cover image Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture

Secular Vocations: Intellectuals, Professionalism, Culture

Bruce Robbins. Verso, $60 (256pp) ISBN 978-0-86091-430-3

Robbins, professor of English at Rutgers, here offers an original defense of academic cultural criticism as practiced today. Whereas most commentators have lamented the professionalization and increasing specialization of cultural work, Robbins contends that such ``fall narratives'' oversimplify, and that university-based intellectuals can contribute valuable critical insight and political awareness to a likewise professionalized public. Seeking to expose the inconsistencies of theory's critics, Robbins deconstructs their appeals to abstract notions of culture, critical distance, universality and the public. Alongside of this negative work, Robbins presents positive accounts of the careers of significant literary intellectuals, whose writings he mines for ``allegories of vocation'' that provide possible models for socially engaged academics. He focuses here on the late British Marxist Raymond Williams and on Edward Said, author of Orientalism . Robbins writes at a high pitch of theoretical sophistication, but cogently; his arguments will provide a valuable counterweight in the ongoing battles over the value of contemporary criticism. (Aug.)