Walter Benn Michaels is Professor of English and the Humanities
at the Johns Hopkins University.
"Unlike so many of his academic colleagues, Michaels has little interest in the effort to design more intricate notions of group identity... Rather, he wishes to jettison those notions altogether... Race, for Michaels, isn't a fact of nature or a social experience; it's an intellectual fallacy. Culture isn't a living tradition or a font of wisdom; it's more like a phantom limb or a false memory." - Alexander Star, The New Yorker "Michaels's name tends to provoke irritation and even outrage from many academics, as if his work constituted a personal insult... The fact that he provokes such anger and resentment seems to me to signify that his work exposes ethical dilemmas which most academics are more comfortable repressing, that he somehow exposes the 'bad faith' of the University." - Loren Glass, Modern Language Studies "Cunning, brilliant, acutely suggestive, often exhilarating to read, Micheals has nonetheless become the Alan Bakke of American literary criticism... His neopragmatist version of negation simply forbids any account of American culture which would make reference to raced and ethnic identities... Michaels is way too cynical to allow himself to be for anything." - Eric Lott, Transition "Our America is not only a genealogy and a critical reassessment of the legacy of modernism. It is also a provocation, to both our sense of history and our sense of ourselves." - Carla Kaplan, Modernism/Modernity
"Unlike so many of his academic colleagues, Michaels has little interest in the effort to design more intricate notions of group identity... Rather, he wishes to jettison those notions altogether... Race, for Michaels, isn't a fact of nature or a social experience; it's an intellectual fallacy. Culture isn't a living tradition or a font of wisdom; it's more like a phantom limb or a false memory." - Alexander Star, The New Yorker "Michaels's name tends to provoke irritation and even outrage from many academics, as if his work constituted a personal insult... The fact that he provokes such anger and resentment seems to me to signify that his work exposes ethical dilemmas which most academics are more comfortable repressing, that he somehow exposes the 'bad faith' of the University." - Loren Glass, Modern Language Studies "Cunning, brilliant, acutely suggestive, often exhilarating to read, Micheals has nonetheless become the Alan Bakke of American literary criticism... His neopragmatist version of negation simply forbids any account of American culture which would make reference to raced and ethnic identities... Michaels is way too cynical to allow himself to be for anything." - Eric Lott, Transition "Our America is not only a genealogy and a critical reassessment of the legacy of modernism. It is also a provocation, to both our sense of history and our sense of ourselves." - Carla Kaplan, Modernism/Modernity
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