{'fraction_non_alphanumeric': 0.017791732077446363, 'fraction_numerical': 0.0020931449502878076, 'mean_word_length': 4.829268292682927, 'pattern_counts': {'":': 0, '<': 0, '<?xml version=': 0, '>': 0, 'https://': 0, 'lorem ipsum': 0, 'www.': 0, 'xml': 0}, 'pii_count': 0, 'substrings_counts': 0, 'word_list_counts': {'cursed_substrings.json': 0, 'profanity_word_list.json': 0, 'sexual_word_list.json': 0, 'zh_pornsignals.json': 0}}
Book Review: Feminist Visual Culture

In Universities and the Myth of Cultural Decline, Herron (1988) considers the purported crisis of the current state of liberal education. He proposes that universities are, indeed, in a state of crisis, but not for the reasons typically assumed (cultural decline is a myth). The crisis that plagues university English departments is that they have separated themselves from their social function. Rather than a decline in the cultural values of society, academic elitism and inaccessibility have served to close the academy off from society at large; universities now exist apart from a society that cannot understand the significance of their work. The good news is that this implies that the problem can be solved, unlike the nihilistic quagmire of the myth of cultural decline. The more positive alternative to the pessimism of nostalgic academics is to be found in the suggestion that universities do, indeed, still have an important social function – it is just latent rather than publicly manifest. Actualization of universities’ social potential is possible, and it is up to us academics. If we are in crisis in academia, then perhaps one way out of the impasse is for us to consider ourselves not apart from society but accountable to it. If our job is to interpret the world and read it back, then perhaps we need to acknowledge the world more thoroughly and ethically. Perhaps we need to approach the world beyond the academy more on its own terms. The suggestion is not that we lose the rigor of our work or that we become subsumed into corporate or commercial culture – there is certainly enough depoliticization of radical elements of culture going on these days. Rather, it would mean that we should make ourselves valuable to the world and begin writing and speaking in more accessible ways about subjects more relevant to the contemporary, postmodern world.