Transcripts are now created by Substack. You can access them by clicking the transcript icon just above this message.
The quality remains inconsistent. No worse than the ones created by our previous provider, Descript. But not decidedly better either. The prime advantage to the Substack transcripts is that they are synchronized with episode audio, so you can check the text against the recording simply by clicking on the play button to the left of each paragraph.
But my warning from previous posts remains applicable…
These transcriptions are computer-generated. The transcription quality is, in my opinion, very impressive, but it is far from perfect. Transcription software has been known to make basic errors, even confusing homonymic antonyms, like adequate and inadequate. While I hope such errors are rare and I invite you to let me know when you find one, if you are going to quote from an episode of The American Vandal (which I encourage!), please review the associated recording (or have a colleague do so), as that is the proper source of record.
How has the systemic defunding and deprofessionalizing of humanities academia impacted literary criticism? Why is there such a flourishing culture industry if demand for cultural education is supposedly declining? We look to megatrends like U.S. hegemony, organizations like the MLA (6:30), analogues like the Eurozone Debt Crisis (19:30), mechanisms of funding and distribution (28:00), and potential futures of disruption and declinism (1:01.30).
Episode Cast:
Jed Esty is the Vartan Gregorian Professor of English at University of Pennsylvania and the author of The Future of Decline (Stanford UP, 2022).
Anna Kornbluh is Professor of English at University of Illinois, Chicago and the author of The Order of Forms (U. Chicago, 2019) and Immediacy, or The Style of Too Late Capitalism, forthcoming from Verso. She is also the author of "Academe's Coronavirus Shock Doctrine."
Christopher Newfield is Director of Research at the Independent Social Research Foundation in London. He was formerly Distinguished Professor of English at UC-Santa Barbara and President of the Modern Language Association. He’s the author (or co-author) of numerous books in Critical University Studies, most recently The Great Mistake (Johns Hopkins UP, 2018) and Metrics That Matter (Johns Hopkins UP, 2023).
Matt Seybold is Associate Professor of American Literature & Mark Twain Studies at Elmira College, resident scholar at the Center For Mark Twain Studies, and executive producer of The American Vandal Podcast. He’s also co-editor (with Michelle Chihara) of The Routledge Companion to Literature & Economics (2018). And the author of "Gordon Gee's Draw Check Scheme" and "The End of Economics."
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