Year: 2024
Type: article
Abstract: In Mike Judge’s 1999 film Office Space, two consultants, Bob and Bob, are interviewing office workers at Initech, a Texas software company, to determine who should be fired. They bring in a middle manager, Tom, and ask him to explain his role. After Tom gives an unconvincing account of how he acts as an intermediary between customers and engineers, one of the Bobs asks: ‘What would you say … you do here?’ The humanities are currently under threat from the academic version of the Bobs: declining enrolment, a crashing job market for PhDs, and culture warriors sniping at the value of non-STEM disciplines. Academics in the humanities are familiar with uncomfortable conversations in which we are asked to justify our existence and explain what it is we do here. In this short book, Jonathan Kramnick offers a defence of the methods and value of his corner of the humanities—literary studies—but his defence sounds a lot like Tom in front of the Bobs.
Author: Nat Hansen
Institution: University of Reading
Language: English
Subfield: Literature and Literary Theory
Field: Arts and Humanities
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W4401895327