{"title":"Michael Bérubé","description":"\u003cp\u003eDive into the insightful and thought-provoking works of Michael Bérubé. Explore his essays and cultural critiques, perfect for readers interested in academia, politics, and contemporary social issues. Start your exploration now.\u003c\/p\u003e","products":[{"product_id":"secret-life-of-stories-book-michael-brub-9781479832736","title":"The Secret Life of Stories","description":"How an understanding of intellectual disability transforms the pleasures of reading  Narrative informs everything we think, do, plan, remember, and imagine. We tell stories and we listen to stories, gauging their \"well-formedness\" within a couple of years of learning to walk and talk. Some argue that the capacity to understand narrative is innate to our species; others claim that while that might be so, the invention of writing then re-wired our brains.   In The Secret Life of Stories, Michael Bérubé tells a dramatically different tale, in a compelling account of how an understanding of intellectual disability can transform our understanding of narrative. Instead of focusing on characters with disabilities, he shows how ideas about intellectual disability inform an astonishingly wide array of narrative strategies, providing a new and startling way of thinking through questions of time, self-reflexivity, and motive in the experience of reading. Interweaving his own stories with readings of such texts as Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip, Bérubé puts his theory into practice, stretching the purview of the study of literature and the role of disability studies within it.  Armed only with the tools of close reading, Bérubé demonstrates the immensely generative possibilities in the ways disability is deployed within fiction, finding in them powerful meditations on what it means to be a social being, a sentient creature with an awareness of mortality and causality—and sentience itself. Persuasive and witty, Michael Bérubé engages Harry Potter fans and scholars of literature alike. 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In a series of essays, Berube examines such issues as the current state of cultural studies and the significance of postmodernism.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49598030545169,"sku":"GOR003067689","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50365272981777,"sku":"CIN0860916782G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53564508799249,"sku":"NIN9780860916789","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0860916782.jpg?v=1750980308"},{"product_id":"humanities-higher-education-and-academic-freedom-book-j-ruth-9781137506115","title":"The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom","description":"This book is a lively, passionate defence of contemporary work in the humanities, and, beyond that, of the university system that makes such work possible. The book's stark accounts of academic labour, and its proposals for reform of the tenure system, are novel, controversial, timely, and very necessary.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49608255996177,"sku":"GOR011252736","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50025435889937,"sku":"CIN1137506113G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52332113133841,"sku":"NLS9781137506115","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1137506113.jpg?v=1750919943"},{"product_id":"left-at-war-book-michael-brub-9780814799840","title":"The Left at War","description":"The terrorist attacks of 9\/11 and Bush's belligerent response fractured the American left—partly by putting pressure on little-noticed fissures that had appeared a decade earlier.  In a masterful survey of the post-9\/11 landscape, renowned scholar Michael Bérubé revisits and reinterprets the major intellectual debates and key players of the last two decades, covering the terrain of left debates in the United States over foreign policy from the Balkans to 9\/11 to Iraq, and over domestic policy from the culture wars of the 1990s to the question of what (if anything) is the matter with Kansas.  The Left at War brings the history of cultural studies to bear on the present crisis—a history now trivialized to the point at which few left intellectuals have any sense that merely \"cultural\" studies could have something substantial to offer to the world of international relations, debates over sovereignty and humanitarian intervention, matters of war and peace. The surprising results of Bérubé's arguments reveal an American left that is overly fond of a form of \"countercultural\" politics in which popular success is understood as a sign of political failure and political marginality is understood as a sign of moral virtue. The Left at War insists that, in contrast to American countercultural traditions, the geopolitical history of cultural studies has much to teach us about internationalism—for \"in order to think globally, we need to think culturally, and in order to understand cultural conflict, we need to think globally.\" At a time when America finds itself at a critical crossroads, The Left at War is an indispensable guide to the divisions that have created a left at war with itself.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":49611436851473,"sku":"GOR007096574","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50363760279825,"sku":"CIN0814799841G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ WELL_READ \/ SBYB","offer_id":50368531300625,"sku":"CIN0814799841A","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52353652097297,"sku":"NLS9780814799840","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0814799841.jpg?v=1761388919"},{"product_id":"it-s-not-free-speech-book-jennifer-ruth-9781421443874","title":"It's Not Free Speech","description":"How far does the idea of academic freedom extend to professors in an era of racial reckoning?  The protests of summer 2020, which were ignited by the murder of George Floyd, led to long-overdue reassessments of the legacy of racism and white supremacy in both American academe and cultural life more generally. But while universities have been willing to rename some buildings and schools or grapple with their role in the slave trade, no one has yet asked the most uncomfortable question: Does academic freedom extend to racist professors?  It's Not Free Speech considers the ideal of academic freedom in the wake of the activism inspired by outrageous police brutality, white supremacy, and the #MeToo movement. Arguing that academic freedom must be rigorously distinguished from freedom of speech, Michael Bérubé and Jennifer Ruth take aim at explicit defenses of colonialism and theories of white supremacy—theories that have no intellectual legitimacy whatsoever. Approaching this question from two angles—one, the question of when a professor's intramural or extramural speech calls into question his or her fitness to serve, and two, the question of how to manage the simmering tension between the academic freedom of faculty and the antidiscrimination initiatives of campus offices of diversity, equity, and inclusion—they argue that the democracy-destroying potential of social media makes it very difficult to uphold the traditional liberal view that the best remedy for hate speech is more speech.   In recent years, those with traditional liberal ideals have had very limited effectiveness in responding to the resurgence of white supremacism in American life. It is time, Bérubé and Ruth write, to ask whether that resurgence requires us to rethink the parameters and practices of academic freedom. Touching as well on contingent faculty, whose speech is often inadequately protected, It's Not Free Speech insists that we reimagine shared governance to augment both academic freedom and antidiscrimination initiatives on campuses. Faculty across the nation can develop protocols that account for both the new realities—from the rise of social media to the decline of tenure—and the old realities of long-standing inequities and abuses that the classic liberal conception of academic freedom did nothing to address. This book will resonate for anyone who has followed debates over #MeToo, Black Lives Matter, Critical Race Theory, and \"cancel culture\"; more specifically, it should have a major impact on many facets of academic life, from the classroom to faculty senates to the office of the general counsel.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ GARDNERS","offer_id":49742326169873,"sku":"NGR9781421443874","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":49758099964177,"sku":"CIN1421443872VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50337295597841,"sku":"CIN1421443872G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1421443872.jpg?v=1751178247"},{"product_id":"secret-life-of-stories-book-michael-brub-9781479823611","title":"The Secret Life of Stories","description":"How an understanding of intellectual disability transforms the pleasures of reading  Narrative informs everything we think, do, plan, remember, and imagine. We tell stories and we listen to stories, gauging their \"well-formedness\" within a couple of years of learning to walk and talk. Some argue that the capacity to understand narrative is innate to our species; others claim that while that might be so, the invention of writing then re-wired our brains.   In The Secret Life of Stories, Michael Bérubé tells a dramatically different tale, in a compelling account of how an understanding of intellectual disability can transform our understanding of narrative. Instead of focusing on characters with disabilities, he shows how ideas about intellectual disability inform an astonishingly wide array of narrative strategies, providing a new and startling way of thinking through questions of time, self-reflexivity, and motive in the experience of reading. Interweaving his own stories with readings of such texts as Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury, Haddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time, Kingston's The Woman Warrior, and Philip K. Dick's Martian Time-Slip, Bérubé puts his theory into practice, stretching the purview of the study of literature and the role of disability studies within it.  Armed only with the tools of close reading, Bérubé demonstrates the immensely generative possibilities in the ways disability is deployed within fiction, finding in them powerful meditations on what it means to be a social being, a sentient creature with an awareness of mortality and causality—and sentience itself. Persuasive and witty, Michael Bérubé engages Harry Potter fans and scholars of literature alike. For all readers, The Secret Life of Stories will fundamentally change the way we think about the way we read.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50171531002129,"sku":"CIN1479823619VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":53522589286673,"sku":"NLS9781479823611","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/1479823619.jpg?v=1754232285"},{"product_id":"what-s-liberal-about-the-liberal-arts-classroom-politics-and-bias-in-higher-educ-book-michael-berube-9780393060379","title":"What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts Classroom Politics and Bias in Higher Education?","description":"A compelling defense of liberalism on campus and off.    At least since the publication of Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind, higher education in the United States has been described as an institution in crisis, infected by liberal bias, hemmed in by political correctness, and undermined by an erosion of standards. This portrait has been accepted by millions of people outside academeand a surprising number of college professors and students as well. But is it accurate?    What's Liberal about the Liberal Arts? offers a definitive rebuttal to conservative activists' most incendiary claims about American universities. In his analyses of faculty and students, critiques of ideologues left and right, and behind-the-scenes accounts of his own courses, Michael Berube makes a supple case for liberalism itselffor the cause of universal human rights, for free and unfettered inquiry, and for the classically liberal insistence that no single faction should attain dominance over all of a society's civil institutions.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50352977084689,"sku":"CIN0393060373G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0393060373.jpg?v=1751390644"},{"product_id":"employment-of-english-book-michael-brub-9780814713013","title":"Employment of English","description":"What sorts of cultural criticism are teachers and scholars to produce, and how can that criticism be employed in the culture at large? 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This smooth and swift read (New Criterion) offers a definitive rebuttal of conservative activists' most incendiary claims about American universities, and in the process makes a supple case for liberalism itself. An important polemic as well as a clear-eyed, occasionally quite humorous account of the joys and frustrations of running a college classroom (New York Observer), this book is required reading for anyone concerned about the political climate on and off campus.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50486010937617,"sku":"GOR013811929","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":51002012369169,"sku":"NIN9780393330700","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":51529910452497,"sku":"CIN0393330702VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52128762954001,"sku":"NLS9780393330700","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52926757208337,"sku":"CIN0393330702G","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0393330702.jpg?v=1750942271"},{"product_id":"the-ex-human-book-michael-brub-9780231215053","title":"The The Ex-Human","description":"Michael Berube explores the surprising insights of classic and contemporary works of SF that depict civilizational collapse and contemplate human extinction.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50726583632145,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"GB \/ VERY_GOOD \/ INTERNAL","offer_id":50726583927057,"sku":"GOR014048863","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":52592771531025,"sku":"CIN0231215053VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0231215053.jpg?v=1769248678"},{"product_id":"aesthetics-of-cultural-studies-book-michael-brub-9780631223061","title":"The Aesthetics of Cultural Studies","description":"The subject of the aesthetic has returned to cultural and literary debates with a vengeance. 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Includes substantial introductory material by the editor.","brand":"WoB","offers":[{"title":"- \/ - \/ -","offer_id":50922618749201,"sku":"","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true},{"title":"US \/ VERY_GOOD \/ SBYB","offer_id":50922620748049,"sku":"CIN0631223061VG","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":false},{"title":"GB \/ NEW \/ INGRAM","offer_id":52345216827665,"sku":"NLS9780631223061","price":0.0,"currency_code":"GBP","in_stock":true}],"thumbnail_url":"\/\/cdn.shopify.com\/s\/files\/1\/0784\/4072\/6801\/files\/0631223061.jpg?v=1766140218"},{"product_id":"humanities-higher-education-and-academic-freedom-book-j-ruth-9781137506108","title":"The Humanities, Higher Education, and Academic Freedom","description":"This book is a lively, passionate defence of contemporary work in the humanities, and, beyond that, of the university system that makes such work possible. 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