Renker E. The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History

Cambridge University Press, 2007. — 233 p. — (Cambridge Studies in American Literature and Culture).Renker gives an account of the rise and fall of American Literary Studies (she dates their uncertain rise between the years 1880-1930, and then a period of relative stability between the years 1930-1980) but more interesting to this reader is her account of the rise and fall of university culture itself from the era of the professor and the classic curriculum to the current era of "disciplinary fragmentation" which she sees as marking the beginning of the end not just of American Studies but the end of the era where there can be any identifiable, fixed or flexible, curricula at all.I am particularly intrigued by Renker's focus in the last chapter of her book on what she calls "the Millenials" (those students born between 1980-2000 aka "screenagers" and "Net Generation" ). In the last twenty pages or so of her conclusion Renker disusses a reversal now or about to occur in the institutes of higher learning as a result of the influx of these new participants in educational life. She suggests that this new generation of participants, affiliated as they are with technology (their participatory prowess evidenced by knowledge collectives or wikis), no longer view themselves as passive consumers of knowledge but as creators (or co-creators) of content. And that the very notion of authorship/authority (what counts as knowledge, who creates it, who is entitled to create it; who controls and distributes information) has largely been undone by new practices. As a result, an old version of literacy is being replaced by a new version of literacy. Perhaps most interesting of all is Renker's suggestion that we are living at the tail end of the age of the canonical text and the blockbuster film as well as the end of the age of the professional knowledge producer and tastemaker; and at the beginning of an age where abundance and amateurism are the rule and where niche writers, artists, and tastemakers cater to "niche markets". In sum, Renker is suggesting that the time of top-down culture is past, and that we now live in a time when culture is created from the bottom up and production and consumption are no longer mutually exclusive terms.