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Symbolic War: The Cultural Politics of Proletarian Literature, 1929 - 1935
(**Status**: manuscript complete; under review for the Labor in Crisis Series (ed. Stanley Aronowitz), Temple University Press)

Contrary to its later representation as a movement in thrall to ideological dogma, proletarian literature as cultural formation is haunted by a central, even defining, anxiety: what does it mean to write about the working class in a cultural form - - literature - - that belongs to the middle class? Focusing on a broad range of literary and critical texts, __Symbolic War__ explicates this anxiety as a tension between mimetic and rhetorical desires - - between the commitment to portraying working-class experience and the inescapable awareness of a middle-class readership and literary establishment. In many “proletarian” texts, such as the 1935 anthology, __Proletarian Literature in the United States__, this tension is dramatized by the insistent presence of class-coded reader-surrogates within proletarian texts. In more spectacular cases, like Jack Conroy’s __The Disinherited__, one of the most celebrated proletarian novels, dissonant languages, motifs, and plots indicate a confusion about proletarian literature’s implied reader and a deeper confusion about the identity of the proletarian writer, suspended between working-class and middle-class. More modernist treatments of the tension between rhetorical and mimetic desires produce deconstructive fictions like those of Albert Halper and Thomas Bell, fictions which narrate the absent location of proletarian narrative somewhere between the mass culture consumed by the working classes and the literary narratives favored by more cultivated readers.

__Symbolic War__ outlines the rich cultural contexts - - from King Kong and hard-boiled detective fiction to New Deal documentary photography - - that shaped and reflected proletarian literature’s ambitions to rewrite class representation in the U.S. The book offers a series of new, extended readings of proletarian writers like Jack Conroy, Tillie Olsen, Meridel LeSueur, Thomas Bell, and Albert Halper. It also engages with the “proletarian” literary careers of more familiar figures like Edmund Wilson, Malcolm Cowley, Philip Rahv, and William Saroyan. Drawing on an eclectic theoretical milieu, including Pierre Bourdieu, Kenneth Burke, Stuart Hall, Bakhtin, the “new” ethnography, and cultural studies, Symbolic War aims not so much to refurbish the literary canon nor to complete the literary historical record. Instead the book attempts to re-read proletarian literature as a heuristic for understanding the politics of difference that structure our own post-multicultural moment and for complicating our contemporary cultural investments in the redemptive value of social difference.

Read the "Introduction" to Symbolic War: The Cultural Politics of Proletarian Literature, 1929-1935:

University 2.0: Teaching and Learning in the Managed University
(**status**: in draft, various chapters drawn from presentations and publications)

Across the globe, new media and technologies are being rapidly adopted by university faculty, administrators, and institutions. At the same time, the university as a site of knowledge production and labor is being radically restructured. Various scholars have described this restructuring as: the institution of an "academic capitalism" (Slaughter); the retooling of faculty into "managed professionals" (Rhoades); and the transformation of the university into a "knowledge factory (Aronowitz)." This change has been signaled by the new keywords that populate our discussion of the profession: contingent faculty; accountability; assessment; flexibility; efficiency.

Until now, these two currents have largely flowed past each other. Techno-philes and phobes argue for and against the best uses of technology in teaching and learning. Governance leaders and administrators argue for and against new missions, configurations, and values for higher education.


 * University 2.0** brings these separate debates into direct contact by asking: what roles does and can educational technology play in the "managed university" of the new millenium? The manuscript explores the possible and current uses of technology in teaching, learning, scholarship, and administration and governance, even as these dimensions of the university are themselves in a state of flux and change. **University 2.0** argues that educational technology is best understood as contested turf, where "top-down" institutional imperatives often conflict with realities generated within classrooms, courses, and curricula.

The manuscript begins by questioning how technology disrupts the basic elements of academic life: the document; collaboration; publication; the archive; and workspace. This first analytical section of the manuscript lays the groundwork for the second part's more synthetic discussion of how these disruptions are managed within institutional practices.