AustLit

'I could follow Justin Clemens’ pointed question in his ‘Manifesto for an International University’ with a rhetorical ‘or both?’ It seems to me that to pick either debasement or disposability would bypass the combined insult and injury of working as a casual teacher in a state of offense to the University; I mean you—if you are a casual teacher—carry an unwelcome status as simultaneously the University’s disobedient citizen, near-superfluous to its educational structure and its legal liability. The problem of casual teaching remains a postscript to the bulking literature of cri de coeur about the ‘crisis’ of the corporate University (for example see Connell). This crisis has launched hordes of ‘defences’ for literary studies on the grounds of its shifting relevance to labour-capital relations, characterised by the erosion of institutional guarantee, and the perpetuation of precarity. It is hardly a head-scratcher that it remains within the domain of the hypothetical ‘rare tenured critic’ to strive for ‘different answers’ to questions about what constitutes the program, and how the classroom can keep it alive (Kornbluh). As for answers, think of a whole book of lamentations for the loss of the discipline’s cultural repertoire, appeals to its economic contribution to the ‘creative industries’, and counsel on how to repurpose the transmission of literary knowledge—often all at the same time. In one recent example, Rita Felski has called for new ‘justifications for the costs of the humanities’ by focusing on the alliterative sequence of ‘curating, conveying, criticising, composing’ (Felski).' (Introduction)