{"id":179625,"date":"2026-04-01T11:57:42","date_gmt":"2026-04-01T19:57:42","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=179625"},"modified":"2026-06-15T13:21:44","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T21:21:44","slug":"ten-convenient-beliefs-in-the-uc-berkeley-departments-of-english-and-rhetoric","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=179625","title":{"rendered":"Ten Convenient Beliefs In The UC Berkeley Departments of English and Rhetoric"},"content":{"rendered":"

Berkeley’s English<\/a> and Rhetoric<\/a> departments share faculty, seminars, and a creed. English runs hard<\/a> toward postcolonial, ethnic, and identity-centered literature. Rhetoric runs toward Continental philosophy, critical theory, and the analysis of power. The two read literature and rhetoric as tools of critique rather than as crafts with their own standards. That shared creed<\/a> rests on beliefs that pay their keep socially and earn little as explanation.<\/p>\n

Stephen Turner calls these convenient beliefs<\/a>: ideas a group holds because they reward the holder with allies, status, and a clear conscience, not because they track the world. A convenient belief often carries a true kernel. The convenience lies in how far past that kernel the belief gets stretched, and in whether anyone would keep holding it once it stopped paying.<\/p>\n

The first holds that cultural studies<\/a> and critical theory<\/a> open every text. Foucault<\/a> (1926-1984), Butler<\/a> (b. 1956), Spivak<\/a> (b. 1942), and Fanon<\/a> (1925-1961) supply the keys, and no lock resists them. The kernel is real. Power and ideology shape much of what gets written and read. The stretch comes when the keys claim every lock. Classical lyric, formalist verse, and devotional poetry from outside the theoretical tradition still move readers who never heard of ideology critique. The belief pays because it turns each syllabus into an intervention and keeps citation networks and job lines alive. Drop the social payoff and few would insist the keys fit every door.<\/p>\n

The second holds that widening the canon toward the Global South<\/a>, Asian-American, and African diaspora writing is an advance with no cost. The recovery is real. A recent seminar on hearing enslaved voices puts Frederick Douglass<\/a> (1818-1895) and Harriet Jacobs<\/a> (1813-1897) in front of students who gain from reading them. The word that does the convenient work is unqualified. Every addition to a finite syllabus is also a subtraction. Calling the trade costless spares the department the harder argument about what it drops and why. The belief shields the faculty from the charge of Eurocentrism and feeds student demand. Both payoffs survive whether or not the trade carries a cost.<\/p>\n

The third makes postcolonial, decolonial, and intersectional<\/a> method the standard for the field. These approaches read empire and its afterlife with care, and they recovered subjects older criticism ignored. The standard claim is where the stretch begins. The method coordinates conferences, grants, and graduate training, and it often maps its own categories onto pre-modern and non-Western texts that never knew them, with no test that could show the map wrong. A reading that cannot fail explains nothing. The arrangement holds because it organizes careers, not because it survives that test.<\/p>\n

The fourth ranks Rhetoric’s study of power, ideology, and Continental philosophy<\/a> above naive or formalist reading. The field gains real edge from asking who speaks, to whom, and for whose benefit. Superior by nature is the convenient part. It guards departmental prestige and the interdisciplinary claim without testing whether the power reading yields sharper results than a close formal one on the same poem. Prestige rewards the ranking. Evidence has not been asked to.<\/p>\n

The fifth makes power, race, empire, gender, and ideology the first lens for every artifact. For some texts the lens fits well. The trouble is the word every. A method that already knows what it will find treats aesthetic and moral questions as suspect and arrives at the same verdict each time. The default keeps seminars publishable and current. It costs the reader the texts the lens cannot see.<\/p>\n

The sixth holds that Berkeley’s history, from the Free Speech Movement<\/a> onward, obliges the departments to lead progressive critique. The campus does carry that history. The obligation reconciles a public university’s prestige with a radical self-image, and it routes resources toward identity and postcolonial fields. The placement power that students want still rides on the elite credential the creed attacks. The belief smooths that contradiction. Smoothing it is the payoff.<\/p>\n

The seventh treats dense prose and theoretical opacity as marks of depth rather than walls. Hard ideas sometimes need hard language. More often the difficulty sorts insiders from outsiders and lets the circle wave off criticism as philistine. The belief protects the gate. A field confident in its results would want them legible to the people it hopes to persuade.<\/p>\n

The eighth justifies literature and rhetoric by their use to anti-racism, decolonization, and gender and sexuality justice. The link to public life can enliven a classroom. As a justification it serves enrollment, foundation money, and donor appeal during a long contraction in the humanities. Whether the link enlarges the audience for literature or its explanatory reach goes unasked, because the money arrives either way.<\/p>\n

The ninth claims that theory-soaked pedagogy and activist scholarship serve craft and political consciousness in equal measure. Sometimes a writer’s politics sharpens the work. The equal-measure claim papers over the strain between craft standards and a political test a manuscript must pass. Holding both at once recruits students who want either. The recruitment is the reward, and it does not depend on the two aims agreeing.<\/p>\n

The tenth answers the field’s own troubles, a brutal job market, graduate precarity, a narrow range of views, with more diversity initiatives and finer theory rather than a change of course. This channels discontent into work that preserves the coalition and leaves the core beliefs untouched. A remedy that never threatens the thing it treats is built to protect it.<\/p>\n

The beliefs<\/a> are the working creed of two departments, and they run the hiring, the tenure, the teaching, and the public profile from a campus that prizes protest. As social technology they work. As accounts of how literature and rhetoric move people across centuries and cultures they hold a kernel of truth wrapped in a layer of convenience. The way to tell which is which: ask of each belief whether the faculty would keep it if it stopped winning allies, status, and grants. The beliefs that would stay are the true ones. The rest pay rent<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Berkeley’s English and Rhetoric departments share faculty, seminars, and a creed. English runs hard toward postcolonial, ethnic, and identity-centered literature. Rhetoric runs toward Continental philosophy, critical theory, and the analysis of power. The two read literature and rhetoric as tools … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[14100,42813,43070],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-179625","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-english","category-rhetoric","category-uc-berkeley"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t