Walter Benn Michaels

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Walter Benn Michaels is a literary theorist, known as the author of Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism and The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. He is currently the Chair of the Department of English, at the University of Illinois at Chicago, a position he has held since 2001.

Michaels is a renowned teacher. His article "Against Theory," co-written with Steven Knapp, is included in the Norton Anthology of Literary Criticism.

He is often but incorrectly identified with the following quotes/ideas: "race does not exist", and "race is a cultural construction." Michaels is married to fellow UIC Professor, Jennifer Ashton, who is also a member of the university's Department of English.

He is well-known for his study of American Realism, The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism; American Literature at the Turn of the Century, published in 1987.

In 2004, he published The Shape of the Signifier.

In October 2006, he published "The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality".

[edit] Biographical information

Michaels was born in 1948. He earned his BA in 1970 and PhD in 1975 from the University of California, Santa Barbara. Afterwards, he taught at Johns Hopkins University (1974-1977, 1987-2001) and the University of California, Berkeley (1977-1987). Since 2001, he has taught at the University of Illinois at Chicago.

[edit] Selected works

Essays

• "Against Theory." Critical Inquiry 8.4 (Summer 1982): 723-42.

Books

• The Trouble with Diversity: How We Learned to Love Identity and Ignore Inequality. New York: Metropolitan, 2006.
• The Shape of the Signifier: 1967 to the End of History. Princeton: Princeton University

Press, 2004.

• Our America: Nativism, Modernism and Pluralism. Durham: Duke University Press, 1995.
• The Gold Standard and the Logic of Naturalism. University of California Press: Berkeley,

1987.