Michael Bérubé tells all

I was making my rounds the other day and followed a link to an interview with Michael Bérubé. But what really caught my attention was the name of the reviewer, Frederick Luis Aldama. What!@? My eyes blinked thrice and when I opened them it was still there: Intellectual relevance: an interview with Michael Bérubé.

I suppose you’re thinking, what’s so special about that? If you’re thinking that you may not know the interwebs like I know the interwebs. Back in October 2009 Bérubé had run up a post about one of Aldama’s books, a defense of the humanities. He called Aldama out for making a bunch of bone-headed mistakes, like, e.g., asserting that Leonardo da Vinci had been inspired by Isaac Newton’s account of gravity when, as we all know, Newton was born more than a century after Leonardo had died. (And how’d that one ever get past copy-editing?) And yet Aldama was able to get past it and give us a wonderful review.

Here’s some of my favorite passages.

After telling us that he’d originally intended to go into advertising rather than academia, Bérubé admits:

Let’s just say that if I were on an admissions committee, I wouldn’t have bet on me. But one thing that stays with me from being a musician is always wanting to be asked back. Even if you didn’t like the gig. From grad school onward, anytime someone has given me a break, I’ve been grateful – and I’ve tried to show them that they didn’t make a mistake. (The flip side of this is that you want the people who didn’t believe in you to go down in history like Dick Rowe, the A&R man from Decca who turned down the Beatles.) As a drummer, I also had to learn to overcome a paralyzing fear of failure. The first time I tried to play drums in public I couldn’t do it. I promised myself I’m not doing this again until I’m plausible. I felt the same way about graduate school – I was determined to make the most of it, wherever I got in.

Ah, yes, there’s nowhere to hide. One of these days I’ll tell you about the time I fracked the opening line to “You’re Still a Young Man” (here it is done right).

Concerning his most recent book:

With The Secret Life of Stories (2016) I return to narratology – some of those readings from my early years of graduate school: Wayne Booth, Peter Rabinowitz, Frank Kermode, and Paul Riceour. (Old white guys theorizing narrative! I used to be a serious Gérard Genette fan. No one knows this about me.) Narratology and my journey with my son Jamie (I wouldn’t have read Harry Potter without him) allowed me to analyze disability in fiction in terms of narrative strategies: motives, plot devices, for instance. In this way, I was able to show that disability in fiction doesn’t even require characters with identifiable disabilities; instead, it can involve ideas about disability, meditations on the social stigma associated with disability, narrative strategies that deploy ideas about disability that function in innumerable ways. The theorizing scaffold may be old school – hell, I rely heavily, at the end, on Viktor Shklovsky’s account of defamiliarization – but I knew I was opening up whole new territory for literary criticism in a way I’ve never done. Also, I have to admit, The Secret Life of Stories was more fun to write than anything I’ve written ever.

But, you know, Michael, the discipline would be better off these days if it hadn’t turned its back on narratology, poetics, and old school structuralism back in the mid-1970s. These days, for example, we have folks theorizing about doing “surface reading” and description without actually doing it. If more people had gone with narratology and the others, there’d be more practical descriptive work around to think about and emulate. Instead it seems to be easier to theorize about something we may do sometime in the future if only we knew how! You learn by doing, not by theorizing, which comes later.

Sorry about editorializing all over your interview, Michael. And – pro tip – I'd be more circumspect about admitting to having fun.

About the virtues of writing for non-academic audiences:

As an assistant professor at the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, I was told in a friendly way that none of my writing for the Village Voice would count for tenure; it wouldn’t count against me, but it wouldn’t be a formal part of the tenure dossier, either. Still, I was encouraged to keep up the nonacademic writing as long as it was intellectually substantive. We both know that to get readers’ attention, non-academic writing actually has to be more rigorous in terms of theorizing and hailing its audiences. So, once I cleared that tenure hurdle, I knew I wanted to publish more of this kind of writing.

On working with the AAUP:

Yeah, sometimes you feel it’s like you have to build the house every day. So the first thing is really the question about institutionality and making sure that whatever you build stays around from year to year and it survives you. [...] resources. It’s why I chose to work for the American Association of University Professors (AAUP) – because that work has consequences for people’s working conditions and for policies and practices, especially with regard to academic freedom. I ran for Faculty Senate at Penn State so we could create a university-wide system for the review and promotion of fixed-term faculty. (And we did! [...]) I also wanted a conversion-to-tenure plan for long-term faculty with distinguished records but who don’t do research, along the lines Jennifer Ruth and I laid out in our book. (If they do research, great. But it shouldn’t be required for conversion to tenure. After all, these are teaching intensive jobs.) Jennifer and I argue that we can stabilize the profession of college teaching by moving as many people to tenure as possible. I couldn’t get that at Penn State, but we did create a system where fixed-term faculty can elect committees consisting entirely of fixed-term faculty to review fixed-term faculty the promotions that come with raises as well as changes of title to professorial titles. I also wanted promotions to be accompanied by multi-year contracts. We have that language now, and our administration has agreed to it, though I wish it were stronger. The upside is that our administration agrees with the Senate that we want to create a “culture of expectation” that promotions come with multi-year contracts, and we’ll keep working on that. So that’s what I’m going to spend my time doing. I want to work hand in hand with my fixed-term colleagues at Penn State to do something with what was once a random, arbitrary system, and reprofessionalize it.

Bérubé went on to point out that being President of the MLA (Modern Language Association) didn’t “really have the kind of institutional consequence I’m talking about [...] in terms of advocacy, the MLA can do a lot of things. In terms of implementation, not much.”

Finally:

I got into this business not just for the fun of reveling in ideas and doing different kinds of writing, but because the intellectual autonomy of the university is unparalleled in the American workplace. The university is a place where the people who dream of worlds that don’t exist can find a home. Those worlds don’t just exist in the theoretical sciences – they exist wherever the spark of human creativity bursts into flame. And those of us in the arts and humanities are the guardians of that flame.

I’ll close with my favorite Samuel Delaney line:

Science fiction isn’t just thinking about the world out there. It’s also thinking about how that world might be—a particularly important exercise for those who are oppressed, because if they’re going to change the world we live in, they—and all of us—have to be able to think about a world that works differently.