How to Be an Intellectual

JEFFREY J. WILLIAMS has published widely on criticism, the novel, and the politics of higher education, in Dissent, The Chronicle of Higher Education, LARB, Salon, and VLS, as well as in major academic journals. He is one of the editors of the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism. He also served as editor of the minnesota review from 1992 to 2010. He is Professor of English and of Literary and Cultural Studies at Carnegie Mellon University.

• Acknowledgments Introduction Part One: The Politics of Criticism 1. How to Be an Intellectual: Rorty v. Ross 2. The Retrospective Tenor of Recent Theory 3. The Rise of the Theory Journal 4. How Critics Became Smart 5. Publicist Intellectuals 6. The Ubiquity of Culture 7. Credibility and Criticism: On Walter Benn Michaels 8. The Statistical Turn in Literary Criticism Part Two: Profiles in Criticism 9. Prodigal Critics: Bloom, Fish, and Greenblatt 10. A Life in Criticism: M. H. Abrams 11. Bellwether: J. Hillis Miller 12. The Political Theory License: Michael Walzer 13. The Critic as Wanderer: Terry Eagleton 14. From Cyborgs to Animals: Donna Haraway 15. Intellectuals and Politics: Stefan Collini 16. The Editor as Broker: Gordon Hutner 17. Gaga Feminism: Judith "Jack" Halberstam 18. Book Angst Part Three: The Predicament of the University 19. The Pedagogy of Debt 20. Student Debt and the Spirit of Indenture 21. The Academic Devolution 22. The Neoliberal Bias of Higher Education 23. The University on Film 24. The Thrill Is Gone 25. Unlucky Jim 26. Academic Opportunities Unlimited Part Four: The Personal and the Critical 27. The Pedagogy of Prison 28. Shelf Life 29. Teacher: Remembering Michael Sprinker 30. My Life as Editor 31. Other People's Words 32. Long Island Intellectual

"This is a book full of shrewd insights, illuminating and suggestive histories of how the intellectual has been and could be. The criticism without footnotes approach helps bring the crucial questions into a much clearer and open light than is usual. In short, it helps to make its reader an intellectual. This is a vital and necessary book." -- -Thomas Docherty Left History: A Interdisciplinary Journal of Historical Inquiry and Debate "Jeffrey Williams has provided ample evidence here of a passionate and principled intellectual engagement with the political and financial interests that are combining forces to gut higher education. There could not be a better time for all of us working in the academy to follow his example." -Academe "No one has chronicled the lives and times of modern intellectuals as astutely as Jeff Williams. The breadth and depth of this brilliant guidebook to the shifting landscape of the last quarter-century showcases his unparalleled talents as a critic, reporter, editor, scholar, and independent thinker." -- -Andrew Ross New York University "Jeff Williams makes the case that the university, thanks in part to the dramatic loss of job security for faculty, is no longer marginal to American life, but central to it. His book is compulsively readable, lucid without being populist. It makes you see that while being an intellectual is hard in all sorts of ways, old and new, it's still worth giving it a try." -- -Bruce Robbins Columbia University "'How to Be an Intellectual' can best be recommended because of Williams scathing and fact-filled indictment of colleges, in concert with the politicians, who have decided that the education biz is just that: a business." -- Irving Spivak -RALPH & The Folio "The book's 32 essays cover a vast stretch of territory, from profiles of prominent critics to the impacts of student debt to an analysis of how universities are portrayed in film... The book thus draws connections between 'post-welfare state university' and everything from the importance of being 'smart' to the 'conceptual shrinkage' in literary theory." -InSide Higher Ed "For more than twenty years, Jeff Williams has been one of the indispensable critics of the politics of American higher education, and one of the most reliable and perceptive commentators on the intellectual trajectory of cultural studies. Since taking over the minnesota review in the early 1990s (when he was what, maybe twenty years old?), he has also become something else: the most astute and rigorous interviewer in the business. No one has even attempted to perform the kind of interlocutor/archaeologist role Jeff has defined for himself-and I am not sure anyone could. Every essay here, and every interview, offers an invaluable demonstration of how to be a responsible, engaged, and organic intellectual." -- -Michael Berube Director, Institute for the Arts and Humanities, Pennsylvania State University "The 'criticism without footnotes' that Jeffrey Williams proposes and enacts in How to Be an Intellectual makes for lively and engaging reading. His shrewd assessments of contemporary critical pashas, schools, and fashions are necessary reading for anyone involved in the literary and cultural issues of our times." -- -Laura Kipnis "The scope of this book is astonishing, and Williams in one of the very few academic writers who could have pulled it off." -- -Frank Donoghue The Ohio State University "Critics, books, journals, institutions, money: Jeffrey Williams takes on the many faces of the humanities in this engaging book. If only more scholars wrote with such verve and clarity! How to be an Intellectual is the perfect guide to the idiosyncrasies of academic life." -- -Rita Felski University of Virginia