In Postmodernism, or, The Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism (1991), J

Published in the days leading up to the 45th president’s inauguration, two new books purport to show a path forward for liberals in Trump’s America.

In his introduction to “What We Do Now,” co-editor Dennis Johnson writes of the widespread “despair,” “grief” and “disillusionment” that followed the election.

The standard model of scholarly publishing assumes awork written by an author. There is typically a single authorwho receives full credit for theopusin question. By thesame token, the named author is held accountable for allclaims made in the text, excluding those attributed to othersvia citations. The appropriation of credit and allocation ofresponsibility thus go hand-in-hand, which makes for fairlystraightforward social accounting. The ethically informed,lone scholar has long been a popular figure, in both fact andscholarly mythology. Historically, authorship has beenviewed as a solitary profession, such that “when we picturewriting we see a solitary writer” (Brodkey, 1987, p. 55). Butthat model, as Price (1963) recognized almost three decadesago, is anachronistic as far as the great majority of contem-porary scientific, and much social scientific and humanistic,publishing is concerned.

In their book American English, Walt Wolfram and Natalie Schilling-Estes (1998, 281-84) point out thal Stan