The Employment of English Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies

What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce and how can that criticism be "employed" in the culture at large? In The Employment of English, Michael Berube examines the cultural legitimacy of literary study. Berube asserts that we must situate these questions in a context in which nearly half of all college professors are part-time labor and in which English departments are torn between their traditional mission of defining the movements of literary history and the protocols of textual interpretation, and their newer tasks of interrogating wider systems of signification under rubrics like "gender," "hegemony," "rhetoric," "textuality" (including film and video), and "culture."