Faculty Directory
Michael Berube
Paterno Professor in English Literature and Science, Technology, and Society
Contact:
221 Burrowes Building
University Park, PA 16802
Office Phone: 814-863-5742
mfb12@psu.edu
Office Hours:
Tuesday 11-1 and Wednesday 4-5
Michael Bérubé is the Paterno Family Professor in Literature at Pennsylvania State University . He is the author of six books to date : Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon (Cornell University Press, 1992 ); Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics (Verso, 1994); Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child (Pantheon, 1996; paper edition, Vintage, 1998); The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies (New York University Press, 1998); What ' s Liberal About the Liberal Arts?: Classroom Politics and “ Bias ” in Higher Education (W. W. Norton, 2006) and Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities (University of North Carolina Press, 2006). He is also the editor of The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies (Blackwell, 2004), and, with Cary Nelson, of Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities (Routledge, 1995). Bérubé has written over a hundred and fifty essays for a wide variety of academic journals such as American Quarterly , the Yale Journal of Criticism , Social Text , Modern Fiction Studies , and the minnesota review , as well as more popular venues such as Harper's , the New Yorker , Dissent , The New York Times Magazine , the Washington Post , the Nation , and the Boston Globe . Life As We Know It was a New York Times Notable Book of the Year for 1996 and was chosen as one of the best books of the year (on a list of seven) by Maureen Corrigan of National Public Radio. Bérubé is a member of the Advisory Board of the Penn State Center for American Literary Studies.
Awards:
National Humanities Center fellow, March 2006 (Assad Meymandi Fellowship)
University Scholar, University of Illinois
University of Illinois Incomplete List of Excellent Teachers, 1990-97, 1999, 2000
Life As We Know It selected by Maureen Corrigan of NPR "Fresh Air" as one of the best books of 1996 (on a list of seven); also selected by The New York Times as one of the notable books of the year
Life As We Know It (in Harper's ) awarded honorable mention in "Best American Essays," 1994
University of Illinois Research Board, Humanities Released Time Fellowship, 1996-97
Fellow, Program for the Study of Cultural Values and Ethics, University of Illinois, 1993-94
Academic Specialist Grant, U.S. Information Agency, to conduct American Literature seminars in Brazil, 1993
University of Illinois Research Board, Humanities Released Time Fellowship, 1990-91
National Endowment for the Humanities Summer Stipend, 1990
Books
Rhetorical Occasions: Essays on Humans and the Humanities . Forthcoming from the University of North Carolina Press, 2006.
What's Liberal About the Liberal Arts? Classroom Politics and “Bias” in Higher Education . W. W. Norton, 2006.
The Employment of English: Theory, Jobs, and the Future of Literary Studies. New York University Press, 1998.
Life As We Know It: A Father, A Family, and an Exceptional Child. Pantheon, 1996. Paper edition published by Vintage, 1998.
Public Access: Literary Theory and American Cultural Politics. Verso, 1994.
Marginal Forces / Cultural Centers: Tolson, Pynchon, and the Politics of the Canon . Cornell University Press, 1992.
Edited Books
The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies . Blackwell, 2004. Contributors: Rita Felski, John Frow, Jane Juffer, Jonathan Sterne, David Shumway, David Sanjek, Barry Faulk, Irene Kacandes, Steve Rubio, and Laura Kipnis.
Higher Education Under Fire: Politics, Economics, and the Crisis of the Humanities . Edited with Cary Nelson. Routledge, 1995. Contributors: Michael Apple, Ernst Benjamin, Linda Brodkey, Troy Duster, Michael Eric Dyson, Judith Frank, Henry Giroux, Todd Gitlin, Gerald Graff, Barry Gross, Jeffrey Herf, Gregory Jay, Paul Lauter, Cameron McCarthy, Linda Ray Pratt, Joan Wallach Scott, Carol Stabile, Michael Warner, and Jerry Watts.
Articles
Contributions to Scholarly Journals
“The Eighteenth Brumaire of George W. Bush: Campaign 2004 as Tragedy and Farce.” South Atlantic Quarterly 105.1 (2006): 161-73. Special issue. AmBushed: The Costs of Machtpolitik , edited by Dana D. Nelson.
“Disability and Narrative.” PMLA 120.2 (2005): 568-76.
“The Loyalties of American Studies.” American Quarterly 56.2 (2004): 223-33.
“The Utility of the Arts and Humanities.” Arts and Humanities in Higher Education ( UK ) 2.1 (2003): 23-40.
“American Studies without Exceptions.” PMLA 118.1 (2003): 103-13.
“Introduction: Worldly English.” Modern Fiction Studies 48.1 (2002): 1-17; introductory essay for the special issue I guest-edited on “Postmodernism and the Globalization of English.”
“Teaching to the Six.” Pedagogy 2.1 (2002): 3-15.
“Days of Future Past.” ADE Bulletin 131 (2002): 20-26.
"Autobiography as Performative Utterance." American Quarterly 52.2 (2000): 339-43. Part of special section,
"The Empire of the ' Normal ': A Forum on Disability and Self-Representation," G. Thomas Couser, editor.
"The Blessed of the Earth." Social Text 49 (1997): 75-95. Reprinted in Will Teach for Food: Academic Labor in Crisis , edited by Cary Nelson (University of Minnesota Press, 1997): 154- 82.
"Against Subjectivity." PMLA 111.5 (1996): 1063-68. Special forum on "The Place of the Personal in Scholarship."
"Professional Obligations and Academic Standards." Centennial Review 80.2 (1996): 223-52. Special issue on the future of graduate education in the humanities.
"Straight Outta Normal." (Essay on avant-garde publishing and Fiction Collective 2.) Critique: Studies in Contemporary Fiction 37.3 (1996): 188-204.
"Cultural Criticism and the Politics of Selling Out." Electronic Book Review 2 (Spring 1996). Focus essay of a symposium on the relation between cultural criticism and social policy, with replies by Marjorie Perloff, Gregory Ulmer, Cary Wolfe, Robert Markley, Jamie Owen Daniel, and others. Originally published, along with my reply, “Selling Out in a Buyer's Market,” at http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr2/2berube.htm.
"Peer Pressure: Literary and Cultural Studies in the Bear Market." the minnesota review 43-44 (1996): 131-44.
"Bite Size Theory: Popularizing Academic Criticism." Social Text 36 (1993): 84-97.
“Disuniting America Again." Journal of the Midwest Modern Language Association 26.1 (1993): 31- 46.
"Exigencies of Value." the minnesota review 39 (fall/winter 1992/93): 63-87.
"Winning Hearts and Minds." Yale Journal of Criticism 5.2 (1992): 1-25.
"Just the Fax, Ma'am--Or, Postmodernism's Journey to Decenter." Village Voice Literary Supplement 99 (October 1991): 13-17. Cover essay for the VLS' tenth anniversary issue. Reprinted in Postmodern American Fiction: A Norton Anthology , ed. Paula Geyh, Fred G. Leebron, and Andrew Levy (W. W. Norton, 1997). Reprinted in War of the Words: 20 Years of Writing on Contemporary Literature , edited by Joy Press (Three Rivers, 2001): 186-99.
"Masks, Margins, and African-American Modernism: Melvin Tolson's Harlem Gallery ." PMLA 105.1 (1990): 57-69.Reprinted in Contemporary Literary Criticism volume 105 ( Detroit : Gale): 264- 73.
"Avant-Gardes and De-Author-izations: Harlem Gallery and the Cultural Contradictions of Modernism." Callaloo 12.1 (1989): 192-215.
Chapters in Books
“Plot Summary: Motives and Narrative Mechanics in Underworld and White Noise .” MLA Approaches to Teaching DeLillo's White Noise ,” edited by John Duvall and Timothy Engles (MLA, 2006): 135-43.
“The ‘Cultures' of Cultural Studies.” Redefining Culture: Perspectives Across the Disciplines , edited by John R. Baldwin, Sandra L. Faulkner, Michael L. Hecht, and Sheryl L. Lindsley (Mahwah: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates, Inc., 2006): 77-82.
“Disability,” “Empiricism,” “Experience,” “Materialism,” “Objectivity,” “Pragmatism,” and “Relativism.” Entries for New Keywords: A Revised Vocabulary of Culture and Society , edited by Tony Bennett, Lawrence Grossberg, and Meaghan Morris. London : Blackwell, 2005.
“Disability, Democracy, and the New Genetics.” Genetics, Disability, and Deafness , edited by John Vickrey Van Cleve (Gallaudet UP, 2004): 202-20.
“There is Nothing Inside the Text, or, Why No One's Heard of Wolfgang Iser.” Postmodern Sophistry: Stanley Fish and the Critical Enterprise , edited by Gary A. Olson and Lynn Worsham (SUNY, 2004): 11-26.
“Race and Modernity in Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist .” Science, Technology, and the Humanities in Recent American Fiction , ed. Peter Freese and Charles B. Harris. Arbeiten zur Amerikanistik v. 35 ( Essen : Die Blaue Eule, 2004) ( Germany ): 105-29; published in the United States in The Holodeck in the Garden: Science and Technology in Contemporary American Fiction (Dalkey Archive P, 2004): 163-78.
“Working for the U.” Affiliations: Identity in Academic Culture , edited by Jeffrey R. Di Leo (U of Nebraska P, 2003): 33-43.
"The Return of Realism and the Future of Contingency." What's Left of Theory? New Work on the Politics of Literary Theory , edited by Judith Butler, John Guillory, and Kendall Thomas (Routledge, 2000): 137-56.
"Max, Media, and Mimesis: Bigger's Representation in Native Son ." MLA Approaches to Teaching Wright's Native Son , edited by James A. Miller (MLA, 1997): 112-19.
"Professional Advocates: When Is 'Advocacy' Part of One's Vocation?" Advocacy in the Classroom: Problems and Possibilities , ed. Patricia Meyer Spacks (St. Martin's Press, 1996): 186-97.
"Life as We Know It." (Essay on genetics, evolution, and my second child, James, born in 1991 with Down Syndrome.) Confessions of the Critics , edited by H. Aram Veeser (Routledge, 1996): 187-204. A shorter version of this essay appeared in Harper's 289 (December 1994): 41-51. Reprinted in In Context , edited by Ann Feldman, Nancy Downs, and Ellen McManus (Longman, 2002): 416-24.
"Discipline and Theory." Wild Orchids and Trotsky: Messages from American Universities , edited by Mark Edmundson (New York: Viking Penguin, 1993): 171-92.
National Professional Service:
Member of the American Association of University Professors National Council, 2005-Member of the American Association of University Professors Executive Committee, 2006-Chair, NCTE Orwell and Doublespeak Awards Committee, 2006-
MLA Executive Council, 2002-05
MLA Executive Council Subcommittee on the Evaluation of Standards for Tenure and Promotion, 2004-05
MLA Delegate Assembly Organizing Committee, 2002-05
MLA Committee on Disability Issues, 1999-2000; co-chair, 1999-2002
MLA Nominating Committee, 1999-2000
MLA Delegate Assembly, 1996-98; 2000-05 Editorial committee, Profession, 1996-98
Advisory Council, MLA American Literature Section, 1997-99
Member of the editorial boards of:
Comparative Literature Studies, Contemporary Literature, Electronic Book Review, Iowa Journal of Cultural Studies, Journal of Aesthetic Education, Journal of Sport and Social Issues, The Minnesota Review, Modern Fiction Studies, Pedagogy, Postmodern Culture, Twentieth-Century Literature, Symplok
Member of the Board of Literary Advisors, Electronic Literature Organization
