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Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars by Michael Keefer (review)
- University of Toronto Quarterly
- University of Toronto Press
- Volume 67, Number 1, Winter 1997/98
- pp. 146-147
- Review
- Additional Information
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146 LETTERS IN CANADA 1996 Michael Keefer. Lunar Perspectives: Field Notes from the Culture Wars Anansi. xxv, 225. $18.95 In addition to his roles as a professor of English and as a recent president of the Association for CanadianCollege and University Teachers of English, Michael Keefer has gained a more public profile for his contributions to newspapers and magazines on the topics of institutional policy (the 'political correctness' controversy) and curricular change (the 'canon' debate). Not only a participant, he has also become an ad hoc documentarian of the various pronouncements, polemics, dreams, and denunciations that have appeared in both popular and' academic writings over the last decade, tracking the 'culture wars' in their particularly English-Canadian manifestation . Lunar Perspectives is the result of these years of engagement. It is an overview of the declining status of the humanities (in both the public eye and the just-in-time university of the 19905), and a call for a renewed (and publicly perceptible) relevance in the humanities disciplines. In its combination of restrospection and prescription, its generic mix of autobiography and policy analysis, its dual address to the public and to academics, and its double-jointed rhetorical action of argumentation and moral suasion, Lunar Perspectives echoes the complexities and contradictions of the issues it addresses. Witness the mixed spatializations of the title and subtitle: while Lunar Perspectives seems to offer either a distantiated analysis or moony reverie (connotating, as well, the reflective time academics lack and the 'lunacy' which often occupies their days), Field Notes promises first-hand observation and even a battle plan. (While the term 'culture wars' has been adapted from its original United States context , the military analogy has a particular resonance in Keefer's book: references to his Royal Military College training and his earlier incarnation as a naval officer are rather mischievously offered to cotrnter theperception of academicsĀ·as hothouse creatures with little 'real' world experience.) This book has an 'orbital and eccentric trajectory' (in Keefer's words), composed as a series of loosely interlocked studies: the rise of faculty workloads and the decline of humanities funding, the revival of racialist (and racist) intelligence 'theories,' the debate about core versus more diversified curricula, the furore over on-campus sexual harassment offices and policies, for example. (The archival value of this book is considerable: Keefer clearly kept a good clipping file on events as they W1folded.) All these issues are seen as symptomatic of the peculiarly chiasmic politics and educational politics of recent years, where business is the social, with citizens a 'special interest' group; where economic 'partners' have an increasing role in university governance as students and professors are excluded from it; where politicians who dozed through Macbeth in eleventh grade are now Shakespeare's public defenders, accusing English teachers of the crime of bardicide. HUMANITIES 147 One of the more curious aspects of the 'pc f debate, in both Canada and the United States, is the degree to which it first focused on English and the literature curriculum: why not history, for example, or sociology? Not only a professor of English, but an expert in the area of Renaissance studies (with a strong background in classics), Keefer is well positioned to analyse the ways in which conservative educational critics (both neo and old line) have defended the'classics' and their role in transmitting received wisdom (or 'culturef) and traditional valties. Keefer is at his best - in the section called 'Canonical Subversions/ for example - where he can combine political with literary analysis: some witty readings of high-canonical classics (Plato, Shakespeare, and the Romantics) show how these works vibrate with the ethical and existential uncertainties which so alarm the canoneers, and are often infused with the political passions they find equally disturbing . (Beware the quicksand tmder these cultural 'foundations.') For Keefer, however, such selective or censoring use of the 'classics' is not confined to conservative social thinkers alone: this'subtractive politicizing' (again, Keefer's term) can be found within the academyin, for example, the kinds of decontextualized Renaissance studies which new historicists wish to overturn. However, Keefer's concern is broader than theoretical or canonical disputes, and his threnodic conclusion returns to the urgencies of...