University of California Davis professor to discuss English curricula, culture wars

1:48 p.m., March 17, 2015--John Marx, professor of English at the University of California, Davis, will speak at the University of Delaware about English departments and the culture wars of the 1980s from 2:15-3:35 p.m., Monday, March 23, in Room 123 Memorial Hall.

The talk, titled “Bad English: The Culture Wars Reconsidered,” is sponsored by the Department of English. It is free and open to the public and will be followed by a reception.

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Marx will discuss how the 1980s culture warriors were “obsessed” with English departments and seemed sure that revising the curricula could solve the problems facing the nation and its educational system. Today, he says, “assaults on ‘the humanities’ by governments, businesses or postmodernists are less an issue than the increasing subdivision of labor within the university itself.”

Marx’s research focuses on contemporary mass media, including novels. He is an editor of the journal Contemporary Literature and is the author of numerous articles and two books, most recently Geopolitics and the Anglophone Novel, 1890-2011.

He is working on a book manuscript provisionally titled Mega: How Mass Media Make Contemporary Cities.