Shaming and the Pop Culture Canon

A Facebook status update from a colleague here at the English Department of the University of Basel:

genuine shock and dismay that only 50% of my class has seen Star Wars!!!!

My comment (among the others that had already commented):

For years now (decades even), I have joked with students that it's okay to have never read "Hamlet" but it's not okay to have never seen "The Wizard of Oz." And until just now, I've always meant it as a joke.

But your status here made me realize that there's something more serious going on: in contemporary culture, there's no particular reason to have not "done" any particular traditionally canonical work, be it "Hamlet" or "The Odyssey" or "Pride and Prejudice." If you haven't, oh well, you haven't.

But if no excuse is necessary for not being up on the "high culture" canon ("high culture": for lack of a better term), there is still no excuse for not being up on the "pop culture" canon. Failure to have kept up with that canon is now the acceptable location of cultural shaming.

In short, the proper response to those 50% is not to joke with them about not seeing "Hamlet" or the like—the proper response is to shame them as an earlier generation of professors would have shamed those who exposed their ignorance about the classic canon of literature and art.

(I'll leave it to you to decide whether this is yet another joke. Who can tell, after all, when Shields starts talking like this, just how serious he is actually being?)

Opening for Lecturer in English Language Practice and (Applied) Linguistics

Here's a job opening for someone to be my colleague at the English Department of the University of Basel. Deadline for applications is April 1, 2013, but it's no joke!

Blog for My Simon Armitage Seminar

I've started a blog for my course on Simon Armitage that is starting next week. The students will be posting there; I'll continue with more posts on Armitage here. (May the discussions in the seminar be as interesting as the discussion of my post on "Night Shift"!)

Fritz Senn and Klaus Reichert in Basel

In collaboration with the Theater Basel, the English Seminar of the University of Basel has organised a James Joyce double bill:

Thursday, February 21, Theater Basel, Literatursalon, Klosterberg 6, 8:00 p.m.: Fritz Senn, the Joyce expert and director of the Joyce Archive in Zurich, will give a talk about Ulysses combined with a reading of a passage of the novel by Bastian Semm.

Friday, February 22, English Seminar, Nadelberg 6, Basel, in the room called the Cave, 10.15 - 11.45 a.m.: Fritz Senn and Klaus Reichert, also an eminent Joyce scholar and editor, will have a public conversation and will also be available for questions from the audience and prepared to give students advice on a first approach to Ulysses.

American Lit Professorship in Basel

Here's the official English text of a job ad at the University of Basel, for various professorships, actually, but the one I care about most is the North American Literature job (which is in the department where I am an English-language, the English Seminar). So get out your resumes, all you people with Ph.D.s who might be interested in moving to Switzerland!

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The Philosophical-Historical Faculty of the University of Basel has four openings for professors of Linguistics and Literature, to be filled as soon as possible:

Medieval French and General Literature
North American and General Literature
Slavic and General Literature
German Medieval Studies in a European Context

We are looking for people who both teach and do research in these areas and can demonstrate an appropriate breadth and theoretical-methodological variety or the potential necessary for such breadth.

The future strategy of the University of Basel plans to increasingly organize and emphasize research into "Culture" in interdisciplinary terms. Thus, the applicants are expected, beyond their work within their individual institutes and teaching programs, to be willing to do a great deal of interdisciplinary work, to participate in the existing interphilological program "General Literature;" and to be capable of working in a team.

We expect the following specialties from the individual professors:

— Medieval French and General Literature: a historical emphasis on French and European literature of the Early Modern Period.

— North American Literatures and Cultures and General Literature: an emphasis on the methods and theories of Cultural Studies and Literary Theory that have emerged in the United States.

— Slavic and General Literature: an emphasis on Russian should be complemented by expertise in at least one other Slavic culture, preferably Czech.

— German Medieval Studies in a European Context: Emphases on Historical Anthropology, General Literature (Literary Theory and Comparative Literature), and History of Language / Historical Linguistics.

The individual chairs will be filled as "Ordinariat" (Full Professor), "Extraordinariat" (Associate Professor), or tenure-track Assistant Professor, according to the qualifications of the candidates to whom offers are made. In French and English, all teaching is done in the language of study. The University's administrative language is German.

The University of Basel is committed to increasing the number of women among its professors. Applications from women are thus especially welcome.

The University of Basel offers excellent working conditions, modern infrastructure, and an exciting scholarly environment in a relatively small-scale setting (www.unibas.ch). As an autonomous university, the University of Basel depends on the participation of professors in the University administration.

Contact addresses: Applicants with Habilitationen or equivalent qualifications are asked to submit the usual documents (CV, list of publications—without writing samples, list of courses offered, current and planned projects) to the Dekanat der Philosophisch-Historischen Fakultät der Universität Basel, Bernoullistrasse 28, CH-4056 Basel, Switzerland, by December 31, 2007. Further information is available from the Dean, Prof. Ueli Mäder (Tel. 0041 (0)61 267 34 09).