British Academic Life Writing and Meritocratic Virtue

Abstract

If British academic memoirs disclosed the personal origins of professional careers, they also became themselves intellectual performances subject to critical disciplinary judgment. Ambiguity, irony, and other literary devices artfully retrieved the crosscurrents of past experience, but they also created a logic of simultaneity that allowed academics to resolve incompatibilities about themselves and their careers.

Keywords:

• life writing
• meritocracy
• academics
• Britain

Disclosure Statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1 Collini, “Whisky out of Teacups,” 13–15.

2 Whitlock, “Disciplining the Child,” 340.

3 In “Making History by Contextualizing Oneself,” Aurell develops the somewhat similar and related concept of “interventional academic autobiography” when he examines the life writing of historians. See also Aurell, Theoretical Perspectives. A pioneering work on the life writing of historians is Popkin’s History, Historians, and Autobiography.

4 The following section on Kermode draws heavily from LeMahieu, “Kermode’s War.”

5 Kermode, Not Entitled, 31.

6 Kermode, Not Entitled, 15.

7 Kermode, Not Entitled, 50.

8 Kermode, Not Entitled, 63.

9 Kermode, Not Entitled, 115.

10 Kermode, Not Entitled, 98.

11 Kermode, Not Entitled, 83.

12 Kermode, Not Entitled, 133–134.

13 Kermode, Not Entitled, 116.

14 Kermode, Not Entitled, 49.

15 Kermode, Not Entitled, 155.

16 Kermode, Not Entitled, 154.

17 Kermode, Wallace Stevens, 3.

18 Sage, Bad Blood, 130.

19 Sage, Bad Blood, 239, 240.

20 Sage, Bad Blood, 29.

21 Whitlock, “Disciplining the Child,” 342; Sage, Bad Blood, 271.

22 Sage, Bad Blood, 3.

23 Sage, Bad Blood, 47.

24 Sage, Bad Blood, 117–118.

25 Sage, Bad Blood, 169.

26 Sage, Bad Blood, 172.

27 Sage, Bad Blood, 219.

28 Sage, Bad Blood, 273.

29 Sage, Bad Blood, 245.

30 Sage, Bad Blood, 258.

31 Sage, Bad Blood, 281.

32 Robbins, “Gatekeeping,” 48.

33 Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, 57.

34 Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, 31, 32.

35 Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, 78, 79.

36 Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, 52.

37 Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, 111.

38 Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, 48.

39 Turner, “Workers of the World.”

40 Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, 75.

41 Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, 127.

42 Malcolm, “Central Casting in Academe.”

43 Eagleton, The Gatekeeper, 178.

44 Ayer, Part of My Life; Russell, Autobiography of Bertrand Russell.

45 Avrahami, “Keep Your Mind,” 306–308.

46 Brower Latz, Social Philosophy, 160–197.

47 Rose, Hegel contra Sociology, 2.

48 Jay, Refractions on Violence, 64.

49 Rose, Love’s Work, 79–80.

50 Rose, Love’s Work, 94.

51 Rose, Love’s Work, 97–98.

52 Rose, Love’s Work, 69.

53 Rose, Love’s Work, 76.

54 Rose, Love’s Work, 77.

55 Rose, Love’s Work, 124, 125.

56 Annan, “A Very Un-English Childhood.”

57 Wollheim, Germs, 12.

58 Wollheim, Germs, 13.

59 Wollheim, Germs, 18.

60 Wollheim, Germs, 38.

61 Wollheim, Germs, 147.

62 Wollheim, Painting as an Art, 8.

63 Wollheim, “Freud,” 221.

64 Wollheim, Germs, 255.

65 Eley, A Crooked Line; Sewell, “Crooked Lines”; Spiegel, “Comment”; Goswami, “Remembering the Future.”

66 Hoggart’s The Uses of Literacy is frequently autobiographical. He also wrote a multivolume autobiography, which was combined into one volume in the American edition: Hoggart, A Measured Life. Williams’ first two novels, Border Country and Second Generation, are heavily autobiographical.

67 See Joas, David Martin.

68 Martin, Education of David Martin, 4.

69 Martin, Education of David Martin, 7.

70 Martin, “Personal Reflections,” 31; Education of David Martin, 93.

71 Martin, Pacifism.

72 Joas, David Martin, 1–49, 162–190.

73 Martin, Education of David Martin, 95.

74 Joas, David Martin, 4.

75 Martin, Reflections, 57–58.

76 Martin, Reflections, 60.

77 Martin, Education of David Martin, 232.

78 Martin, Secularisation, 143.

79 Hall, Familiar Stranger, 26, 27.

80 Hall, Familiar Stranger, 157–158.

81 Hall, Familiar Stranger, 13.

82 Hall, Familiar Stranger, 16.

83 Hall, Familiar Stranger, 144.

84 Hall, Familiar Stranger, 236.

85 Hall, Familiar Stranger, 237.

86 Hall, Familiar Stranger, 271.

87 Franklin, Academic Lives, 1–27.