Interpreting the Culture War: Universities, Left Cultural Criticism, and the Christian Right
Open Access
- Author:
- Rockrohr, Dillon
- Graduate Program:
- English
- Degree:
- Doctor of Philosophy
- Document Type:
- Dissertation
- Date of Defense:
- May 10, 2024
- Committee Members:
- Janet Lyon, Professor in Charge/Director of Graduate Studies
Claire Colebrook, Major Field Member
Christian Haines, Major Field Member
Jeffrey Nealon, Chair & Dissertation Advisor
Sabine Doran, Outside Unit & Field Member - Keywords:
- higher education
English
humanities
critical university studies
critical theory
interpretation
Friedrich Schleiermacher
Walter Benjamin
Michel Foucault
Edward Said
culture war - Abstract:
- This project is a study of the role interpretation has played during a few key moments in a culture war over the role of the university in society. It argues that in these key moments in which a political reflection has been undertaken regarding the way knowledge is produced and distributed, the nature and function of interpretation as such has continually become a going concern. The discourse of “campus culture war” we hear about today owes much of its shape to political developments in the 1970s that were reacting to 60s radical activism, among other things, as this project shows, but the project also points to the much earlier roots of campus culture war discourse—its insistence on hashing out the importance of proper methods of interpretation—in the tradition of the critical study of the Bible that formed the basis of the first medieval universities in the West and took on new life in the nineteenth-century reforms that established the first modern research universities, which also centered the concerns of biblical hermeneutics. This project negotiates between two sorts of critiques that meet in the present moment, linking the concerns of critical university studies and those voiced by Christian-Right culture warriors, in order to show how concerns with national culture and the agonies of the religious-secular relation in modernity use interpretation at the university as the staging ground for attempting to resolve irresolvable contradictions in the social production of knowledge.