BiblioVault - Books about University

Periodizing Jameson

Dialectics, the University, and the Desire for Narrative

Phillip E. Wegner

Northwestern University Press, 2014

For a half century, the American intellectual Fredric Jameson has been a driving force in literary and cultural theory. In Periodizing Jameson, Phillip E. Wegner builds upon Jameson’s unique dialectical method to demonstrate the value of Jameson’s tools—periodization, the fourfold hermeneutic, and the Greimasian semiotic square, among others—and to develop virtuoso readings of Jameson’s own work and the history of the contemporary American university in which it unfolds.

Wegner shows how Jameson’s work intervenes in particular social, cultural, and political situations, using his scholarship both to develop original explorations of nineteenth-century fiction, popular films, and other promiment theorists, and to examine the changing fortunes of theory itself. In this way, Periodizing Jameson casts new light on the potential of and challenges to humanist intellectual work in the present.

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The Pivot

One Pandemic, One University

Robert J. Bliwise

Duke University Press, 2022

The COVID-19 pandemic presented higher education with an unprecedented challenge: How could institutions continue the basic work of teaching and research while maintaining safe environments for their faculty, staff, and students? In The Pivot, Robert J. Bliwise traces Duke University’s response to the pandemic to show how higher education broadly met that challenge head-on. Bliwise interviews people across the campus: from bus drivers and vaccine researchers to student activists, dining hall managers, and professors in areas from English to ecology. He explores the shift to teaching online and the reshaping of research programs; how surveillance testing and reconfiguring residence halls and dining sites helped limit the virus spread on campus; the efforts to promote student well-being and to sustain extracurricular programs; and what the surge in COVID-19 cases meant for the university health system. Bliwise also shows how broad cultural conversations surrounding the 2020 presidential election, climate change, free speech on campus, and systemic racism unfolded in this changed campus environment. Although the pandemic put remarkable pressures on the campus community, Bliwise demonstrates that it ultimately reaffirmed the importance of the campus experience in all its richness and complexity.

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Poor Queer Studies

Confronting Elitism in the University

Matt Brim

Duke University Press, 2020

In Poor Queer Studies Matt Brim shifts queer studies away from its familiar sites of elite education toward poor and working-class people, places, and pedagogies. Brim shows how queer studies also takes place beyond the halls of flagship institutions: in night school; after a three-hour commute; in overflowing classrooms at no-name colleges; with no research budget; without access to decent food; with kids in tow; in a state of homelessness. Drawing on the everyday experiences of teaching and learning queer studies at the College of Staten Island, Brim outlines the ways the field has been driven by the material and intellectual resources of those institutions that neglect and rarely serve poor and minority students. By exploring poor and working-class queer ideas and laying bare the structural and disciplinary mechanisms of inequality that suppress them, Brim jumpstarts a queer-class knowledge project committed to anti-elitist and anti-racist education. Poor Queer Studies is essential for all of those who care about the state of higher education and building a more equitable academy.

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Prague, Jan Hus and Prague University

Martin Nodl

Karolinum Press, 2024

Contextualizes the Czech Reformation in the setting of Prague University.

The Czech Reformation offered a radical solution to the spiritual and institutional crisis of the late medieval church at the end of the fourteenth century. The beginnings of this reform are distinctly connected with Prague University, which drew many educated people to Prague from across Europe. Through John Hus—a former Prague University student who became its rector in 1402—the Czech Reformation gave rise to a new, radical ecclesiology. Not only did Hus challenge the hierarchical system of the church, but under his influence, the Czech Reformation acquired a specific national shape, and elements of Czech messianism emerged with the university.

Prague, John Hus and Prague University explores that sentiment within Prague University, as well as its limits and restrictive consequences for the Czech Reformation and Czech medieval society. Emphasis is placed on showing how Prague and the university became a world that existed outside the Christian ecumenism of the time.

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The Production of Living Knowledge

The Crisis of the University and the Transformation of Labor in Europe and North America

Gigi Roggero

Temple University Press, 2011

Evaluating higher education institutions—particularly the rise of the “global university”—and their rapidly changing role in the global era, Gigi Roggero finds the system in crisis. In his groundbreaking book, The Production of Living Knowledge, Roggero examines the university system as a key site of conflict and transformation within “cognitive capitalism”—a regime in which knowledge has become increasingly central to the production process at large. Based on extensive fieldwork carried out through the activist method of conricerca, or “co-research,” wherein researchers are also subjects, Roggero’s book situates the crisis of the university and the changing composition of its labor force against the backdrop of the global economic crisis.

Combining a discussion of radical experiments in education, new student movements, and autonomist Marxian (or post-operaista) social theory, Roggero produces a distinctly transnational and methodologically innovative critique of the global university from the perspective of what he calls “living knowledge.”

In light of new student struggles in the United States and across the world, this first English-language edition is particularly timely.

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Proposed

The University of the United States

Edgar Wesley

University of Minnesota Press, 1936

Proposed: The University of the United States was first published in 1936. Minnesota Archive Editions uses digital technology to make long-unavailable books once again accessible, and are published unaltered from the original University of Minnesota Press editions.In Proposed: The University of the United States, Edgar Bruce Wesley claims that a reduction in the number of bureaucrats and special advisers to the government, and fewer “blunders of national proportions,” would result from the establishment of a national university in Washington.Such a university would be devoted entirely to graduate and research work. Exchange professors and visiting scholars would contribute to its services. Students would pay no tuition fees since the institution, founded and directed by the federal government, would be supported by taxation. It would be empowered to grant the usual graduate degrees and much of its work would be in the training of promising young people for government service and in carrying on “a continuous and inclusive program of social research.”The establishment of a national university is not a new idea, as Professor Wesley explains, but one that has been proposed by numerous educators and statesmen, including ten presidents of the United States. This book relates the history of the idea, presents arguments in favor of the establishment of such an institution, outlines a plan for its organization, and presents a specific bill for enactment by Congress.

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