Higher Education Discourse and Deconstruction

1. Front Matter

   Pages i-xi

   PDF

2. Introduction: Transparency and Objecthood

   • Neil Cocks

   Pages 1-16

3. ‘[…] Not much like a Grove […]’: Openness, Object, and Agora in ‘The Lecherous Professor Revisited’ by Diane Purkiss

   • Neil Cocks

   Pages 17-38

4. Therapy and its Discontents: Bullying, Freedom and Self-Evidence in The Dangerous Rise of Therapeutic Education by Kathryn Ecclestone and Dennis Hayes

   • Neil Cocks

   Pages 39-61

5. New-Managerial Ontology: Materiality, Vision and Disclosure in Non-Representational Theory by Nigel Thrift

   • Neil Cocks

   Pages 63-92

6. Back Matter

   Pages 93-95

   PDF

This book presents a critique of neoliberalism within UK Higher Education, taking its cue from approaches more usually associated with literary studies. It offers a sustained and detailed close reading of three works that might be understood to fall outside the established body of educational theory. The unconventional methodology and focus promote irreducible difference and complexity, and in this stage a resistance to reductive discourses of managerialism. Questioning the materialism to which all sides of the contemporary pedagogical debate increasingly appeal, the book sets out a challenge to investments in ‘excellence’, ‘transparency’ and objecthood. It will be of interest to students and researchers in the fields of education, sociology, and literary theory.

• Pedagogy
• Discourse
• Bill Readings
• Paul de Man
• REF
• TEF

“Cocks’s compelling argument is that when the aim of those critics is to free theory from the tyranny of subjectivity, we are in for a new tyranny: that of the self-evident. This book’s sustained plea to still engage with both irredeemable textuality and the excessiveness of subjectivity should be mandatory reading for scholars and their managers.” (Jan de Vos, University of Ghent, Belgium)

“This astonishing and necessary book neatly dismantles discourses of transparency in contemporary education, and reflexively interrogates ostensibly radical responses to the various ways scholars in the university sector are monitored and undermined. Neil Cocks provides invaluable ammunition for those who really do want to defend academic space. His book is an argument for and exemplar of good critical textual practice.” (Ian Parker, Emeritus Professor of Management, University of Leicester, UK)

• Department of English and American Literature, University of Reading, Reading, United Kingdom

  Neil Cocks

Neil Cocks is Lecturer in English and American Literature at the University of Reading, UK. His research interests include nineteenth century literature, children's literature, psychoanalysis, and visual culture.

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