BiblioVault - Books about Liu, Catherine

American Idyll

Academic Antielitism as Cultural Critique

Catherine Liu

University of Iowa Press, 2011

A trenchant critique of failure and opportunism across the political spectrum, American Idyll argues that social mobility, once a revered hallmark of American society, has ebbed, as higher education has become a mechanistic process for efficient sorting that has more to do with class formation than anything else. Academic freedom and aesthetic education are reserved for high-scoring, privileged students and vocational education is the only option for economically marginal ones.

Throughout most of American history, antielitist sentiment was reserved for attacks against an entrenched aristocracy or rapacious plutocracy, but it has now become a revolt against meritocracy itself, directed against what insurgents see as a ruling class of credentialed elites with degrees from exclusive academic institutions. Catherine Liu reveals that, within the academy and stemming from the relatively new discipline of cultural studies, animosity against expertise has animated much of the Left’s cultural criticism.

By unpacking the disciplinary formation and academic ambitions of American cultural studies, Liu uncovers the genealogy of the current antielitism, placing the populism that dominates headlines within a broad historical context. In the process, she emphasizes the relevance of the historical origins of populist revolt against finance capital and its political influence. American Idyll reveals the unlikely alliance between American pragmatism and proponents of the Frankfurt School and argues for the importance of broad frames of historical thinking in encouraging robust academic debate within democratic institutions. In a bold thought experiment that revives and defends Richard Hofstadter’s theories of anti-intellectualism in American life, Liu asks, What if cultural populism had been the consensus politics of the past three decades?

American Idyll shows that recent antielitism does nothing to redress the source of its discontent—namely, growing economic inequality and diminishing social mobility. Instead, pseudopopulist rage, in conservative and countercultural forms alike, has been transformed into resentment, content merely to take down allegedly elitist cultural forms without questioning the real political and economic consolidation of powers that has taken place in America during the past thirty years.

[more]

Copying Machines

Taking Notes for the Automaton

Catherine Liu

University of Minnesota Press, 2000

The Dreams of Interpretation

A Century down the Royal Road

Catherine Liu

University of Minnesota Press, 2007

Rethinking the importance of Sigmund Freud’s landmark book The Interpretation of Dreams a century after its publication in 1900, this work brings together psychoanalysts, philosophers, cultural theorists, film and visual theorists, and literary critics from several continents in a compilation of the best clinical and theoretical work being done in psychoanalysis today. It is unique in convening both theory and practice in productive dialogue, reflecting on the encounter between psychoanalysis and the tradition of hermeneutics. Collectively the essays argue that Freud’s legacy has shaped the way we think about not only psychology and the nature of the self but also our understanding of politics, culture, and even thought itself.

Contributors: Willy Apollon, Gifric; Karyn Ball, U of Alberta, Edmonton; Raymond Bellour, Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique; Patricia Gherovici, Philadelphia Lacan Study Group and Seminar; Judith Feher-Gurewich, New York U; Jonathan Kahana, New York U; A. Kiarina Kordela, Macalester College; Pablo Kovalovsky, Clinica de Borde; Jean Laplanche, U of Lausanne; Laura Marcus, U of Sussex; Andrew McNamara, Queensland U of Technology; Claire Nahon; Yun Peng, U of Minnesota; Gerard Pommier, Nantes U; Jean-Michel Rabaté, Princeton U; Laurence A. Rickels, U of California, Santa Barbara; Avital Ronell, New York U; Elke Siegel, Yale U; Rei Terada, U of California, Irvine; Klaus Theweleit, U of Freiburg-im-Breisgau; Paul Verhaege, U of Ghent, Belgium; Silke-Maria Weineck, U of Michigan.

Catherine Liu is associate professor of comparative literature and film and media studies at the University of California, Irvine. John Mowitt is professor and chair of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Thomas Pepper is associate professor of cultural studies and comparative literature at the University of Minnesota. Jakki Spicer received her Ph.D. in cultural studies and comparative literature from the University of Minnesota.

[more]

Virtue Hoarders

The Case against the Professional Managerial Class

Catherine Liu

University of Minnesota Press, 2021

A denunciation of the credentialed elite class that serves capitalism while insisting on its own progressive heroism

Professional Managerial Class (PMC) elite workers labor in a world of performative identity and virtue signaling, publicizing an ability to do ordinary things in fundamentally superior ways. Author Catherine Liu shows how the PMC stands in the way of social justice and economic redistribution by promoting meritocracy, philanthropy, and other self-serving operations to abet an individualist path to a better world. Virtue Hoarders is an unapologetically polemical call to reject making a virtue out of taste and consumption habits.

Forerunners: Ideas First is a thought-in-process series of breakthrough digital publications. Written between fresh ideas and finished books, Forerunners draws on scholarly work initiated in notable blogs, social media, conference plenaries, journal articles, and the synergy of academic exchange. This is gray literature publishing: where intense thinking, change, and speculation take place in scholarship.

[more]