5 - Walter Benn Michaels
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 December 2020
Summary
So my little group of peers, the 20 or 30 or 40 or however many people who are almost exactly my age and made out like bandits, we were a bunch of bright 23-year-olds, who were put in a position where we could do this stuff and we were extremely fortunate. If we were on the job market right now, we would be fucking desperate. A few of us would get lucky, still, and get jobs, like the kind of jobs we did in fact get, but it would be even more obviously luck now than it was then.
Born: 1948.
Education: University of California, Santa Barbara, BA, 1970; PhD, 1975.
Michaels was assistant professor (1974–77), professor (1987–2001), and chair of English Department (1998–2001), Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, MD; was assistant professor (1977–80), associate professor (1980–86), and professor (1986–87), University of California, Berkeley; and is professor of English (2001–) and head of department (2002–), University of Illinois, Chicago.
Michaels's work has generated a set of arguments and questions around issues that are central to literary studies: problems of culture and race, identities national and personal, the difference between memory and history, disagreement and difference, and meaning and intention in interpretation.
Publications
The Beauty of a Social Problem: Photography, Autonomy, Economy (2015), The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality (2006), The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History (2004), Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism (1995), and The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism (1987). Some of his influential articles are “Against Theory,” Critical Inquiry (1982); “Neoliberal Aesthetics: Fried, Ranciere and the Form of the Photograph” (2011); “Interview on Photography and Politics” (2011); “Meaning and Affect” (2012) (all on nonsite.org); and “The Beauty of a Social Problem,” The Brooklyn Rail (2011). Further essays have appeared in Structuralist Review, the Georgia Review, Representations, Paideuma, the San Diego Law Review, and New Literary History, as well as essay collections. He is a founding editor and regular contributor of nonsite.org.
Walter Benn Michaels was interviewed by Veeser at the MLA in Vancouver on January 11, 2015, and then again in his office at UIC in Chicago on July 28, 2015. The following text draws from both interviews.
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- Information
- The Rebirth of American Literary Theory and CriticismScholars Discuss Intellectual Origins and Turning Points, pp. 67 - 78Publisher: Anthem PressPrint publication year: 2020