Studying English Literature and Language

@ PART ONE

INTRODUCTION TO ENGLISH STUDIES

This part of the website reinforces the book’s fundamental concern with English as one and many: as a potentially wide variety of objects and processes (Englishes) organised round a provisional core or centre with a nominally singular name (‘English’). It features a continuous cultural history of English in education from the late 19th to early 21st centuries: ranging across the teaching and learning of English at school and as a foreign or second language to English as a degree subject specialising in linguistic, literary, theoretical and creative constructions of the subject. All these varieties (or versions or visions) of English continue to be distinguished in time (historically), place (geographically), socially (and culturally), and by medium (means of communication). There is also due recognition of English in a disciplinary sense as ‘English Language’ and ‘English Literature’ (or ‘Literatures in English’) while observing that both tend to converge – or conflict or get reconfigured – in studies of ‘Culture’, ‘Communication’ and ‘Media’.

The introductory and practical nature of this part of the book is confirmed by its central engagement with essential communication skills and study strategies. There are further activities in all areas and extra checklists, guidelines and diagrams to encourage you to explore the dynamics of the subject in a variety of directions and dimensions.

@ 1 contains the following:

@ 1.1 WHICH ‘ENGLISHES’?

@ 1.2 ‘DOING ENGLISH’ MORE AND DIFFERENTLY

1.2.2 Turning up, taking part

1.2.3 Taking and making notes

1.2.4 Close reading – wide reading

1.2.5 Library, web, ‘home’ – an ongoing cycle

1.2.6 Taking responsibility: referencing and plagiarism

1.2.7 Writing an essay to make a mark

1.2.8 Doing a presentation to prompt a response

1.2.9 Revision – preparing to take an exam

[book sections 1.2.1, 1.2.5 and 1.2.6 do not have corresponding sections on the website]

@ 1.3 FIELDS OF STUDY: LANGUAGE, LITERATURE, CULTURE

1.3.1 Language

1.3.2 Literature

1.3.3. Culture, communication and media

@ 1.4 ENGLISH IN EDUCATION – A SHORT CULTURAL HISTORY

1.4.1 English as a school subject

1.4.2 English as a foreign or second language

1.4.3 English as a university degree subject

1.4.4 English and Classics

1.4.5 English and Theology

1.4.6 Rhetoric, composition and writing

1.4.7 History and English

1.4.8 From Literary Appreciation to Literary Criticism

1.4.9 English into Literary Studies

1.4.10 English with Theatre or Film Studies

1.4.11 English into Cultural, Communication and Media Studies

1.4.12 Critical Theory into Cultural Practice

1.4.13 Subjects Past, Present and Future: Activities and Discussion

@ 1.1 WHICH ‘ENGLISHES’?

Activity: Mapping ‘non/English’

‘Putting yourself on the map(s)’ (Activity 1.1 b in the book) provides a list of authors and refers to extracts of their work in Part Five. Try reading these extracts, without reading any of the further information about each text, then consider the following questions:

Which of these writers employs what to you are ‘non-English’ words? Identify each non-English word you encounter.
Can you gain an understanding of the meaning of such words solely through their use within the text? Does the writer provide an explanation within the text, for example? And do you feel the need to understand all of the non-English words you have encountered?
Turning to the extra information supplied on the author and text, does that help you work out what such words might mean?
Where else, then, might you turn to find out about such words that may be part of English – but not as you know it? (For example, try beginning with the Oxford English Dictionary (OED) and other reference works referred to in the Reading for 1.1. Follow through with other resources referred to in 1.2.5.)

@ 1.2 ‘DOING ENGLISH’ MORE AND DIFFERENTLY

Introduction

This section contains further activities, examples and links to help you ‘do English’ in your own terms and at your own pace. The aspects featured are as follows:

1.2.2 Turning up, taking part

1.2.3 Taking and making notes

1.2.4 Close reading – wide reading

1.2.7 Writing an essay to make a mark

1.2.8 Doing a presentation to prompt a response

1.2.9 Revision – preparing to take an exam

@ 1.2.2 Turning up, taking part: lectures and seminars

This is a way of gauging of how productive your work is for lectures and seminars. Below is a scale ranging from ‘least productive’ to ‘most productive’ with each kind of activity broken down into before (preparation), during (participation) and afterwards (reinforcement and reflection). Use this to help think about where you are putting in most and least effective effort, and about what you can do to change your work-patterns. 1 = least productive, 5 = most productive.

LECTURES
	1	2	3	4	5
Before
During
After

SEMINARS
	1	2	3	4	5
Before
During
After

Consider what specific kinds of activity (or lack of activity) lie at which points on each scale. Make an honest estimate as to where your current levels of activity are lies. Then think how you could change the pattern or balance of your behaviour: before, during and after. What could you do not just more or less of but differently and more effectively? So as to make it more enjoyable too . . .? You have to attend a lot of lectures and seminars over a programme of study. It makes sense to make the most of them.

Here are some useful websites:

Sheffield University, ‘Lectures and Seminars’, (2010)

http://www.learningtolearn.group.shef.ac.uk/lect_sem/index.html

Joan van Emden and Lucinda Becker, ‘Attending lectures and seminars’ (2012)

ttp://www.palgrave.com/skills4study/studyskills/learning/learning.asp

@ 1.2.3 Taking and making notes

Here are some further examples and explanations of the two main kinds of note-taking and –making featured: informative (‘orderly’) and imaginative (chaotic’):

Informative (‘orderly’) notes tend to use mainly vertical, horizontal and simple geometrical structures. Built for recording and retrieval, they involve reading across and down and sometimes around. Typically they take the forms of:

MAIN HEADINGS

Subheadings

Bullet-
points
Number-
ing

Stacks of opposing and partly corresponding ideas, e.g.:

Form	Function
Style	Substance
Text	Context
Nature	Nurture

Or three- and four- part categories, in simple triangles, squares, circles, etc. Think about the relationships between ideas, how these relationships can be most simply depicted, and how varying this depiction can change your appreciation of these relationships. For example, if you depict ‘language’, ‘literature’ and ‘culture’ as the points of a triangle, how does your understanding of the relationships between each concept change depending on which concept is at the ‘top’ of the triangle? Ideas and information can also be organised through simple flow charts, steps, ladders, etc., to note some kind of progression, development, causality, etc. (For some examples in the present book, see p.39, figure 1.1 p. 42, figure 1.2 p. 43, p. 45, p.47, and figure 2.1 pp.126-7). The appeal of informative/orderly notes is that they look simple and promise closure.

Imaginative (‘chaotic’) notes tend to become clusters, webs, trees, roots, rhizomes . . . any flexible and organic form that comes to hand or mind.Emerging though exploration and experiment, they often begin with a few handy or random points of reference (words, phrases, names, titles) and develop lines of connection, distinction and transformation that join or separate or fuse them: straight or curved or wiggly, continuous or discontinuous, dotted or dashed, one-, two-, many- and any-way . . . Often the shapes and dynamics turn out to be:

organic ‘tree’ or ‘flower’ diagrams with a single trunk and branches, leaves and petals; or ‘rhizomes’ like potatoes and iris that shoot and root from many points in many directions and dimensions, in space as well as over time . . .
maps and ‘scapes’ that establish some ‘space’ in which items may be placed and related and processes may be modelled and imagined, intricately yet uniquely linked, perhaps changing over time too.
exotic geometries and topologies such as infinity loops and möbius strips, spirals and cycles, malleable ‘doughnuts’ (toruses) and cut surfaces (catastrophically)
. . . combinations of all of these and more, actually observed or virtually generated or not-so-simply imagine: crystal, snow-flake, coast-line, rainbow, cloud-pattern. . . solar system, spiral galaxy, atomic or molecular structures, electron path, cloud-chamber . . . music notation, algorithm . . . an oyster . . . an eye, an ear and a mouth . . . a hand, spread or clenched, with five fingers – holding a pen, tapping a keyboard – one of them pointing, another pausing . . .

The appeal of imaginative/ chaotic notes is that they look complex and offer openness. (For examples in the current book see pp.16-17, and figure 6.3 pp.370-1.) Meanwhile, for all the above reasons, given all their various forms and functions (actual, virtual and potential) . . .

Informative notes tend to become – turn out or in to be – Imaginative notes, and vice versa. That is, it is an inherent tendency of both ‘vertical/horizontal’ and ‘web/cluster’ designs to turn – gradually or suddenly, deliberately or accidentally – into the other. Thus an initially ‘orderly’, rectilinear design may sprout off-shoots or gather clusters of points around, and thereby become baroque, exotic, a mess. Just as an initially ‘chaotic’ curvilinear or discontinuous design may settle to more or less neat columns and sub-sections stacked down and across the page – all very neat and tidy. Indeed, at some point there may well be a conscious decision to switch from the one design to the other. In this respect form may guide function. The way you make and take notes may actually change how you think and know: what you find and what you look for. It’s as simple – and complex – as that.

‘ . . .’ The essential incompleteness of notes

The most tell-tale sign of ‘the note’ is its incompleteness: a few words, a half or quarter-formed thought, some lines towards an argument, notes towards a definition, even a whole chapter in search of a book . . . Conventionally, as here, the gap or silence is signalled by the three suspension dots of the ellipsis: . . . Ellipses are signs that say ‘no more words’; they are a kind of quote with a hole in the middle. But notes are full of ellipses, whether formally marked or not. They are, so to speak, defined by the shapes of their emptiness, what is absent. Depending what you later decide to fill it with, each ellipsis can come to mean everything or nothing: be a crucial missing link or merely a broken chain of thought. Perhaps a productive ellipsis might be called a ‘Note Well’ and an unproductive one a ‘Note Ill’. The trouble is that you never know which is which till you have filled them in or out, or at least tried to join up the dots. This everyone has to do, for . . .

Notes are individual, selective, structured and evolving

These are some key points to bear in mind so as to make taking notes effective and enjoyable – useful and an adventure, not just a chore or an opportunity missed.

Note-taking is individual. There are various means of efficient and effective note-taking, such as the ‘informative (‘orderly’)’ and ‘imaginative (‘chaotic’)’ forms discussed here – over time you’ll work out what works best for your individual thinking patterns and learning needs. But there are some important features of note-taking that make it what it is:

You will write down very little of what is said in a lecture; i.e. you will be highly selective. You’ll only have time to write down some of it - don’t attempt to get down every word the lecturer says. The act of picking out important elements and summarising parts is in itself an important part of intellectually engaging with what you’re hearing. What you choose write down will depend on what you perceive and/or believe to be most important, significant, and useful. This will in some ways be indicated by the lecturer through stress and repetition and the like, but to some extent it’ll be down to your own judgement and interest. Obviously, you’ll be better able to gauge this if you’ve actually read the text in advance…
Expect your notes to emerge and evolve, perhaps in a non-linear way. Even if they start off with a logical, linear progression down the page, expect to add words, extend notes, draw new connections to previous notes (remember the above notes on the ‘informative (‘orderly’)’ and ‘imaginative (‘chaotic’)’ forms).
So you should also aim to use some kinds of structural, as you go or when reinforcing and reflecting later. Bullet points, sub-headings, lists, connectors, and maybe shapes such as triangles or circles, webs and trees . . . these will all help to organise parts of the information. They will also be invaluable when it comes to retrieving and revising your work.

Remember, notes are what you make as well as take for your own use. They are some of your most important ‘shapes of things to come’!

Tips on using notes with hand-outs and PowerPoint

You may receive a lecture handout, which will provide you with a framework for your note taking. You might also be able to access the lecture’s PowerPoint presentation, if one was used, via a virtual learning environment on the internet. But you shouldn’t take either of these for granted, and you shouldn’t use either as a substitute for taking notes yourself. In taking notes, you engage with everything that is spoken, which will go far beyond that which is on a handout or PowerPoint presentation. These aids provide the bare bones of the lecture. They’re not designed to function in the same way as notes. A handout may give you a few keywords, some definitions and some of the lengthier examples or extracts from texts which the lecturer may draw upon. A PowerPoint presentation will contain similar information, and more, including both the more and less important elements, but the main function of PowerPoint presentations is to provide a visually structured overview of all of the information, so as to help you process everything that is said while you’re listening. If you rely on either of these kinds of lecture aids without taking notes, you’ll miss the opportunity to develop your own thinking by sifting through and reflecting on the verbal content of the lecture yourself.

Really using your notes – making them work for you

In so far as they stay in your bag or file, notes taken from lectures (or seminars or books) are just a potential resource. To maximise their value and get them to really work for you, you need to get them out and play and engage with them in a variety of ways. The following simple steps will help you do both. As usual, they are best seen as a series or cycle of things to do regularly but with variations. Get into a rhythm and make them part of your evolving study patterns. (This is illustrated with lecture notes here, but similar things can be done with notes from books or the web.)

(i) Soon afterwards, ideally later the same day, you should go back over your notes and make sure everything you’ve written down makes sense to you. The lecture should still be fresh enough in your mind at this point for you to clarify a few more things for yourself, flesh out a few points, and so on, as necessary, so that when you come back to the notes days or weeks later everything is clear.

(ii) Follow up and resolve anything you didn’t understand, and anything of particular interest to you. You might need to look up a term or concept using a dictionary or literary or linguistic terms, or you might need to follow up and read some texts recommended by the lecturer (maybe in a ‘further’ or ‘secondary’ reading list, if one has been provided).

(iii) Return to the primary reading with the lecture information in mind. You’ll see new things in the text or topic or task, and make new connections.

(iv) Finally, perhaps much later, return to your notes yet again to help you prepare to write your assessed essay, put together your presentation or revise for your exam. Later on in the course you’ll have a better idea of how the information you were given in each lecture relates to information about other the texts and topics involved in the unit of learning as a whole, so you’ll see even more connections, intersections, and so on, and you will be newly aware of overarching important themes running through the course as a whole.

As you can see, to attend a lecture (or read a book, or consult the web) is not a matter of just sitting back and passively absorbing information. Taking, making and using notes during and after a lecture will allow you to really gain from the experience.

In a sense, again, it can all be thought of as just two movements or moments, stages or levels (see @ Prologue):

first impressions – taking down, registering – vision.
further impressions – making up, reflecting – re-vision

But the four steps above will help you get into the rhythm of note-taking and making for yourself. They can then really work for you – which they never will if you just leave them in your file or till the last minute.

Here are some useful websites:

‘Taking and Making Notes’, The University of St. Andrews (2007) http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/students/academic/Studysupport/Takingandmakingnotes/

The Open University, ‘How to Take Notes’, Skills for OU Study (2012) http://www.open.ac.uk/skillsforstudy/how-to-take-notes.php

Sheffield University ‘Taking Notes’ (2010) http://www.learningtolearn.group.shef.ac.uk/takingnotes/index.html

Dustin M. Wax, ‘Advice for Students: Taking Notes that Work’, in Lifehack (2007) http://www.lifehack.org/articles/productivity/advice-for-students-taking-notes-that-work.html

Adina Glickman, ‘Taking Notes’, The Center for Teaching and Learning, Stanford University (n.d.) http://www.law.harvard.edu/current/student-services/taking_notes.pdf

@ 1.2.4 Close reading – wide reading

Close reading – a brisk reprise

So what, basically, do you need – and not need – in order to get going with close reading?

Broad literary historical knowledge? Not necessarily. If you happen to have some awareness of the literary historical period in which the text was published and/or biographical information about the author, and can see ways in which certain aspects are relevant to the content of the extract, then by all means let this inform your analysis, but remember that the text itself is the focus. You can certainly perform close reading well without this kind of knowledge.
Broad literary critical understanding? Not necessarily. While some kinds of literary analysis and criticism encourage new readings based on certain theoretical stand points (see chapter 3), such as psychoanalytic, marxist or feminist readings, close reading asks you to explore the text in a more theoretically neutral way, responding to its linguistic and thematic nuances without a particular critical schema in mind.
Basic grammatical knowledge? Yes, this is helpful. An understanding of the different word classes and sentences structures will enable you to articulate your observations acutely and accurately. It will help you recognize particular grammatical choices made by authors and identify more patterns (and deviations from patterns) in the text, facilitating your further exploration of the interpretative effects of these choices, patterns and deviations.
‘Textual sensitivity’? Yes. This phrase is often used to express a central learning objective of close reading tasks. To be textually sensitive is to ‘pick up on’, ‘detect’, or to be highly aware of the stylistic and poetic choices an author has made, from punctuation and lexis to overarching cohesive structural and semantic links that run across the text as a whole, and to be able to see how these choices are working in combination to create certain interpretative effects. Your textual sensitivity will develop over time, as you practice this kind of close study of texts, and the guidance in this section is designed to help you with that progression.
Interpretative and argumentative logic? Yes, especially as you go on. In communicating your close reading, you need to be able to show how the particular stylistic and poetic features you have identified and described create certain interpretative effects, or vice versa – how the interpretative effects you perceive are contributed to by particular stylistic and poetic features. Without making such links, you will be providing only a linguistic description of the text (in the former case) or an unsupported impressionistic reading (in the latter). You need to go further and show the relationships between form, content and meaning.

Alternative approaches to close reading

The book and other material on this website explain and demonstrate use of the ‘What, Who, When, Where, How, Why and What if’ steps to set out about an initial textual analysis (see 1.2.4 ‘Core questions’ p.41 and the analyses in 2.1). These follow on from the ‘opening moves’ Note—Pattern—Contrast—Feeling. What follows is a more discursive and to some extent alternative introduction to these process of beginning to engage with a text that is new to you.

You should always start with your initial interpretative impressions. Skipping this step leads to mechanical readings lacking connection between form, content and meaning (in fact, often lacking any derivation of what the text is ‘about’ at all). Regular neglect of this crucial and foundational part of engagement with texts can also lead to the feeling that studying a text merely involves ‘taking it apart’, like a mechanic taking apart a car engine, without any emotional and intellectually engagement with – and enjoyment of - the text as a work of literature.

To begin the interpretative process, then,

a) read through the text a few times

b) underline aspects which attract your attention and/or seem interpretatively significant, annotating the text - highlighting, circling, underlining and connecting features, identifying the seemingly significant, the patterns and deviations, etc.

c) review this annotation and gather your thoughts on what the text is ‘about’, what kind of themes, contexts, moods, relationships, etc., are involved

From this point you can then lead yourself further into the text, and begin to move from initial interpretation and annotation to analysis, by asking the ‘six ‘Wh’ and a ‘How’’ questions, guided by what you have initially felt to be interpretatively significant. Alternatively, or as well, you could move you into thinking analytically about the text by systematically addressing the different linguistic levels at work: that is, you might analyse the text at the levels of: discourse: syntax; semantics; metrics and prosody; lexis; morphology; phonology and graphology – or the other way round, from graphology to discourse. (See Appendix A: Grammatical and linguistic terms – a quick reference; then @ Appendix A: Full glossary of linguistic and grammatical terms). In any event, the important thing is to be guided – and selective – on the basis on what you feel be interpretatively significant. In fact, a loose mix of these two approaches, as well as others, may be as productive as systematically following one or another. What’s more, the approach you take may in also be guided by the nature and complexity of the text. Any approach, however, will require you to be able to describe the features of the text in linguistic detail, to help clarify what you feel to be interpretatively significant, and how it is contributing to your interpretation. More formally, this is what may be termed linguistic description of stylistic features and extrapolation of their interpretative effects. Done systematically and sensitively it always generates both further identification of related stylistic features and further interpretative insight. The process of close reading can therefore seem circular; though in practice, with different texts and even readings of the same text, it always turns out be cyclic – similar processes gone through differently – or even spiral: burrowing into the text’s layers of meaning, and circling inwards towards the key workings of the text, or perhaps circling upwards through layers of insight and outwards through the expanding network of associations and interpretative ramifications of the text. But you will have got the idea, and may wish to develop – and draw or project – a model that best seems to express your own analytical and interpretative processes. (See 1.2.3 and @ 1.2.3 above for various ways of modelling such things – ‘chaotic’, ‘orderly’ and otherwise).

Writing up a close reading, structuring an interpretative response

Having analysed the text in detail, you will need to organise and communicate your thinking In order to plan and structure your response, you will need to

Identify the key points: select the most interpretatively significant points from the array that you have explored (as it’s unlikely you will have the time or space to provide a fully comprehensive close reading of the text). These points might be focussed on particular aspects of your interpretation of the text, or on specific uses of particular stylistic and poetic features of the text. At this point you may be able to see new connections between points, tying some together and allowing you to relate others to these in different ways.
Identify evidence for each: select best (most illustrative) example(s) to cite and discuss to support your key points, ensuring you provide explicit and acute linguistic description in support of reasonable interpretative extrapolations.
Order your key points in a logical sequence, perhaps following the order in which interpretative issues or stylistic features arise in the text (i.e. following the text’s linearity), or perhaps progressing from less significant to more significant aspects (i.e. in accordance with interpretative significance), or following some other pattern which arises out of the particular workings of the text.

Frame these key points with an introduction and conclusion – which is basically just a setting-up and rounding-off – and you have produced a close reading! Very likely a good one.

This will not, of course, be the end of your reading. You still have to read up and around, find out and reflect some more, then re-read and re-respond, and gradually write back and up accordingly. In short, you still have to do some wide(r) reading. But it will still have been a good start. And it’s the essential first step. Without it, everything else is likely to be overpowered by somebody else’s words. Suffocated rather than sustained. The latter is what we again pick up next.

‘Text-centred square’

This is another way of relating close reading to wide reading, another model of the process of relating ‘text’ in the narrowest sense to ‘context’ in the fullest. Here it takes the form of a ‘Text-centred square’. This can be seen as intermediate between the ‘triangular’ and ‘openly plural patterns’ represented in the book.

Diagram

Fig.1.2.4b. Text-centred Square (Wide reading 2)

This carries substantially the same information as in the triangular model in the book (figure 1.1 p.42) but organises it in a different way and with different effects. This ‘Text-centred-square’, as its name suggests, is centred on the initial text and moves out from and back to it in a systematically ‘grid-like’, horizontal and vertical fashion. In this respect it is like an ‘orderly’ (as opposed to ‘chaotic’) mode of note-taking. It allows us to explore in orderly fashion the text’s intertextual and contextual relations in a variety of modes and moments, past and present, here characterised broadly as ‘there and then’ and ‘here and now’. It is a very effective framework for investigating a given (hence ‘set’) text, exploring its main coordinates while keeping it at the centre of attention. It therefore underpins a traditional (‘pre-set’) text-centred approach to literary study and research. What it does not do, however, is offer a variety of possible centres for study or open up different kinds and lines of enquiry. Nor does it expressly offer positions for the reader and writer. For these we need a diagram with many more (in principle infinite) points, lines and angles – and beyond that others with a variety of planes, volumes and dimensions. This is where the ‘Openly plural’ model featured in the book comes into its own (figure 1.2 p.43).

Here are some useful websites:

‘Close reading’, University of Warwick (2011)

http://www2.warwick.ac.uk/fac/arts/english/undergraduate/current/modules/fulllist/second/en227/closereading/

Shasta Turner, ‘Close Reading Example’ in Resources, Claremont Graduate University Writing Center (2012) http://www.cgu.edu/pages/918.asp

Sheffield University, ‘Reading’ (2012) http://www.learningtolearn.group.shef.ac.uk/read/index.html

@ 1.2.7 Writing essays

What kind of essay-writer are you . . . would you like to become?

Consider each of the following pairs of terms. Where would you currently place yourself as an essay-writer on each of the lines between? (Neither pole is better or worse, and the pairs are not necessarily stacked in the right columns.)

Chaotic . . . . . .׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . Orderly

Just sit down and write . . .׀ . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . Plan carefully in advance

Set text first . . . . . .׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . Critics first

Ideas based . . . . . .׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . Evidencebased

Opportunist . . . . . .׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . Systematic

Imaginative . . . . . .׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . Rational

Many different drafts . . . . . .׀ . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . ..׀ . . . . . ׀ . One gradual composition

Risk taking. . . . . .׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . . Security seeking

Playful . . . . . .׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . . Serious

Now, recalling the two kinds of essay introduced before, try adding the following as headings to the two columns:

‘Try-out’ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . .׀ . . . . . ׀ . . . . . ‘Proof’

Does this work? And how far do you find yourself towards one pole or the other with different pairs? Go on to add some more terms of your own to describe what kind of essay-writer you think you are. See if they will fit in either column – or whether you need another column entirely (If so, how might it be headed?)

Finally, consider in what ways you would like to become adifferent kind of essay-writer. You can do this bygoing through the above pairs line by line, thinking how far you would like to nudge yourself one way or the other. Also decide which ways you would like to move with the terms you yourself added.

Once you have done all this, you will have a good preliminary sense of what kinds of essay-writer you are and, equally importantly, what kinds of writer you would like to become. The plural is important. No-one is ever just one kind of writer – completely consistent or absolutely fixed. We are all several and various, depending on the text and task, our mood and the occasion. Crucial, however, is our approach to writing: how far and in what ways we are prepared to experiment. Try some. Prove it.

From preparation and planning to a first draft

In a sense you are always preparing to write and are constantly involved in drafting. Writing, like reading, is a gradually accumulated skill not a one-off trick. The one feeds the other and you have to do a lot of both to get better at them. So if you are regularly reading closely and widely you are much more likely to ‘write closely’ (choose words carefully and attend to detail) and ‘write widely’ – using a wide vocabulary and varied sentence structures. Especially crucial to processes of re-drafting are your ways of taking and making notes, including writing them up and revising them later. All these routine practices are what turn your reading and thinking into written thoughts. Like the technical exercises and practice pieces that a musician or dancer has to do constantly in order to keep fit and in shape for performances, so writers must keep on working out and playing around with words if they are to produce work that’s really worth reading. What follows is a practical method for approaching essay-planning and the production of a first draft. It can be used alongside or as an alternative to the above ‘essay-diamond’. While clearly ‘experimental’ in the broadest sense, the method is very simple: it involves two sides of sheet of paper and a couple of folds or lines. But don’t be fooled by that. It also involves words and minds, texts and contexts. So it can get as complicated and sophisticated as anyone could wish. Though it stays simple too.

The theory of this practice is grounded in the vital interplay of ‘chaotic’ and ‘orderly’ processes introduced through the activity of taking and making notes (1.2.3). It informs the characterisation of various kinds of essay (and essay-writer) in terms of Trying-out’ and ‘Proving’ at the opening of the present action. These processes are further theorised in ‘The new Eclecticism’ (2.10) and, as practices, are extended so as to inform more complex ‘study patterns and lines of enquiry’ later (4.3). Being ‘chaotic’ in more or less controlled ways and ‘orderly’ in imaginative ones is fundamental to all aspects of ‘doing English’. Here we simply bring them to bear on the processes of planning and doing a first draft.

A two-part ‘chaotic’ and ‘orderly’ approach to essay-planning

(1) Take a sheet of A4 paper and put a dotted line or fold across the middle from side to side. Write the essay question in the centre of the upper half and write the names of the texts or authors in the lower half. Start with the essay question: underline key terms, tease out further questions and scribble notes all around. Then turn to the text(s) or author(s) below: what do you already know that’s relevant – and what do you need to know? Finally, try linking the top and bottom halves of the page: with arrows, lines, numbers, letters, whatever. You now most likely have a mess. But it’s potentially a very productive mess. This is your ‘chaotic’ stage.

(2) Now turn the page over and put a fold or dotted line down the middle of that side, from top to bottom. Write the essay question at the top of the left column and the names of texts/authors at the top of the right column. Go steadily down the page putting your ‘chaotic’ findings and makings from the other side into order on this. (Try numbering them first to help you arrive at a sequence.) You will now have a couple of fairly neat and tidy lists. (Though even here may be some crossings out and the odd re-shuffling of sequence. )This obviously is the ‘orderly’ stage.

You may wish to go through this whole process more than once, till you settle on patterns (on the ‘chaotic’ side) and lists (on the ‘orderly’ side) that suit you. The point is that neither a ‘chaotic’ nor an ‘orderly’ approach is sufficient on its own. You need both at some stage to produce work that is interesting as well as coherent. Planning essays like this (and in principle any piece of sustained work) keeps them playful as well as purposeful: moving forward without plodding; dancing along without just going in circles. For essay-writing, it is the counterpart of making imaginative notes and taking informative notes (see Action 3). We need both, Just as we also need firm shapes like the ‘essay diamond’ and the flexibility of its non-standard attachments. The difference with the present method – folded or lined on two sides, across then down – is that you start with a blank sheet of paper. This you fill with whatever questions you have been set and materials you have to hand, and with whatever shapes and lists you have a mind to. Once some minimal differences are set in play (above-below, across-down, left-right) almost anything can happen. It’s your ‘essay’, your plan, and up – and down – to you.

Using ‘secondary’ reading – for analysis, criticism, theory and research

Most essays draw on ‘secondary’ reading and some essays, especially longer ones on more advanced courses, require some ‘research’ or at least concerted enquiry. Once you have a preliminary grasp of the question and your ‘primary’ materials, as well as some sense of your initial approach and design, you have in effect established your ‘Home base’. (Remember, ‘text + task’ and ‘course + question’ = ‘Home base’; see p.45.) This is therefore the point at which you are best placed to engage with other critics and theorists and the full cycle of ‘Library, Web, ‘Home’’ (1.2.5). Turn to that section to remind yourself of the kinds of source and resource at your disposal, also the importance of retaining a firm grasp of your own interests and insights even while engaging with those of others. (Hence the emphasis on constantly returning ‘Home’.)

For the two main dangers with essay-writing are over-reliance on and utter ignorance of published work. The former (favoured in many academic cultures) tends towards dutiful dependence and a dull repeating of what other people have said. The latter (less common, but promoted in others) tends towards wilful independence and a celebration of the banal and superficial that could be made far more interesting and informed with just a little more reading. This ‘in/dependent’ balancing act is extremely unnecessary, and the whole thing gets much more realistic and productive once you recognise that academic work is interdependent: your own words are developed through dialogue with those of others; you and they are in a constant process of ex/change. It’s the same with ‘Close reading and wide reading’ (1.2.4). Turn to that section if you have some detailed textual analysis to relate to other texts and broader contexts. There are many ways of focusing the text, pulling back to map the interrelations, and even of reconfiguring the terrain. Textual, contextual and intertextual emphases are all possible, and Text-centred and Openly plural frameworks are available to model the connections. (For the theory of this, see 2.1—2.)

Second draft

This usually comes down to the more or less uneven look and feel of the piece – the sense that some parts seem to work alright, while others feel too dense or lightweight, clogged or bitty, etc. Often, in fact, an apparently mechanical decision about visible structure can help with a decision about argumentative strategy: simply realising that you need a new paragraph (and therefore fresh topic) at this point, or a quotation and piece of analysis at that point (to illustrate and substantiate it); or that you can shift relevant but strictly extra material into a foot-note; or that your wrestling with four or five key terms is best fixed in a diagram rather than all done in discursive prose. All these are crucial feelings (then observations then decisions) that the writer cannot have and make until there is first substantial draft to work over. But they are the very stuff of the second draft and can make the difference between an essay that is half-baked and fully done. (In assessment terms, the difference is often a whole grade.) Sometimes – if you have a tendency to over-write – this will mean drastically trimming a section or cutting it completely, and asking do you really need two or three words (or phrases or sentences) where one will do. Sometimes – if you tend to under-write – this will mean building up the argument and adding further materials to develop the point, and asking whether your words and structures are discriminating and complex enough. Often it is a mixture, varying from part to part. The point is that there is indeed a ‘second-draft’ stage and that it is crucial to the overall structure and strategy and success of the piece. The funny thing is that once you have done it and got over the shock, you quickly get used to the new slimmed-down or filled-out version. You may even forget what was there before. And your reader, of course, will never know what was there in the first place. They at this stage are who and what you must be thinking of more and more. Getting down what you as a writer have got to say in response to the question is the main business of the first draft. Getting it across to your reader as effectively and interestingly as possible has to be increasingly the aim from the second draft onwards. ‘Is the reader being encouraged to read on: from the beginning, through the middle, to the end?’ That is the top and bottom line at this stage. Here are some practical tips for doing it:

Assessment and feedback

The criteria for these are remarkably similar wherever English is done at an advanced level, but check the detail of those that apply to you. The following categories, or something like them, are very common: Knowledge of subject (Content). Critical awareness. Argument. Expression/Style. Presentation, Academic conventions. Overall comment. Interestingly and importantly, the only major difference between expectations for an essay submitted as course-work and one for an exam – apart from length and detail – is that the latter is not expected to be as formally finished in mechanical terms: with full references and notes, bibliography, etc. There is also usually some silent allowance made for writing at speed and therefore the occasional slip (but not too many) with spelling and grammar. Otherwise the criteria and categories are much the same. See Make a plan, take an exam (Action 9) for typical examples of comments on strong and weak essays.

Common kinds of essay question: what they are asking for . . .

Each essay question is different, and yet all essay questions tend to be looking for similar things. Here are the kinds of thing that most questions require, invite or assume. :

attention to the specific words in the question, quoted or otherwise
a sense of comparison or contrast, connection or distinction
detailed reference to the text in context
a developing argument
knowledge
insight

These, therefore, are the kinds of thing that should feature in your answers.

Each essay question is different, and yet most essay questions fall into one of the following types. Here are the main kinds of essay question that get asked on English Studies courses. (They are illustrated with the Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights and Peter Childs’s critical essay on it; 4.1.1 and 4.1.4)

(i) Compare X with Y with respect to Z.

e.g. Compare Wuthering Heights with another nineteenth-century novel (Jane Eyre, Pride and Prejudice, romance, gothic fiction. . .) with respect to narrative strategy (style, sexual politics, later film version ….)

(ii) Explore the relation between X and its context A.

e.g. How far and in what ways does Wuthering Heights expose and critique contemporary (Victorian, mid-nineteenth century) understandings of property, marriage, nature, the country and the city . . .?

(iii) ‘Critical Quotation’ (actual or made up). How far do you agree . . .? How adequate is this as view of A (and B) . . .?

e.g. ‘Heathcliff [is] the orphan who has become the catalyst and engineer of the book’s revolutions.’ (Peter Childs). How far do you agree with this estimation of Heathcliff’s role, and can you suggest an alternative focus for interpretation of Wuthering Heights?

(iv) ‘Quotation from primary/set text’. What light does this throw on S in T’s text? How representative is this as . . . ?

e.g. ‘ “I am Heathcliff” ’. Tease out the implications of Catherine’s declaration for understanding of the novel as a whole, and consider some of ways in which this statement exposes the limitations of a narrowly ‘subjective’ approach to identity.

(v) Comment upon the significance of one (two . . ) of the following for at least two (three. . .) texts studied on this course: a ; b ; c ; d .

e.g. Write an essay drawing together one novel and one collection of poems studied on this course with respect to two of the following topics: authorship; readership; genre; language; violence; class; gender; sexuality; ethnicity; revolution; nature. (You may write about Emily Brontë’s novel or her poems but not about both.)

(vi) Offer a close reading of one of the following passages, commenting in detail on any aspects that seem to you to be important in the light of your reading of the literature of period (genre, course). You should comment both on the stylistic features of the passage and on how you think it reflects the broader concerns of the period.

e.g. the opening of Wuthering Heights (see 4.1.2) relative to late Romantic or mid-Victorian or Women’s or Novel . . . writing

Here are some useful websites:

‘Essay and Report Writing Skills’, The Open University (2011) http://openlearn.open.ac.uk/course/view.php?id=3359

University of Maryland University College, ‘Essay Writing’, Effective Writing Center (2012)

http://www.umuc.edu/writingcenter/writingresources/essaywriting.cfm

The GradSchools.com team, ‘How to Write your Essay Introduction’, GradSchools.com (2010)

http://www.gradschools.com/article-detail/essay-intro-123

Scribendi, ‘How to Write a Persuasive Essay’ (2012)

http://www.gradschools.com/article-detail/essay-intro-123

@1.2.8 Giving a presentation, stimulating a response

Assessment and feedback

Criteria for presentations vary in emphasis, but they usually look for skill in delivery and the capacity to engage an audience as well as substantial content. Here is a common range of criteria, along with some typical comments on what are reckoned ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ presentations.

Clarity, audibility, pacing

Strong: clear voice, assured presence, varied, well-paced, head up, good eye-contact

Weak: muttered, hesitant . . . monotone, rushed, head down, no eye-contact

Knowledge of subject

Strong: good examples, strong analysis, interesting quotation, well-informed

Weak: few/no examples, little analysis, little evidence of reading, patchy knowledge

Organisation and strategy

Strong: engaging opening, imaginative strategy, well-organised points, neat conclusion

Weak: bitty, never got hold of it, confused and confusing, petered out, stop abruptly

Use of audiovisual aids (hand-out, transparency, power-point, etc.)

Strong: effective, imaginative, resourceful

Weak: could have used some... too reliant upon ....

Readiness to engage in dialogue

Strong: engaging activities, handled questions well, had plenty more to say

Weak: ran out of time, trouble with questions, lack of preparation evident

Overall

Strong: lively, well-prepared and organised, thoroughly engaged and engaging

Weak: hard to follow, unclear, poorly organised never really got hold of topic or audience

Everyone has different strengths and weakness: play to the former and work on the latter. The key things are to prepare thoroughly, experiment adventurously, and settle on what works best for you and you audience. Knowing your stuff is essential. Showing it is infectious.

Here are some useful websites:

‘Presentation Planning Checklist’, Mind Tools (2011) http://www.mindtools.com/CommSkll/PresentationPlanningChecklist.htm

University of Kent Careers and Employability Service, ‘Tips on Making Presentations’ (2012)

http://www.kent.ac.uk/careers/presentationskills.htm

School of Chemical Engineering and Advanced Materials, Newcastle University, ‘Communication Skills – Making Oral Presentations’ (2009)

http://lorien.ncl.ac.uk/ming/dept/Tips/present/comms.htm

J. Douglas Jeffreys, ‘Killer Presentation Skills’ (2006)

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=whTwjG4ZIJg&noredirect=1

@ 1.2.9 Revision – preparing for an exam

Kinds of exam question

There are two common kinds of exam question in English: essay and text/extract. (With some English Language exams there may be data supplied instead of or along with the latter.) Essay questions are treated in 1.2.8. Here we shall look at what is meant by and required from questions on texts/extracts.

Text extracts require you to analyse or comment on a piece of text in relation to its context, the author’s work, period, genre or style. This may be a text you have already met and studied on the course; or it may be a fresh, ‘unseen’ text that relates to the issues, period, author, genres, etc. This text may be a piece of literature or a piece of theory or criticism. Whatever it is – and whether previously seen or unseen – you will be tested on your ability to relate the actual words in front of you to texts, ideas and issues you have already studied and are expected to know about. For previously ‘unseen’ texts/extracts, use the methods in ‘Initial analysis: how to read a page’ (4.1). For previously ‘seen’ texts/extracts, use the methods in ‘Full interpretation: informed reading’ (4.2). Both draw on the essential skills and attitudes developed in ‘Read closely – read widely’ (1.2.4).

Assessment and feedback on written work

Here are the kinds of criteria commonly used for assessing written work in English. These are substantially similar for continuously assessed coursework and formal examination. The only significant difference is that course-work is expected to include full academic referencing and extensive quotation whereas exam work without books to hand is not. There is also some allowance in the latter for occasional slips in expression under pressure. That aside, all work is expected to be accurate and adequately presented. (Check these criteria against those used where you are studying, also the detailed grading guidelines from first-class to fail.) Alongside are some examples of the kinds ofcomment commonly made on ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ work. (Ask yourself whether similar things have been said about your work – and what you have done about it.)

Criteria	Comments by markers
	Strong	Weak
Relevance	‘Addresses question directly’	‘All-purpose’, off the point’
Knowledge	‘Full, precise, technical’ ‘Close knowledge of text’	‘Generalised, uninformed’ ‘Little reference to text’
Critical awareness	‘Sophisticated, shrewd, searching’	‘Crude, simplistic, descriptive’
Argument	‘Purposeful, coherent’	‘Bitty, lacks progression’
Organisation	‘Well structured’	‘Just lists points’
Expression	‘Articulate, clear, lucid’	‘Poor, weak, vague’
Presentation	‘Polished, careful, professional’	‘Crude, shoddy, a mess’
Academic apparatus	‘Full, consistent, accurate’	‘Incomplete, inconsistent’
Overall	‘Answers all questions well, assured, good range’	‘Incomplete, signs of haste, weak, limited’

Notice that many of these criteria are the same as or similar to those for assessing and giving feedback on oral presentations (see 1.2.8). The differences are entirely to do with the modes of communication and media involved. In this way, again, ‘doing English’ is about actively using aspects of the subject as well as observing specific instances of them as objects. Our approach and the assessment have to be varied accordingly.

Here are some useful websites:

‘Revision Tips’, University of Cambridge Local Examinations Syndicate (2011) http://www.cambridgestudents.org.uk/examtime/revisiontips/

SSDS, University of Leicester, ‘Revision and Exam Skills’ (2010)

http://www2.le.ac.uk/projects/oer/oers/ssds/oers/revision-skills/Revision%20and%20exam%20skills.pdf

University of Southampton, ‘Revising for and Taking Exams’ (2008)

http://www.studyskills.soton.ac.uk/studytips/exams.htm

@ 1.3 FIELDS OF STUDY

@ 1.3.1 Language

Activity

Listen to a conversation between a parent and a baby or very young child. How do they communicate? What sounds and gestures does the parent interpret as requests or expressions of need? What responses does the parent give and how do they function?

@ 1.3.2 Literature

Activity

Put some of the examples of texts you’ve considered in activities (a) and (b) from section 1.3.2 of the book on a scale of literariness, from ‘least literary’ to ‘most literary’? What kinds of characteristics feature at either end of the scale?

@ 1.3.3. Culture, communication and media

Activity (b) within section 1.3.3 of the book asks you to try to apply Jakobson’s model of the addresser-addressee relationship to a poem, a piece of prose, and a piece of drama or conversation. Apply it also to some of the texts you considered in activities (a) and (b) in the preceding section of the book (1.3.2), on ‘Literature’. Consider the similarities and differences between the addresser-addressee relationships involved in different examples of ‘less literary’ and ‘more literary’ texts.

@ 1.4 ENGLISH IN EDUCATION – A SHORT CULTURAL HISTORY

Our primary focus here is advanced English in education, chieﬂy in universities and colleges. But there is much that relates to the teaching and learning of English in other sectors. It should also be added that though the following sub-sections are historical in emphasis, they feed directly into the complex fabric of English as it is currently constituted. Nor should the pressing signiﬁcance of the history of the subject surprise us. University and college Englishes, as we see shortly, are hardly a century and a half old. But the traditions they represent are many and various, and often complex and contentious. They inform many present practices and point to many potential futures.

The topics and sections are as follows:

1.4.1 English as a school subject

1.4.2 English as a foreign or second language

1.4.3 English as a university degree subject

1.4.4 English and Classics

1.4.5 English and Theology

1.4.6 Rhetoric, composition and writing

1.4.7 History and English

1.4.8 From Literary Appreciation to Literary Criticism

1.4.9 English into Literary Studies

1.4.10 English with Theatre or Film Studies

1.4.11 English into Cultural, Communication and Media Studies

1.4.12 Critical Theory into Cultural Practice

1.4.13 Subjects Past, Present and Future: Activities and Discussion

@ 1.4.1 English as a school subject

For most of its history ‘English’ at school has meant the basic skills of literacy: learning to read and write. For only a small part of that history, from the late nineteenth century onwards, has ‘English’ meant learning to read and write about literature. Latin was the dominant medium of instruction at both school and university during the Middle Ages and much of the Renaissance, and even when English began to take over this role in the sixteenth century the chief languages and literatures studied were still classical. The emphasis in English was on handwriting and grammar and (as print culture deepened from the eighteenth century) standardised *spelling and *punctuation. All these were taught chieﬂy with a view to composing business letters, annotating accounts and drafting routine agreements. Anything more specialist in the legal, medical and scientiﬁc spheres, or anything more self-consciously literary, would be developed with classical models in mind, perhaps in Latin. It is interesting to reﬂect that ‘English Literature’ did not exist as a school or college subject for Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, Wordsworth, Austen or the Brontës; even though their works are now part of what is taught under that name. Women were at a peculiar disadvantage. They were formally debarred from universities till the late nineteenth century and at school generally discouraged from a high degree of literacy (especially knowledge of the classical languages and literatures). Signiﬁcantly, however, this gave women something of a head start in the writing and reading of such low status genres as personal letters and journals, as well as the kinds of vernacular novel associated with them.

English, Christianity and a ‘civilising’ mission

The teaching of English at school has been heavily inﬂuenced by the Church for much of its history. It still is in some speciﬁcally religious schools and colleges. Therefore, it is to such institutions as the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Charity Schools, Sunday Schools and Dissenting Academies that we must look for the beginnings of anything like mass education in English. Meanwhile, in the British Empire, education of ‘natives’ in English was almost wholly under the control of missionary schools of one denomination or another. Many of these schools taught English through – and with a view to – reading the Bible, which had been widely available in English translations since the sixteenth century. The moral and cultural framing of ‘English’, and indeed its ‘civilising’ mission, have therefore often been assumed to be in some sense Christian.

The state takes control

Only in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did the state begin to take substantial responsibility for school education of any kind, including schooling in English. (In Britain the most important Education Acts in this respect were in 1870, 1902, 1944 and 1989.) At the same time, significantly, ‘English’ began to include ‘English LITERATURE’, and the latter was increasingly charged with a variety of moral roles previously ﬁlled by religion. Paramount among these were the three tasks of

heightening personal perception and reﬁning sensibility;
inculcating social propriety and enhancing public morality;
promoting social solidarity and national identity.

One of the ﬁrst and most inﬂuential advocates of this use of Literature in general, and English Literature in particular, was the school inspector, poet and essayist Matthew Arnold (1822–88). But statements of similar positions on the value of ‘Eng. Lit’, sometimes echoing Arnold, resonate throughout the twentieth century: notoriously in the Newbolt Report (1921), and famously in the work of such ﬁgures as F. R. Leavis in the UK and many NEW CRITICS in the USA. Such arguments readily get extended to the function of English in education as a whole whenever and wherever there is talk of some kind of ‘national curriculum’ and proposed standardisation. Often this is in the context of a sense of anxiety about everything from (declining) moral standards to (a loss of) national identity. Typically, especially in the populist media, the arguments are polarised in terms of ‘Traditionalists versus Progressives’ (in grotesque caricature, ‘Rabid Right-wing Reactionaries’ versus ‘Looney Liberals and Lefties’). Either way, you might like to reﬂect that neither of the following positions, on its own, is likely to result in an adequate programme for English at any level. The two sides need to be combined and reﬁned so as to produce a third which is different again. (The primary focus here is English at school. But the relevance of these arguments to university ‘Schools of English’ is obvious enough.)

Here are some typically (even if stereotypically) polarised positions on the functions of English in education:

‘Traditional’	‘Progressive’
English for employment	English for ‘life’
Vocational training in specialism	Education of whole person
Promotion of single standard language	Recognition of varieties
Emphasis on writing	Attention to speech
Formal written examinations	Mixed-mode assessment
Dictionary deﬁnitions & grammatical rules	Flexibility of usage
Canon of ‘great works’	Open or no canon
National curriculum	Local syllabuses
Single dominant cultural identity	Multicultural differences

READING: Palmer 1965; Brooker and Humm 1989: 13–72; Dixon 1991; Kress 1995; Eaglestone 2000: 9–14; Peel et al. 2001.

Here is a useful website:

Rick Rylance, ‘Why study English?’ (2011)

http://www.whystudyenglish.ac.uk/you-are/whyenglish.htm

@ 1.4.2 English as a foreign or second language

English has been widely taught as a foreign or second language, often with trade and commerce in mind, since before the sixteenth century. ‘ELT’ (English Language Teaching) is now one of the major, albeit largely ‘invisible’, exports of Britain, the USA and Australia. In the UK alone, in the year 2000, ELT accounted for over 750 million pounds of revenue and over 1,000 million pounds in associated publishing. Oxford University Press, for instance, is famous for its dictionaries and research monographs; but its economic base is secured by the publication of ELT materials. In fact, like all the other Western European languages of empire (Spanish, Portuguese, French, Dutch and German), English has not only been in demand; it was for a long time taught by virtual command as the necessary language of administration and official religion. Lord Macaulay sounded the imperial note most clearly in his parliamentary ‘Minute’ of 1835, laying down the rationale for Indian education in English: ‘to form a class who may be interpreters between us and the millions whom we govern; a class of persons, Indian in blood and colour, but English in taste, in opinions, in morals, and in intellect.’ (see Ashcroft et al. 1995: 428–30). America’s subsequent pre-eminence in commerce, technology and popular culture (seen by some as a form of neo-colonialism) has further increased the supply as well as the demand. The general cultural and historical conditions of this situation have already been set out (in 1.2) and its ramiﬁcations are further explored under POSTCOLONIALISM. Here all that will be added are some words of caution, and a reminder of issues that must be aired precisely because they, too, easily become ‘invisible’. The main reason for this is that, institutionally, the ‘English Language Teaching’ unit tends to be kept quite separate from the ‘Department of English (Literature)’, the former being treated as a ‘service’ department supporting other courses, while the latter is seen as an ‘academic’ subject in its own right.

It is therefore not hard to see why those whose ﬁrst (and perhaps only) language is English may assume that their language is the natural medium of education; also that it is culturally neutral. However, people for whom English is a second (or third or fourth) language tend to have quite distinct, because more detached, views of the subject; they inevitably experience it cross-culturally. Basically, for many, English represents access to speciﬁc knowledge and skills and tends to be identiﬁed with the technology and science as well as the economic and cultural models of the modern West. Hence the characteristic emphases of advanced courses in English for Academic Purposes (EAP) and, more explicitly, English for Special Purposes (ESP), which often feature materials relevant to Business, or Computing, or Engineering, or Law. In such contexts, however, the ‘Traditional’ and ‘Progressive’ polarities featured in the previous section tend to get scrambled or replaced. From one point of view, English in EFL/ESL would seem to be squarely aligned with the ‘Traditional’ side: an emphasis on employment, specialism, promotion of a single standard, concentration on writing, and so on. And yet, the fact is that in many respects EFL/ESL is the most dynamic and resourceful area of the subject: the space where much of the most innovative work in cross-cultural teaching and learning goes on, and where there is usually a direct and interactive engagement with contemporary genres, discourses and varieties of speech and writing in general. Moreover, the latter often goes well beyond, though it may also include, the relatively familiar areas of poetry, prose and drama as such. Thus, along with instances of other discourses devoted to word-play (such as jokes, anecdotes, adverts and news stories), literary texts are often used in ELT to extend and enliven the learning process. In short, there is a lot about EFL/ESL that is ‘Progressive’, too.

Meanwhile, the main tensions in the teaching and learning of English as a Foreign or Second Language are often experienced in quite other terms: between approaches based on Grammar and Vocabulary (emphasising rote learning and the accurate reproduction of a formal written standard) and Communicative approaches (emphasising interactivity and the cultivation of a more ﬂexible approach to speech as well as writing). Much depends upon whether the language is being learnt with a view to text-handling alone (e.g., study and technical translation) or fuller social and cultural exchanges (e.g., ‘live’ encounters and interpreting). Also an issue is whether the ultimate aim is some kind of ‘Native speaker’ ﬂuency (usually with British and American models in mind) or a ‘Functional’ competence appropriate to speciﬁc kinds of text and task. Whereas the former is strictly impossible and may be misleading, the latter may prove inﬂexible and limiting. Yet other challenges are signalled in the Prologue (‘English still spells . . .’, pp. 11–12). And again these concern not only ‘foreign’ or ‘second-language’ or ‘non-native’ learners, but all who seek to grasp what is so ‘Special’ about – or ‘Common’ to – all the various kinds of ‘English’, whether nominally ‘ELT’ or ‘Eng. Lit.’, at home or abroad. They also remind us, as does the entry on translation and translation studies in Part Three, that much of the most significant and insightful work on English, whether at school or university, is inevitably produced by those who can see it at a distance, as an object, and who are not simply subject to it as a matter of course.

READING: Howatt 1984;Mercer and Swann 1996:204–319; Fennell 2001:258–69; Graddol 1997; Pennycook 1994 and 1998; Byram and Fleming 1998; Harmer 2001.

Here is a useful website:

David Graddol, ‘English Next. Why global English may mean the end of ‘English as a Foreign Language’, British Council http://www.britishcouncil.org/learning-research-english-next.pdf

@ 1.4.3 English as a university degree subject

To the astonishment of many contemporary students, university ‘English’ is little more than a century and a half old. In Britain, the first chair of English Literature was created at University College, London in 1828, while the first chairs in English at Oxford and Cambridge were in Anglo-Saxon and established in 1849 and 1878, respectively. The ﬁrst chair of English Literature at Oxford was in 1904. A claim can even be made that St Andrews in Scotland ‘invented’ university English in Britain in the mid-nineteenth century; it had a Professor of Logic and English Literature in 1865. In the USA, meanwhile, the ﬁrst chair of English was at Indiana in 1860, and Harvard got one in 1876. Since then, the university subject called ‘English Language and Literature’ or simply ‘English Literature’ has undergone a process of remarkable expansion (though we should add that, latterly, outside Britain at least, there are signs of perceptible contraction). To begin with, university English substantially displaced its predecessors, the Roman and Greek CLASSICS and RHETORIC (see below). These had been the areas usually dedicated to linguistic and literary study. At the same time, English substantially displaced THEOLOGY and the study of the Bible as a general focus for moral study. Recently, however, there are signs that English in turn is itself being challenged by (or transformed into) other subjects. Notable amongst these are LITERARY, CULTURAL, COMMUNICATION and MEDIA Studies.

Such processes of displacement and transformation appear to be fundamental to the very constitution of the subject. In fact, paradigm shifts seem to be fundamental to the continuous reconstitution of all subjects, as of scientiﬁc knowledges and social discourses in general (see Foucault 1986: 31–120). In the following sub-sections we trace the changing nature of university English over the past century and a half. This is not only inherently interesting: it is also immediately urgent. With a subject that is so relatively ‘young’ much of this history is still with us. Many of the earlier stages are evident in the contemporary organisation and practice of the discipline. In this respect, the subject is like a long geological fault displaying its multi-layered strata in different conﬁgurations and with different degrees of prominence at various places. It is visibly what it is because of what it was. These ‘living histories’ are what we turn to next.

READING: Kinneavy 1971: 5–18; Evans 1993: 3–18; Hawkes in Coyle et al. 1990: 926–40; Eagleton 1996: 15–46; Doyle 1989; Graff 1987; Baldick 1996: 1–19; Milner 1996: 1–26; Crawford 2000.

Here are some useful websites:

‘What You Study – Literature’, Why Study English? http://www.whystudyenglish.ac.uk/you-will/literature.htm

‘What You Study – Language’, Why Study English? http://www.whystudyenglish.ac.uk/you-will/language.htm

@1.4.4 English and Classics

In the first instance, at its inception, the study of English was braced against and heavily inﬂuenced by the study of the classical languages, literatures and cultures of ancient Greece and Rome. English was initially viewed as an inferior upstart. Nonetheless, it eventually displaced Classics at the centre of the liberal arts curriculum. Many elements of a (neo-)classical critical agenda carried through, however. Thus among the ‘Common Topics’ in Part Three you will ﬁnd a strong classical element in the entries on art, comedy and tragedy and genre (including epic, satire and pastoral), metre (see versiﬁcation), myth and, of course, the term classic itself. In short, that older critical agenda is still in part ours now. There is also the matter of classical models and allusions in English literature. These figure especially in earlier writing for the simple reason that many pre-twentieth century writers had at least a rudimentary education in Latin (less often Greek), and some had a lot. Thus, when reading Milton’s Christian epic Paradise Lost, Pope’s mock-heroic The Rape of the Lock or Byron’s satire The Vision of Judgement (see 5.1.3 a, b, e), it is important to know something about classical epics (such as Vergil’s Aeneid and Homer’s Iliad and Odyssey) and satires such as those of Horace and Juvenal. For pastoral, meanwhile, we may look to classical celebrations of the country in Theocritus, and especially Vergil’s Eclogues and Georgics. Models such as these supplied a common frame of cultural reference amongst classically aware writers, readers and audiences. Even later poems such as Yeats’s and Kazantsis’s versions of ‘Leda and the Swan’ assume (though they do not absolutely require) acquaintance with stories from classical mythology (see 5.1.4). Many of these stories of classical gods and nymphs are traceable to Ovid’s Metamorphoses and may be followed up in reference books such as Brewer’s Dictionary of Phrase and Fable.

At the same time it is important not to overstate the depth and significance of classical culture in English literature. Shakespeare, by Jonson’s account, had ‘small Latin and less Greek’: much of the bard’s knowledge of classical mythology, legend and ancient history evidently came by way of translation (e.g., Golding’s translation of Ovid’s Metamorphoses (1565–7) and North’s translation of Plutarch’s Lives (1579)). Moreover, much of his audience’s acquaintance with such things probably came through precisely such plays as Shakespeare’s!

However, we must also recognise that there are many other CULTURES upon which English has drawn and in which it has been implicated. These range from early Germanic (e.g., 5.1.1 a) to contemporary Afro-Caribbean, Indian and Australian Aboriginal (see 5.1.5–6). All of these also have their distinctive mythologies, legends and ‘classic’ stories, as well as their own characteristic genres. A common mistake to avoid, therefore, is simply equating ‘classical culture’ with ‘high culture’ and then identifying both of them exclusively with ancient Greece and Rome. The effect of this is to marginalise or romanticise all other (especially non-Western European) cultures as exotic and foreign or, alternatively, to label them as ‘folk’ and ‘popular’. In short, in a global perspective, there are many more ‘classic’ traditions than one.

Nor need we limit our notions of classics (see canon) and mythologies to ancient cultures. Many modern commentators would argue that a grasp of the contemporary mythologies and distinctive genres of modern advertising, pop music and film (including ‘classics’ of all kinds – from classic cars to classic soap operas and cigars, and modern myths from Monroe to Madonna, and Elvis to ‘Hovis’) is rather more important for an understanding of contemporary English Studies than an acquaintance with Greek and Roman gods and heroes and their associated literary and pictorial genres. Significantly, then, the moment English Studies embraces the study of contemporary cultural classics it tends to transform itself into Cultural Studies. And that’s certainly not one of the transformation tales told by Ovid in his Metamorphoses!

READING: Wynne-Davies 1989:411–13; Healy in Coyle et al.1990:964–74; Barthes 1957; Milner 1996 1–11.

Here are some useful websites:

Robert Scholes, ‘Canonicity and Textuality’, from Introduction to Scholarship in Modern Languages and Literature, ed. by Joseph Gibaldi, http://english.illinoisstate.edu/strickland/rsvtxt/scholes.htm

‘The “Canon” of English Literature’ http://faculty.goucher.edu/eng211/canon_of_english_literature.htm

An interesting page instructing students at an American university how to consider the canon in relation to their creative writing course

@ 1.4.5 English and Theology

In a formally religious age the power to promote and interpret ‘good books’, notably the Bible and commentaries upon it, had been vested in clerics and their academic counterparts: theologians. However, during the nineteenth century, as society became more secular and as education came to be the responsibility of the state rather than the Church, the academic power to decide what was worth reading gradually passed from clerics and theologians to teachers, especially teachers of English (see above, 1.5.1). For late nineteenth- and earlier twentieth-century critics of CULTURE such as Arnold, Leavis and Trilling, teachers of English were virtually a secular priesthood engaged in spreading ‘the word’ of a certain form of civilisation. Moreover, many American NEW CRITICS had an aesthetic and ethical agenda which had close ties with a certain form of Southern States Christianity.

Clerics and theologians also bequeathed the notion of a canon of permitted (as opposed to proscribed) books. This is still with us in recurrent debates about what should or should not be acknowledged as part of ‘the canon of English Literature’ (i.e. great works worthy of study). More subtly, theological habits of textual criticism and analysis which had been grounded in interpretation of Holy Scripture and in the practice of biblical commentary carried over into the interpretation of secular works. Partly as a result, it is still common for readers to expect that a text has some hidden meaning or secret ‘message’ if only they can crack the code. Such a mode of interpretation may fairly be called allegorical in that it involves a supposed layering of meaning, a reading of the text at various ‘levels’ (literal, symbolic, moral and spiritual) and, ultimately, a stripping away of all these layers/ levels to get at some essential ‘truth’. Much of this quest for ultimate authority in texts derives from the underlying expectations of biblical criticism and the orthodox study of Holy Writ. Many of the most systematic and sophisticated techniques of early textual editing also derive from biblical, along with classical, scholarship. So do many signiﬁcant strains of early work on translation; for the ﬁrst translations into English were often of the Latin, Greek and Hebrew Bibles.

Finally, it should be noted that knowledge of the Bible in any language, and of Christianity in general, can no longer be assumed in those studying English. This poses a major challenge when studying earlier English literature in particular (e.g., the Chester ‘Noah’ (5.3.2 a), Paradise Lost (5.1.3 a), Blake’s Milton (5.1.3. d)). In such cases it is reasonable to expect critical readers to become informed about the stories and language of the Bible, as they would with any other major sources and inﬂuences. Confusion only arises when it is implied that a largely secular and potentially MULTICULTURAL body of students should actually believe the doctrine.

READING: Wynne-Davies 1989: 353–4; Prickett in Coyle et al. 1990: 653–63, 951–62; Carroll and Prickett 1997: Introduction.

Here are some useful websites:

Albert S. Cook, ‘The “Authorised Version’ and its influence’, in The Cambridge History of English and American Literature, Vol. IV: Prose and Poetry, Sir Thomas North to Michael Drayton, ed. by A. W. Ward and A. R. Waller (1907-1921), Bartleby.com (2000) http://www.bartleby.com/214/0201.html

Cleland Boyd McAfee, ‘The Influence of the King James Version on English Literature’, in The Greatest English Classic: A Study of the King James Version of the Bible and Its Influence on Life and Literature (1912), Bible Research: Internet Resources for Students of Scripture (2012) http://www.bible-researcher.com/mcafee4.html

@ 1.4.6 Rhetoric, composition and writing

Rhetoric has been taught in one form or another from CLASSICAL times to the present day. It has always had a close, and sometimes vexed, relation with the study of modern languages such as English. Initially, in a predominantly *oral culture, rhetoric meant ‘the arts of persuasive and effective public speaking’. In the ancient Greek city states and the Roman Empire training in rhetoric was reckoned essential for politicians, statesmen and senior administrators, especially in their dealings with a largely illiterate populace. Inﬂuential rhetorical manuals were written by Aristotle, Quintilian, Cicero and Longinus, and these dealt systematically with such matters as:

invention – the identiﬁcation of relevant materials and topics;
disposition – effective overall organisation of argument;
style – speciﬁc choices and combinations of words (including ﬁgures of speech

such as metaphor, antithesis, parallelism, lists, etc.);

the art of memory – for effective storing and recall of all the above;
delivery – for persuasive handling of tone, manner and gesture.

As literacy became more widespread, the province of Rhetoric was extended to embrace the arts of persuasive and effective written composition.

Clearly, then, Rhetoric initially designated something much more fundamental and powerful than is currently implied by the phrases ‘merely rhetorical’ and ‘rhetorical questions’ (i.e. mock-questions to which the speaker already has the answer). The pejorative ring of the latter is the legacy of a comparatively recent Romantic tradition which sought to privilege personal expression as ‘a spontaneous overﬂow of powerful feeling’ (in Wordsworth’s phrase) rather than communication as a considered and crafted interpersonal activity. In fact Rhetoric, along with Grammar and Logic, had been one of the three cornerstones of the medieval and early Renaissance academic curriculum (the ‘Trivium’). Consequently, just about every recognised writer from the fourteenth to the nineteenth centuries (from Chaucer to Byron) had some training in it, chieﬂy through classical models. Wilson’s Art of Rhetoric (1553), a compilation of neo-classical rules and examples, was especially inﬂuential in Shakespeare’s day. In addition, Oxford, Cambridge and the older Scottish and American universities had Professors of Rhetoric virtually from their inception. Rhetoric was no mere adjunct to the study of language and literature. It was virtually its analytical core, and was in many respects the precursor of modern discourse analysis. Moreover, rhetorical training was concerned as much with the actual practice of speaking and writing, as with the analysis of what is already spoken and written. Early rhetorical training thus has modern counterparts (and sometimes direct successors) in the teaching and learning of a wide range of written and spoken composition, as well as ‘communication skills’, at schools, colleges and universities. At any rate it is generally better to approach combinations of critical-creative and analytical-practical activity through broadly ‘rhetorical’ traditions than through narrowly ‘literary critical’ or ‘linguistic analytical’ ones. Another option is to talk of ‘language arts’, with a stress on the practical artisanal as well as the artistic side of doing things with words.

Courses in Rhetoric

Sometimes called ‘Rhetoric and Composition’ or just ‘Comp.’, for short, such courses are a fundamental feature of colleges and universities in the USA today. They have been for some time. So, increasingly, are courses gathered under the umbrella of ‘Writing across the Curriculum’ (WAC). These are courses which encourage writing and communication skills rooted in a whole range of departments, not just in an ‘English’ department as such. Some grasp of the historical development of Rhetoric, Composition and Writing is crucial if we are to understand the particular conﬁguration of university English in the USA. This is also important because certain areas of university English in the UK, Europe and Australasia are currently moving in the same direction.

‘English’ in the American academy

English first came into being by detaching and distancing itself from the well-established study of Rhetoric. From the beginning the latter had been charged with the task of schooling a highly heteroglot and multicultural migrant population in the writing and speaking of what was proposed as a ‘common tongue’: English. (In parts of Canada, French fulﬁls this role.) The key to English’s detachment from Rhetoric was the former’s claim to its own specialised subject matter (a canon of partly British but increasingly American writers in English) as well as its own specialised apparatuses of study (variously historical, bibliographical, philological and, latterly, literary critical; see 1.5.7–8). As mentioned elsewhere (1.5.3), English got its ﬁrst university chair at Indiana in 1860, Harvard in 1876. The institutional result of such differentiation was a hierarchy in which, from the ‘English’ scholar’s point of view, Rhetoric was steadily downgraded to the status of service industry or course prerequisite. Proficiency in writing and speaking were increasingly regarded as someone else’s business: what students should do in ﬁrst-year ‘freshman English’ or before they enrol at all. The effect on the teaching and learning of English as a whole was cumulative and ultimately divisive. Thenceforth ‘English majors’ were often writing essays on Shakespeare or Milton (and later Melville and Faulkner), while anyone else who did English at university would be learning how to write reports and letters and be practising formal presentations and debates – maybe with a little ‘creative writing’ thrown in on the side. There was a fundamental cleavage within both the academic hierarchy and the practice of the subject. English majors talked and wrote about literary classics; students of Rhetoric and Composition analysed and practised many different kinds of speaking and writing.

The hierarchical division of labour between ‘Eng. Lit.’ and ‘Rhetoric and Comp.’

This situation has, however, been strongly challenged over the past decade. As student numbers for straight English Literature have declined (down by 30 per cent in the USA in the past ten years), student numbers and businesses demand for courses in Rhetoric and Composition (now including full MA and PhD programmes) have risen sharply. Funds are tending to follow feet too – and to some extent dictate where they will go. Now many specialist courses in ‘English (and American) Lit.’ are directly or indirectly dependent for their very existence on the numbers and revenue generated by their erstwhile junior partners. Increasingly, ‘Rhetoric and Comp’ and ‘Freshman English’ are not just the bread and butter but also a large slice of the cake in US tertiary education. Similar things are happening throughout the English-speaking worlds: in Australia, New Zealand, Africa, India and the UK. Sometimes these shifts occur within a department called ‘English’. Sometimes they occur outside or alongside it, in departments of COMMUNICATIONS or Languages or Applied Linguistics, or in programmes dedicated to Journalism or Professional Writing or Writing across the Curriculum. But whatever the names of the departments or the configurations of the courses, the basic questions are the same:

How far should ‘English’ include training in effective writing, speech and presentation: verbal and visual, by individuals and groups?
Can the development of knowledge and critical awareness about English be divorced from skills in the use of English? And can we really divorce knowledges from skills, and either of them from theory: ‘know-what’ from ‘know-how’ and ‘know-why’?
What place is there for kinds of creative as well as critical writing in English programmes: script-writing of documentaries and writing of news or advertising copy, say, not only the traditionally ‘literary’ genres of poetry, plays and novels?
What, too, of the critical-creative rewriting of texts through such activities as parody, adaptation and intervention (all of which were in fact routine practices in classical and neo-classical Rhetoric)?

These are challenges picked up in the Prologue (pp. 9–11), carried through in the items on Creative writing and Writing and reading, response and rewriting in Part Three, and further explored in Part Four: Textual Activities and Learning Strategies

READING: Introductory: Kinneavy 1971: 6–17; Dixon 1971; Durant and Fabb 1990: 20–2; Elbow 1993: 126–40; Greenblatt and Gunn 1992: 466–520; Pope 1995: 1–30, 183–92; Woofﬁtt in Maybin and Mercer 1996:122–61; Culler 1997:69–81. Fuller studies: Nash 1989; Nash 1992: 67–155; Graff 1987; Andrews 1992; Berlin 1996; Nash and Stacey 1997; Bartholomae and Petrosky 1999; Stott et al. 2001.

Here are some useful websites:

‘How to Write: AP Rhetorical Analysis Paragraphs and Essays’, Auburn Schools (2011) http://www.auburnschools.org/ahs/mpsinnott/pdf/AP%20English%2011%20Power%20Packet.pdf

Minjie Xing et al., ‘Raising students’ awareness of cross-cultural contrastive rhetoric in English writing via an e-learning course’, Language Learning and Technology 12.2 (2008), http://llt.msu.edu/vol12num2/xingetal.pdf

@ 1.4.7 History and English

There has long been a historical dimension to the study of English, whether as ‘literary history’ or ‘history of the language’. There has also been a long-standing relationship between the academic subjects called English and History – sometimes close, often vexed, always signiﬁcant. In fact we can identify most theoretical positions as well as individual practitioners in so far as they are more or less historical. Everyone has a certain version or vision of history, even (and perhaps especially) if they attempt to relegate history to the background or ignore it altogether.

Literary History

Mainstream academic History at the close of the nineteenth century was mainly concerned with what have been called ‘the biographies of great men’ and ‘kings and queens and constitutions’. Literary history tended to follow suit. It concentrated on the ‘biographies of great writers’ (whose ‘greatness’ was asserted, and whose whiteness, maleness and social respectability were largely assumed). Dr Johnson’s The Lives of the Poets (1781) was reckoned amongst the major precursors, and that great late Victorian monument to British worthies The Dictionary of National Biography (1882 onwards) was one of the chief tools that Literary Historians shared with their colleagues in History. Meanwhile, what can be called the ‘constitutional’ side of Literary History was largely conceived in terms of sources, influences and traditions, often with classical precursors, e.g., Shakespeare’s use of Plutarch’s Lives in his Roman History plays; the influence of Horace, Juvenal and Roman satiric tradition on Dryden, and of all of them on Pope (see 5.1.3 b). More narrowly, scholars asserted a great national tradition of speciﬁcally English Literature. In poetry this ran from, say, Chaucer to Tennyson; in the novel from Defoe to Dickens. Such studies form an enduring and important strain in contemporary literary history. It should be noted, however, that they often construct a distinctive history of literature rather than a sense of literature in history. Literature was (and often still is) projected as though existing in its own space and time and changing according to its own inner logic; as though it is not bound up with the pervasive processes of social-historical change. The distinction between a history of literature and literature in history often turns out to be crucial.

History of the Language

Meanwhile, linguists were laying the foundations of a certain kind of ‘History of the LANGUAGE’. Late nineteenth-century Northern European scholars such as Grimm and Verner were expending a great deal of energy and erudition on the study of the early Indo-European ‘family’ of languages in general and the interrelations among the early Germanic languages in particular. The result was the appearance within English of such subjects as Comparative Philology, History of the English Language, Old Norse and Anglo-Saxon. The sheer linguistic ‘hardness’ of these subjects along with the teasing fragmentariness of the manuscript record made their study the ideal counterweight to those in CLASSICS and THEOLOGY (see 1.5.4–5) who had tended to dismiss the study of English as ‘easy’, ‘light’, ‘unscholarly’ and ‘insufﬁciently rigorous’. Thenceforth it was possible to maintain (and at many universities up to the 1960s compulsory to learn) that such things as the ancient Indo-European words for ‘snow’ or ‘pine tree’, as well as Grimm’s and Verner’s ‘laws’ of sound-changes between, say, Sanskrit, Lithuanian and the Romance and Germanic languages, were an essential foundation for the study of English. So, too, it was insisted, was a study of Anglo-Saxon and medieval English poetry and prose, chieﬂy with an eye to their linguistic characteristics and textual history rather than their ‘literary’ qualities. In fact, these latter areas were soon re-dubbed ‘Old’ and ‘Middle’ English so as to point up the continuity of a tradition leading to ‘Modern’ English (here meaning English from the sixteenth century onwards). In this way the image of a national language, literature and culture was fashioned ‘as a whole’: a complete hi/story with beginning (Old English), middle (Middle English) and end (Modern English).

Here is a useful website:

Hans Robert Jauss, ‘Literary History as a Challenge to Literary Theory’ (1969)

ecmd.nju.edu.cn/UploadFile/17/8195/challe.doc

This is a key essay on the topic.

@ 1.4.8 From Literary Appreciation to Literary Criticism

At the same time that one area of English Studies was being fortiﬁed as ‘hard’ and ‘rigorous’ by philologists and textual scholars, another area was being maintained as ‘soft’ and ‘impressionistic’ by devotees of what has been called literary appreciation. At best, literary appreciation is a style of commentary on literature which has much in common with a good journalistic review of a book, play, ﬁlm or concert: it tells you what the reviewer does and does not like and why. At worst, it smacks of after-dinner chit-chat about ‘ﬁne’ authors, artists, composers, wine and food, or glossy coffee-table books on ‘great works’. This approach to LITERATURE is also called bellettrist (from French belles lettres/beautiful writings) or, more pejoratively, dilettantish (from Italian dilettanti/delight-tasters). Either way, this way of talking about literature has as its primary aim the division of works into ‘pleasing’ or ‘displeasing’, ‘beautiful’ or ‘ugly’, ‘true’ or ‘false’, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, ‘major’ or minor’ – depending on the precise criteria in play.

As that loaded phrase literary appreciation implies, the expectations of both teacher and learner are presumed to be predisposed towards admiration of ‘ﬁne’ writing and, conversely, censure of ‘bad’ writing. Literary appreciation therefore tends to be loosely aesthetic and value-laden. I say ‘loosely’ because writers in this mode tend not to explore their premises in much detail. Rather, they imply a community of interest and a consensus of belief amongst peers. There is the general air of a gentleman’s club or the amiable complacency of an Oxbridge senior common room. The canon of great works is not so much argued over as assumed or asserted. One of the most notable critics of this kind was Sir Arthur Quiller-Couch. He was the editor of many highly inﬂuential anthologies, including the Oxford Book of English Verse (1902) and was appointed Professor of English Literature at Cambridge in 1912. His sweeping gestures and magisterial pronouncements also have something in common with the ‘biographies of great writers’ kind of Literary History referred to in the previous section. The main difference is that ‘Q’, as he preferred to be called, is more concerned with literary textures than historical contexts. Interestingly, Q’s style has much in common with that of a slightly later Cambridge don, F.R. Leavis. In fact, for all Leavis’s avowed opposition to his Cambridge predecessors (as well as many of his contemporaries), his penchant for bold assertion and his vigorous insistence that the critic’s task is to ‘discriminate’ between ‘good’ and ‘bad’ writing signal his allegiance far more to the camp of literary appreciation than to that of literary criticism which superseded it. It is the latter we turn to now.

Professionalising criticism

After the First World War, university English Studies became much more professionalised. The gentleman reviewer and bellettrist gradually gave way to the scholar-critic. The latter insisted that the subject be made more rigorous and technically precise. More particularly, these self-conscious literary critics urged much greater attention to ‘the words on the page’ and developed a distinctive critical vocabulary and apparatus for doing just that. These movements were known as PRACTICAL CRITICISM in the UK and NEW CRITICISM in the USA (see 2.3). Here all that need be noted is that Practical/New Criticism aimed to put commentary on literary texts on a new footing. In place of general impressions and loose opinionating, there was to be close and ‘objective’ analysis of such features as ambiguity, irony, imagery, point of view and integrated or ‘organic’ structure. The fact that many of these terms are perhaps already familiar, even ‘natural’, to you as the routine counters of Literary Criticism is a measure of just how far Practical and New Criticism succeeded in becoming an orthodoxy for much of the twentieth century.

Part Three of the present book identiﬁes a further dozen or so Theoretical Positions and Critical Approaches. This is a reminder that ultimately Practical/New Criticism is just one kind of movement and historical moment in literary criticism, albeit a highly inﬂuential and persistent one.

Criticism can be a confusing concept because 'being critical' and 'being a critic' imply a variety of activities and roles. In fact we can distinguish four basic meanings of criticism:

ﬁnding fault and pulling to pieces in a negative sense;
analysing and pulling to pieces in the neutral sense of taking apart;
interpreting with a view to establishing meaning and understanding;
evaluating with a view to establishing relative or absolute worth.

Good critical readers and writers are constantly aware of the potential slippage and overlap amongst all these four senses. They also embrace them in so far as they recognise the relation between analysis, interpretation and evaluation. Critique is the name for the activity of rewriting a text in order to get to grips with it more interactively (see 4.4). (For fuller discussion, see Norris, 'Criticism', in Coyle et al.1990:27–67.)

READING: Norris and Rylance in Coyle et al. 1990: 27–67, 721–35; Graff 1987; Mulhern 1979; Baldick 1996: 20–115. Also see: Brooks 1947; Leavis 1936, 1948.

Here is a useful website:

F. R. Leavis, The Great Tradition (1950) http://archive.org/stream/greattradition031120mbp#page/n5/mode/2up

Free online access to Leavis’s seminal text.

@ 1.4.9 English into Literary Studies

One response to the globalisation of English is to drop the ‘English’ altogether and substitute for it the adjective ‘Literary’. This has the effect of at once broadening and narrowing the subject matter:

broadening the subject in that many other literatures than English can be openly embraced; e.g., courses on the novel which take in nineteenth-century Russian and twentieth-century South American as well as English and American instances; courses on classical Greek and Roman, Elizabethan and Japanese drama;
narrowing the subject in that many non-literary forms of speech and writing routinely featured in courses on English Language and discourse then tend to be ignored; e.g., conversation, advertising, news-reporting, historical and philosophical texts.

As usual, there are pluses and minuses all round. The international reach of the course can be attractive (there is an especial grandeur in courses billed as ‘World Literature’); but this may be at the expense of a ﬁrm grasp of any speciﬁc national or regional tradition. ‘Cross-cultural’ comparisons may be plentiful; but these may turn out to be superﬁcial because of shaky knowledge of local contexts and the speciﬁcities of cultural–historical differences. The large promise of a totalised view of ‘World Literature’ may also in practice often come down to a predictable core of Western classics (Homer to Heaney) duly trimmed with a more or less exotic fringe of token non-Westerners, also classic. It has yet to be seen how far attempts at more ideologically sensitive courses and anthologies of World Literature on more genuinely global, or at least less Euro-American lines, will fare (e.g., Caws and Prendergast 1994, Geok-Lin Lim and Spencer 1993). A further challenge is that a great deal of what gets studied in ‘Literary Studies’ is translated into English.This is ﬁne as long as it is recognised that that is precisely what is involved: translation. Courses which use translation extensively need to be informed by at least some work on the theory, practice and implications of translation – in short, translation studies.

The term ‘literary’ can also be a problem when certain notions of LITERATURE are assumed to be universal and transhistorical. Many dominant Western European notions of the literary simply do not apply to other countries and cultures. For instance, traditional mega-genres such as poetry, prose and drama do not easily accommodate the mixtures of verse, song, narrative, dialogue, oratory and performance we ﬁnd in various Native American, Afro-Caribbean and Asian traditions (see 5.1.5–6). The printed novel, for instance, is a distinctively modern Western European and substantially bourgeois narrative mode. Even such increasingly prominent genres as auto/biography, travel writing, ‘science’ and ‘fantasy’ ﬁction are not exempt from this risk. No genre can apply everywhere and always. Every instance of such apparently universal modes as narrative and drama turns out to be in some sense peculiar; and sometimes it turns into something else entirely (e.g., a performed narrative which enacts a people’s place in nature; see 5.1.6 b). Another consequence of a certain kind of narrow ‘literary-mindedness’ is that alternative ways of describing cultural practices may be ignored. Word-play and language arts, in particular, or play and art in general, can sometimes prove more capacious and productive concepts. So, in another sphere, can the notions of *sign-systems, COMMUNICATION (from face-to-face to multimedia) and CULTURAL practices. But whatever terms and frames are used, the main thing is to avoid imposing an unexamined notion of literature on every performance or text we meet. FORMALIST preoccupation with ‘literariness’ and ‘defamiliarisation’ or NEW CRITICAL preoccupations with ambiguity, irony and ‘organic unity’ do not work too well with African folk tale, Caribbean dub poetry and Maori or Aboriginal creation myths. Nor for that matter, do some of the more rigid templates of class, gender and race supplied by certain kinds of Marxist, Feminist and Postcolonial literary criticism. Nonetheless, the shift from ‘English’ to ‘Literary’ Studies is now common and can be well worth making. It all depends what national and international arenas you decide to operate in, and how far the linguistic, literary and cultural frames you work with are themselves held up for inspection and interrogation. It also depends how far you are prepared to bend that frame so as to accommodate some of the kinds of traditionally non-literary material featured in the other versions of English which follow (in 1.5.10–12).

READING: Easthope 1991:3–64; Fowler in Coyle et al.1990:3–26; Durant and Fabb 1990; Culler 1997: 42–54.

Here is a useful website:

David S. Miall and Don Kuiken, ‘What is literariness: Three components of literary reading’, Discourse Processes 28 (1999) http://www.ualberta.ca/~dmiall/reading/Literariness.htm

@ 1.4.10 English with Theatre or Film Studies

In this case the emphasis obviously tends to be on the text as part of a dramatic, ﬁlmic or televisual event: not just how words are read from the page but how whole worlds of sight and sound, live or recorded, are realised on stage or screen. In many respects theatre, film and TV are themselves quite distinct MEDIA, both in modes of (re)production and contexts of reception. They are therefore sometimes practised and studied separately. However, the fact that all use sounds and images as well as words often draws practitioners as well as students together. In addition, most ﬁlms, like most stage and radio and TV plays, are based at some point on a script (including shooting script and story-board in the case of ﬁlms). Interestingly, it is only really the script as a primarily verbal text which ensures the links between theatre and film studies, and between both of them and English Literature (where plays, novels and poems are traditionally studied as texts not as performances). For the rest, the superabundantly non-verbal nature of theatre, film and TV makes them particularly awkward – as well as peculiarly attractive – for students of English. Occasionally, Theatre and Film Studies are closely integrated with English or other Modern Language departments. Sometimes they move within the orbit of Visual Studies, Design or even Education. Increasingly, however, they exist in their own independent spaces, sometimes aligned with Media, Communication and Cultural Studies (see 1.5.11). But whatever the precise conﬁguration, there is a noticeable tendency for English departments to incorporate more and more video and ﬁlms into their courses. Sometimes this is as a kind of optional extra, the occasional showing of the ﬁlm of a Shakespeare play or a TV adaptation of an Austen or Dickens novel, for instance. But increasingly there are whole courses built around the relations between literature and film, with the specificity of both media and their various moments of re/production taken into account – ‘Shakespeare and Film’, or ‘The Novel and Screen Adaptation’, for instance. Signiﬁcantly, such combinations often signal a steady retreat from close associations with practical Drama courses. This seems to be because Drama is perceived as more labour and space intensive, as well as less culturally central than ﬁlm and TV.

Cumulatively, all these shifts are beginning to impact on English in a variety of interesting ways. Collaborative production processes and institutional frames tend to be very much to the fore in ﬁlm, TV and theatre – both in the materials studied and in the ways of studying them. A ﬁlm or play is palpably the result of a collective effort, whoever the prominent individuals involved. Many student projects in these areas are also collective and involve team work. Both these facts naturally prompt students of English and Film or Theatre to query the Romantic notion of the author as individual genius. We may, for instance, revise our views of such supposedly individual geniuses as Shakespeare in the light of the palpably collaborative practices of his own theatre (see 2.2). The overall signiﬁcance of such courses involving theatre and/or ﬁlm is therefore much greater than a mere change of ‘medium’, narrowly conceived. What is entailed is a radical revision of what is meant by textual (re)production, as well as a challenge to individualistic modes of learning and assessment.

READING: Theatre: Brook 1968; Elam 1980; Aston and Savona 1991; Boal 1992. Film: Giddings et al.1990; Bordwell and Thompson 1993; McFarlane 1996. Television: Fiske 1987; Allen 1987; Selby and Cowdrey 1995.

Here is a useful website:

Linda Hutcheon, ‘In Defence of Literary Adaptation as Cultural Production’, M/C Journal: A Journal of Media and Culture 10.2 (2007) http://journal.media-culture.org.au/0705/01-hutcheon.php

@ 1.4.11 English into Cultural, Communication and Media Studies

These are yet other, interrelated, responses to the globalising and technologising of contemporary culture. Here the focus shifts to the processes and products of communication in general, and often the modern print and audio-visual media in particular (i.e. newspapers, magazines, pulp fiction, TV, video, computers and multimedia interfaces). At the same time increased attention is usually paid to MULTICULTURAL and other social differences, along with concerted challenging or scrambling of traditional divisions between ‘high’ art and ‘popular’ cultures. This last point is signiﬁcant because Cultural Studies to some extent takes over where people working on the interfaces between traditional departments of Literature, Art History and Music leave off. Until quite recently, if they did interdisciplinary work at all, the latter tended to concentrate on the interrelations amongst classics of a more or less elite kind. In earlier periods the emphasis would be on poetry, painting and music produced for aristocrats, often as a result of patronage (e.g., ‘The Literature, Art and Music of the Court of . . . ’). In later periods the emphasis would be on work of a ‘difﬁcult’ kind often appealing to small and still privileged minorities of connoisseurs (e.g., ‘Modernism, Cubism and Atonality’). In this respect Cultural Studies was initially reactive in that it concentrated on (and was readily confused with) Popular Studies. There was a deliberate emphasis on folk or popular (rather than court or elite) practices in earlier periods and on mass media or broadcast rather than minority and narrowcast) materials in later periods (e.g., ‘Ballads and Broadsheets in . . . ’; ‘Popular Carnival in . . . ’; ‘Popular Women’s Magazines . . . ’).

This balance is currently being redressed, however, especially at postgraduate level. Work within and between traditional departments of English, Art History and Music (often in conjunction with History; see 1.5.7) is now much more likely to embrace the study of a range of material. Popular ballads, songs and images are studied alongside their court and elite counterparts (see 5.1.1 b, f). Illustrated newspapers and magazines are studied together with the novels and short stories (often illustrated) which appeared serialised in their pages or circulated in the volumes of travelling libraries (e.g., Dickens). William Blake may be studied in his multifarious roles as poet, engraver, painter and publisher (not solely as poet; see 5.1.3 d). Songs are studied as words and music; drama is studied as performance on stage or screen, not simply as words on the page (see 1.5.10). Crucially, most of these courses move beyond the merely supplementary use of art and music as backgrounds to the serious business of literature in the foreground – as though art were merely illustrative and music were merely atmospheric. The best grapple from the outset with the challenges of perceiving through different media (they do not automatically privilege ‘the word’). They also acknowledge the problems of distinct traditions of production and reception, and of different period and genre labels for notionally ‘the same’ times and places.

At the same time, Cultural Studies is becoming more self-aware and circumspect. It is being recognised that culture operates at a variety of social levels and in a variety of media. Supposedly ‘mass’ readerships and audiences always turn out to be shifting aggregates and networks of ‘minority’ interests. There is also a growing recognition that print-culture is not in fact being destroyed by electronic audio-visual media (as various groups have tended to celebrate or lament). Instead, it is being reconﬁgured. People still speak, and write by hand, even if they also type and tape, e-mail and ‘text’. It’s simply that they now do these things in different proportions, on varying occasions and for changing functions. Major cultural practices and communicative modes tend to displace – not utterly replace – one another. The telephone extended the reach of speech, displaced the writing of letters and postcards, and altered people’s perceptions of time and distance. But it destroyed nothing except its immediate predecessor and prototype, the telegraph. The same is currently happening with electronic mail and text-messaging, and will doubtless happen with their multi-media successors. These are largely patterns of displacement and replacement; only rarely of utter destruction and disappearance. All this needs saying loud and clear, both inside and outside education. Otherwise the real complexities and teasing dis/continuities are overwhelmed by the strident strains of ‘brave new electronic world’ triumphalism on the one hand or ‘poor old print world’ pessimism on the other. Picking up the challenges identiﬁed in the Prologue (pp. 7–9), practitioners of ‘English’ therefore have some ever-more pressing questions to ﬁnd answers for:

How dependent is the subject on the medium of the written or printed word? Must its central object of study be the printed book?
Do the boundaries of the ‘literary’ (as distinct from the ‘non-literary’) need to be:
(i) rigorously policed? (ii) utterly abolished? (iii) maintained so as to be periodically transgressed? (iv) perpetually re-drawn?
Where is ‘English’ in all this as a national or international culture? and a local and global resource?
Do hypertext and computerised multi-media oblige us to recognise much more collaborative (less individualistic) modes of working and much more ﬂexible models of authorship (also see 1.5.10)? Is this a total ‘revolution’ in the making of the subject?
Or is it a gradual, albeit accelerated, ‘evolution’ – an extension of what we already more or less knew? For haven’t we always had a plural, hybrid and ﬂexible sense of the cultures, communicative practices and media in which we are involved?
Or have we?!

READING: Literature and other arts: Wellek and Warren 1963:125–38; Barricelli et al.1990. Cultural Studies: Brooker and Humm 1989: 236–58; During 1999: 1–28; Grossberg et al. 1992: 1–17; Easthope 1991; Green and Hoggart 1987; Graff and Robbins in Greenblatt and Gunn 1992: 419–36; Fiske in Lentricchia and McLaughlin 1995: 321–35; Milner 1996. Communication and Media Studies: O’Sullivan et al.1994; Goodman and Graddol 1996; Kress 1995; Branston and Stafford 1999.

Here is a useful website:

‘Media and literature: Why use media approaches?’, Mediaed, Media Education Wales (2001) http://mediaed.org.uk/teaching-ideas/general/media-and-literature

This teaching article proposes some arguments and ideas relating literature to other media.

@ 1.4.12 Critical Theory into Cultural Practice

This has been yet another set of possibilities opened up by what might be called ‘several Englishes in search of a subject’ (where subject means ‘discipline’, ‘subject matter’ and ‘subject position’). For in this case ‘English’ has taken several concerted turns towards literary and cultural theory, notably: MARXIST, FEMINIST, PSYCHOANALYTIC, POSTSTRUCTURALIST, POSTMODERN, POSTCOLONIAL and MULTICULTURAL. The resulting prospects are variously arid or exhilarating, shallow or profound. It all depends on the particular theories invoked and how these are related to the actual practices of reading and writing, learning and teaching.

Latterly there have been clear signs that the moment of ‘high theory’ (i.e. highly abstract theory) has passed. There is now a growing concern with theory in practice, especially the politically and pedagogically urgent question of who learns and teaches what, how and why. There is also an incipient sense of ‘post-theory’. Though it remains to be seen how far this takes a regressive or progressive turn – back to ‘lit. crit.’ or towards a fuller environmental or scientiﬁc awareness, for instance. All these matters are cued in the Prologue (pp. 6–7) and picked up in Part Two. There each major position is reviewed in turn and its contribution to a transformed practice weighed. The emphasis is on what can be done with each theory rather than on what it is. There is also an insistence on a flexible yet principled plurality of approach: identifying models and methods appropriate to speciﬁc tasks and texts – not arbitrarily imposing one on all (see 2.10). This principle is extended to modes of writing and study too. Part Four presents a wide range of textual activities and learning strategies which are designed to put a variety of theories into a variety of practices.

READING: Bartholomae and Petrosky 1986; Scholes 1985; Kress 1995; Brooker and Humm 1989: 73–170; Corcoran et al. 1994; Green and Hoggart 1987; Pope 1995: 183–202; Eagleton 1996: 169–89; Nash and Stacey 1997: 182–225; Butler et al. 2000.

Here are some useful websites hosting texts on the subject:

Michael Delahoyde, Critical Theory: Introduction to Literature (2013) http://public.wsu.edu/~delahoyd/lit.crit.html

Ben Agger, ‘Critical theory, poststructuralism and postmodernism: Their Sociological relevance’, Annual Review of Sociology 17 (1991) http://www.artsrn.ualberta.ca/courses/PoliticalScience/661B1/documents/BenAggerCriticalTheoryPoststructPostMod.pdf

@ 1.4.13 Subjects Past, Present and Future? Activities and Discussion

In this section we have traced at least a dozen directions in which the study of English is currently moving. All of these derive directly from the very varied history of the subject as studied in schools, and especially colleges and universities, over the last century and a half. English as we currently know it is constituted by the knitting together of a variety of ‘living histories’. Virtually every strand of its past design can be discerned in some aspect of the current fabric. Thus we ﬁnd that traces of subjects as varied (and themselves as variable) as Classics, Theology, Rhetoric, Composition and History (Literary and Linguistic) and a wide range of ‘Studies’ (Theatre, Film, Literary, Cultural, Communication and Media) as well as a wide range of critical theories and cultural practices (from New Critical and Formalist to Feminist, Poststructuralist and Postcolonial), can all be discerned in the complex patterning of the discipline(s) we currently call English Studies. Indeed, this patterning is so richly variegated that it has been suggested we recognise English as an ‘interdiscipline’: a site where old disciplines meet with new, and in their mingling help generate fresh configurations of knowledge. This last aspect is crucial. English as it is currently conﬁgured is as much concerned with ‘know how’ (skills) and ‘know why’ (critical evaluation and cultural theory) as with ‘know what’ (content, subject matter).

To be sure, no single department of English – and certainly no single person in it is practising all of these knowledges. Nor can the present book claim to do more than gesture towards the major ones. And yet, every department and every individual practitioner of English potentially has access to all of them. That is, we all have the capacity (even if we do not always have the opportunity or even the desire) to draw on a variety of traditions stretching from the recoverable past to the as yet unmade future. Put another way, with the emphasis on plurality and choice, we all have some responsibility to identify the pasts of the subject we wish to draw on, and to use these to help articulate the futures we would prefer. In this respect it is desirable, at least initially, to try to think the study of English ‘as a whole’ (even if it sometimes seems to be no more than ‘a series of holes’). No one may be practising all ‘English Studies’ but all are practising some. We are all contributing to some features of what is, even if not a common design, a shared fabric. And so are many people who belong to what, nominally at least, are quite distinct disciplines (from Art and History to Cultural and Queer Studies). The activities which follow should help you get some provisional bearings on the kinds of ‘Studies’ you are currently involved in.

Activity

English and or as other subjects?

Turn to section of this name in the book (6.2). Use the double-page spread there to help plot the kinds of English Studies in which you are currently engaged. More particularly, use it to discuss:

the main emphases and orientations of your current English programme;
your own main interests within or beyond that programme;
directions or dimensions in which the subject in general seems to be moving;
directions or dimensions in which you would like to push it. Go on to modify or completely remodel this diagram as you see ﬁt.

Discussion

(i) Interdisciplinary work is not the calm of an easy security; it begins effectively (as opposed to the mere expression of a pious wish) when the solidarity of the disciplines breaks down.

Roland Barthes, ‘From Work to Text’, Image-Music-Text (1977: 155)

(ii) English should be reconstituted as the study of how verbal and written ﬁctions have been produced and used, socially channelled and evaluated, grouped together, given social signiﬁcance, institutionalised, transformed [. ..] The study of English will then provide a creative base for active experiments with cultural production (verbal, visual and aural) which enhance, improve and diversify rather than narrow and homogenise our cultural life.

Brian Doyle, English and Englishness (1989: 142)

READING: Speciﬁc suggestions are attached to each of the above sections. The following are of general and recurrent usefulness. Brisk and stimulating places to start are: G. Kress Writing the Future: English and the Making of a Culture of Innovation 1995; P. Widdowson ‘W(h)ither English?’ and T. Hawkes ‘The Institutionalisation of Literature: The University’, in M. Coyle et al. (eds) Encyclopedia of Literature and Criticism 1990: 1221–36, 926–40; S. Greenblatt and G. Gunn (eds) Redrawing the Boundaries: The Transformation of English and American Studies,1992:Introduction and T. Eagleton Literary Theory: An Introduction (2nd edn) 1996: 15–47, 169–208. Many present positions and future possibilities are opened up in the four excellent volumes of Open University course U210: The English Language: Past, Present and Future 1996; especially relevant here are S. Goodman and D. Graddol (eds) Redesigning English: New Texts, New Identities 1996 and N. Mercer and J. Swann (eds) Learning English: Development and Diversity 1996.These treat developments in India, Australia and elsewhere at a variety of educational levels, while also addressing matters of global standardisation, local identity and high- and low-technology contexts. Also see S. Tweddle et al. English for Tomorrow 1997 and R. Peel et al. Questions of English 2001. The following concentrate on ‘English’ in tertiary education in Britain and America: Britain – B. Doyle English and Englishness 1989 and C. Evans English People: The Experience of Teaching and Learning English in British Universities 1993; C. Bloom Literary Politics and Intellectual Crisis in Britain Today 2001. America – G. Graff Professing Literature: An Institutional History 1987; P. Elbow What is English? 1993; Greenblatt and Gunn 1992 (as above); J. Guy and I. Small Politics and Value in English Studies: A Discipline in Crisis? 1993 and J. Berlin Rhetorics, Poetics, Culture: Refiguring College English Studies 1996. More historically speciﬁc studies are: C. Baldick The Social Mission of English Criticism 1848–1932 1983; C. Baldick Criticism and Literary Theory 1890 to the Present 1996; P. Parrinder Authors and Authority: English and American Criticism, 1750–1900 1991; F. Lentricchia After the New Criticism 1980; F. Mulhern The Moment of Scrutiny 1979 (on Leavis) and D. Palmer The Rise of English Studies 1965.

Collections of relevant essays are: S. Gubar and J. Kamholtz (eds) English Inside and Out: The Place of Literary Criticism 1993; P. Brooker and P. Humm (eds) Dialogue and Difference: English into the Nineties1989; J. Batsleer et al. Rewriting English: Cultural Politics and Gender and Class 1985; C. MacCabe (ed.) Futures for English 1988 and M. Green and R. Hoggart (eds) English and Cultural Studies: Broadening the Context 1987 and P. Widdowson (ed.) Re-reading English 1982.