These provocative essays explore the unwritten, often unacknowledged codes, conventions, and ideologies overseeing the evolution and current practice of English as a "discipline." The first section of the book offers historical perspectives: how "composition" became distinguished from "literature," how key intellectuals shaped the discipline, and how various specialties--Renaissance literature, American literature, "theory"--became subfields. The second section focuses on how certain aesthetic categories of art and universal experience persist today in the actual teaching and writing of...
These provocative essays explore the unwritten, often unacknowledged codes, conventions, and ideologies overseeing the evolution and current practice ...
Richard M. Ohmann Elizabeth G. Traube Gage Averill
To what extent do moviemakers, television and radio producers, advertising executives, and marketers merely reflect trends, beliefs, and desires that already exist in our culture, and to what extent do they consciously shape our culture to their own ends? In-depth interviews with ten executives from the "culture industry" and five scholarly analyses examine that question, and address the issues of power and authority, meaning and identity, that arise when cultural producers define and react to audiences. In their own words, leaders from companies like Twentieth-Century Fox, National...
To what extent do moviemakers, television and radio producers, advertising executives, and marketers merely reflect trends, beliefs, and desires that ...
When it first appeared in 1976, this groundbreaking exploration of the influences of capitalism on the profession of English touched a nerve among educators and inspired Library Journal to declare, "This book should be read by all thoughtful Americans." Now, 20 years later, in a substantial new introduction that recontextualizes the book, Richard Ohmann addresses the critical furor over its initial publication, evaluates his own arguments in the aftermath of the Cold War, and locates the profession of English in the thick of the hotly contested culture wars. A remarkably prescient book whose...
When it first appeared in 1976, this groundbreaking exploration of the influences of capitalism on the profession of English touched a nerve among edu...
Richard Ohmann's work is in a class by itself. While editor of College English, and in the three books he published since then, he has created America's most comprehensive vision of how teaching and scholarship are at once part of the university, of society and of history. In Politics of Knowledge, Ohmann's essays and interviews analyze, explain and criticize the roles of the university, the academic professions and publishing in a rearranged America. Focusing on the opposed movements of a more open university and overwhelmingly powerful multinational corporations, he offers language and...
Richard Ohmann's work is in a class by itself. While editor of College English, and in the three books he published since then, he has created America...