Monsters, Inc. : Notes on the Neoliberal Arts Education

This essay reads the film Monsters, Inc. (Pixar Studios, 2001), as an allegory for the humanities in the age of global capitalism. Using the film's ending and Citibank advertisements as examples, Freeman argues that corporations have appropriated many of the classic ideas about the value of a humanities education. She claims that the corporate world recasts these values in the language of the market such that the ideal corporate citizen has what she calls a "neoliberal arts education" designed to facilitate people skills in service and trade relations. With the film's relations between monster and child characters as a touchstone, Freeman contends that humanities practitioners must risk 1) addressing the positive role of bodies, desire, and psychoanalytic transference as they affect teaching and learning in the humanities disciplines, and 2) acknowledging how these energies disrupt the smooth transfer of knowledge into commodities and students into salespeople.