Showing papers by "Linda Hutcheon published in 1997"

Postmodern Provocation: History and 'Graphic' Literature

Abstract: On the postmodern literary scene, the blurring of boundaries has long been a given. For years now, the border-crossing between high art and popular culture, in particular, has been both decried and celebrated' . For Andreas Huyssen, in After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism', it is in fact the erosion of the boundary between the elite and the popular that marks the move from the modem to the postmodern in twentieth-century culture. But generic borders are also losing their comforting defining power, as fiction, history, biography, autobiography, and other genres mix to create hybrid forms that, for some, simply recall the early days of the novel's formation! and, for others, foretell the death of the novel -once again. Yet another contentious characteristic of postmodernism has been its controversial relationship with historythat is. "history" understood as both the events of the past and the narratives that tell of them. For some, to challenge the accepted objectivity of historical accounts, pointing to their constructed nature, is tantamount to questioning the truthvalue of historical narrative itself; to others, it is a welcome

Disciplinary Formation, Faculty Pleasures, and Student Risks

Abstract: INTERDISCIPLINARITY has clearly become both an embattled site of controversy and a new battle cry. For every colleague who thinks it spells the death of the discipline of English studies, there is another for whom it is the best thing yet for the health of the discipline (as well as of scholars within it). It will prevent clogging of the intellectual arteries, these others assert, and they respond to institutional hesitations or resistances with suspicion and irritation. But those resistances can have complex origins, not all of which are easily traced to innate disciplinary conservatism or intellectual purism. Of course, there are those who worry about the threat that interdisciplinarity might pose to the specificity of both literature and its analysis, to the particularity of literary criticism, to “why anyone takes [literary criticism] seriously,” as Stanley Fish writes (“Literary Criticism”). In times of budget constraint, even those who are most enthusiastic about crossing disciplinary boundaries (in either research or teaching) might understandably be loath to dismantle existing departmental structures: the humanities are too often seen as dispensable already. (Such a scenario may well be less paranoid than “metanoid”— or whatever the situation is called when it doesn't seem that enemies are everywhere; they really are). Interdisciplinary programs have a long history in North American universities. Even in more flush financial times, when they were easily staffed by borrowing faculty time from established departments, programs like women's studies have often been precariously funded. In harder times like these, different issues have arisen: for instance, some department chairs may well worry that in collaboratively taught courses the institutional credits (for the students taught by members of their departments) will be recorded elsewhere, to the department's detriment. And, of course, some administrators support interdisciplinary endeavors as a way to eliminate expensive departmental structures.