intellectual anyway?

8 June
Constance Penley, NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America
Constance Penley, "From NASA to The 700 Club (With a Detour Through Hollywood): Cultural Studies in the Public Sphere"

10 June
Lawrence Grossberg, "Teaching the Popular"
Simon Frith, "The Good, the Bad, and the Indifferent: Defending Popular Culture From the Populists"
Michael Bérubé, "Entertaining Cultural Criticism"

12 June
Henry A. Giroux, "Talking Heads and Radio Pedagogy: Microphone Politics and the New Public Intellectuals"
Susan McClary, "Living to Tell: Madonna's Resurrection of the Fleshly"
Christopher Anderson, "Reflections on Magnum, P.I."
Marlon T. Riggs, "Unleash the Queen"


intellectual work outside the academy

15 June
Katha Pollitt, Reasonable Creatures: Essays on Women and Feminism

17 June
Jon Katz, "Rock, Rap and Movies Bring You the News"
Robert Christgau, "Madonnathinking Madonnabout Madonnamusic"
Joe Wood, "Who Says a White Band Can't Play Rap?: Cultural Consumption, From Elvis Presley to the Young Black Teenagers"
Joe Wood, "Niggers, Negroes, Blacks, Niggaz, and Africans"
Joe Wood, "Bad Faith: Playing on the Moral High Ground"
Lisa Jones, "Never 'Auntie'"
Lisa Jones, "Mama's White"
Lisa Jones, "Is Biracial Enough? (Or, What's This About a Multiracial Category on the Census?: A Conversation)"
Lisa Jones, "Looking for Mariah"

19 June
Michael Ventura, "The Most Essential Documents"
Michael Ventura, "Report From El Dorado"
Michael Ventura, "The Great Wall of Hollywood"
Lewis Lapham, "Democracy in America?"
Lewis Lapham, "Who and What Is American"
Lewis Lapham, "Adieu, Big Bird"
Michael Moore, "The Movies & Me"
Michael Moore, "What You Can't Get Away With on TV"
Michael Moore, "Banned by Borders"
Michael Moore, "Don't Be Left Out"

22 June -- no class
paper #3 due
full citations

Christopher Anderson. 1987. Reflections on Magnum, P.I. In Television: The critical view, ed. Horace Newcomb, 4th ed, 112-125. New York: Oxford University Press.

Richard Appignanesi and Chris Garratt. 1995. Introducing postmodernism. New York: Totem Books.

Bruce Bawer. 1998. Public intellectuals: An endangered species? The Chronicle of Higher Education (24 April): A72.

Michael Bérubé. 1994. Bite size theory: Popularizing academic criticism. In Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics, 161-178. New York: Verso.

________. 1994. Just the fax, Ma'am: Or, postmodernism's journey to decenter. In Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics, 119-135. New York: Verso.

________. 1994. Pop goes the academy: Cult studs fight the power. In Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics, 137-160. New York: Verso.

________. 1995. Entertaining cultural criticism. Paper presented to the Unit for Criticism and Interpretive Theory Monthly Colloquium Series, University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, March.

________. 1998. Cultural criticism and the politics of selling out. In The employment of English: Theory, jobs and the future of literary studies, 216-242. New York: New York University Press.

James W. Carey. 1997. Political correctness and cultural studies. In James Carey: A critical reader, ed. Eve Stryker Munson and Catherine A. Warren, 270-291. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Robert Christgau. 1991. Madonnathinking Madonnabout Madonnamusic. Village Voice (28 May): 31-33.

David Cogswell. 1996. Chomsky for beginners. New York: Writers and Readers.

Michael Eric Dyson. 1996. It's not what you know, it's how you show it: Black public intellectuals. In Race rules: Navigating the color line, 47-76. Reading, MA: Addison-Wesley.

Umberto Eco. 1986. Preface to the American edition. Travels in hyperreality, ix-xii. Translated by William Weaver. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich.

Mark Edmundson. 1997. On the uses of a liberal education: As lite entertainment for bored college students. Harper's (September): 39-49.

Phyllis Franklin. 1992. The academy and the public. In The politics of liberal education, ed. Darryl J. Gless and Barbara Herrnstein Smith, 213-221. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Simon Frith. 1991. The good, the bad, and the indifferent: Defending popular culture from the populists. diacritics 21(4): 102-115.

Henry A. Giroux. 1995. Beyond the ivory tower: Public intellectuals and the crisis of higher education. In Higher education under fire: Politics, economics, and the crisis of the humanities, ed. Michael Bérubé and Cary Nelson, 238-258. New York: Routledge.

________. 1996. Public intellectuals and postmodern youth. In Fugitive cultures: Race, violence, and youth, 117-140. New York: Routledge.

________. 1996. Talking heads and radio pedagogy: Microphone politics and the new public intellectuals. In Fugitive cultures: Race, violence, and youth, 141-161. New York: Routledge.

Gerald Graff. 1992. Academic writing and the uses of bad publicity. South Atlantic Quarterly 91(1): 5-17.

Herman Gray. 1996. Is cultural studies inflated?: The cultural economy of cultural studies in the United States. In Disciplinarity and dissent in cultural studies, ed. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 203-216. London and New York: Routledge.

Lawrence Grossberg. 1986. Teaching the popular. In Theory in the classroom, ed. Cary Nelson, 177-200. Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

________. 1995. Cultural studies: What's in a name (one more time). Taboo: The Journal of Culture and Education 1: 1-37.

________. 1997. Bringing it all back home: Pedagogy and cultural studies. In Bringing it all back home: Essays on cultural studies, 374-390. Durham, NC: Duke University Press.

Stuart Hall. 1992. Cultural studies and its theoretical legacies. In Cultural studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, Linda Baughman, and J. Macgregor Wise, 277-294. New York: Routledge.

bell hooks. 1992. Dialectally down with the critical program. In Black popular culture, ed. Gina Dent, 48-55. Seattle: Bay Press.

Lisa Jones. 1994. Is biracial enough? (or, what's this about a multiracial category on the census?: A conversation). In Bulletproof diva: Tales of race, sex, and hair, 53-66. New York: Anchor.

________. 1994. Looking for Mariah. In Bulletproof diva: Tales of race, sex, and hair, 195-205. New York: Anchor.

________. 1994. Mama's white. In Bulletproof diva: Tales of race, sex, and hair, 28-35. New York: Anchor.

________. 1994. Never "auntie." In Bulletproof diva: Tales of race, sex, and hair, 21-27. New York: Anchor.

Jon Katz. 1992. Rock, rap and movies bring you the news. Rolling Stone (5 March): 33, 36-37, 40, 78.

Lewis Lapham. 1995. Adieu, Big Bird. In Hotel America: Scenes in the lobby of the fin-de-siècle, 253-263. New York: Verso.

________. 1995. Democracy in America? In Hotel America: Scenes in the lobby of the fin-de-siècle, 9-21. New York: Verso.

________. 1995. Who and what is American. In Hotel America: Scenes in the lobby of the fin-de-siècle, 135-145. New York: Verso.

John Leo. 1997. Intellectuals get the blame. The St. Petersburg Times (1 October): A-21.

George Lipsitz. 1990. What counts as culture? Chicago Reader (10 August): 10-11.

Bill Maxwell. 1998. Ph.D.s don't have what it takes. The St. Petersburg Times (22 April): A-17.

Susan McClary. 1991. Living to tell: Madonna's resurrection of the fleshly. In Feminine endings: Music, gender, and sexuality, 148-166. Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press.

Michael Moore. 1996. Banned by Borders. The Nation (2 December): 10.

________. 1996. Don't be left out. The Nation (16 December): 10.

________. 1996. The movies & me. The Nation (4 November): 10.

________. 1996. What you can't get away with on TV. The Nation (18 November): 10.

Meaghan Morris. 1989. Politics now (anxieties of a petty-bourgeois intellectual). In The pirate's fiancée: Feminism, reading, postmodernism, 173-186. New York: Verso.

________. 1997. A question of cultural studies. In Back to reality?: Social experience and cultural studies, 36-57. New York: Manchester University Press.

Constance Penley. 1996. From NASA to The 700 Club (with a detour through Hollywood): Cultural studies in the public sphere. In Disciplinarity and dissent in cultural studies, ed. Cary Nelson and Dilip Parameshwar Gaonkar, 235-250. New York: Routledge.

________. 1997. NASA/TREK: Popular Science and Sex in America. New York: Verso.

Katha Pollitt. 1995. Reasonable creatures: Essays on women and feminism. New York: Vintage .

Marlon T. Riggs. 1992. Unleash the queen. In Black popular culture, ed. Gina Dent, 99-105. Seattle: Bay Press.

Rius. 1976. Marx for Beginners. Translated by Richard Appignanesi. New York: Pantheon.

Gilbert B. Rodman. 1993. Making a better mystery out of history: Of plateaus, roads, and traces. Meanjin 52(2): 295-312.

________. 1997. Subject to debate: (Mis)reading cultural studies. Journal of Communication Inquiry 21(2): 56-69.

Andrew Ross. 1989. No respect: An introduction. In No respect: Intellectuals and popular culture, 1-14. New York: Routledge.

Edward Said. 1994. Representations of the intellectual. New York: Vintage.

Greg Seigworth. 1994-1995. assorted "Fear of a Blank Planet" columns. 13 Magazine.

Earl Shorris. 1997. On the uses of a liberal education: As a weapon in the hands of the restless poor. Harper's (September): 50-59.

The TABLOID Collective. 1997. Disciplining the university: How universities became prime battlegrounds in the Reagan revolution. In Mass culture and everyday life, ed. Peter Gibian, 40-60. New York: Routledge.

Michael Ventura. 1985. The great wall of Hollywood. In Shadow dancing in the USA, 163-176. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

________. 1985. "The most essential documents." In Shadow dancing in the USA, 78-84. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

________. 1985. Report from El Dorado. In Shadow dancing in the USA, 85-102. Los Angeles: Jeremy P. Tarcher.

Cornel West. 1987. The dilemma of the black intellectual. Critical Inquiry 29(4): 39-52.

________. 1992. The postmodern crisis of the black intellectuals. In Cultural studies, ed. Lawrence Grossberg, Cary Nelson, Paula A. Treichler, Linda Baughman, and J. Macgregor Wise, (eds.), Cultural Studies, 689-705. London and New York: Routledge, 1992.

Jeffrey Williams, 1995. Spin doctorates: From public intellectuals to publicist intellectuals. Voice Literary Supplement (November): 28-29.

Raymond Williams. 1989. The future of cultural studies. In The politics of modernism: Against the new conformists, 151-162. New York: Verso.

Joe Wood. 1994. Bad faith: Playing on the moral high ground. Village Voice (15 February): 26, 94.

________. 1991. Niggers, negroes, blacks, niggaz, and Africans. Village Voice (17 September): 38-39.

________. 1991. Who says a white band can't play rap?: Cultural consumption, from Elvis Presley to the Young Black Teenagers. Voice Rock & Roll Quarterly (March): 10-11.