Terry Caesar - Böcker

Wry and honest essays on the everyday conditions of professional life at a "second-rate" university, with implications for our understanding of higher education in general.What is it like to be a faculty member at a university in the United States that enjoys no reputation or distinction? Traveling through the Boondocks discusses this situation not from the top down but from the bottom up, where the experience of exclusion ranges from that of departments where scholarship gets to count in hiring decisions to conferences where only individuals from elite institutions get to appear on stage. This book reinvigorates our understanding of higher education by illuminating the everyday conditions under which academics work and the hierarchical distinctions in which they are always embedded.

Breaking the silence on a number of sacrosanct aspects of higher education—and now and then raising the clamor about some highly politicized issues—Conspiring with Forms is a critique of both the academy and the discourse concerning its purposes and direction.Academic life is embedded among forms, says Terry P. Caesar. It is a milieu of customs and conventions, practices and pretenses, all bursting with implications and hidden costs for the mainly mute and complicitous scholars who perpetuate them. Many of these forms are texts—proposals, letters of application and recommendation, dissertations, freshman compositionthemes, and prefaces and acknowledgments in books. It is impossible, Caesar says, to be an academic and not produce them or, more important, be produced by them.To discuss these texts, Caesar combines theoretical sophistication with subjective depth and a measure of urbane wit. Essentially, he turns some of the techniques of contemporary theory and criticism back onto the system from which they evolved. At the same time, he draws on his personal experiences, supplemented with excerpts from actual texts of his own and others.

Writing in Disguise is a series of increasingly personal essays that both discuss and dramatize through firsthand experience the significance of subordination in academic life, in terms of issues and structures but above all in terms of texts. Some are written: memos, rejection letters, even resignation letters. Some are not: anecdotes, protests, jokes, parodies. All of these texts have in common the imperative of disguise, represented as the most crucial consequence of dominant discourse, within which subordination might speak only by knowing its place, and write only by producing hidden transcripts. Caustic, pointed, satiric, Writing in Disguise is an engaging critique of aspects of academia involving the misuse, misappropriation, and misappreciation of verbal communication in its many guises.