@ PROLOGUE: CHANGING ‘ENGLISH’ NOW

@ Prologue actively mobilises many of the issues raised in the book Prologue: crossing borders, establishing boundaries, exploring texts in context, etc. It also offers a preliminary work-out and play-around with most of the skills explored in ‘Doing English’ (1.2). Some of the activities can be picked out and done individually; but when linked and done continuously they form a flexible and capacious project. Either way, the material is designed to be readily adaptable for a wide variety of occasions and courses. Most immediately, this is an extended practical prelude to the present book. Theoretically and methodologically, it enacts the kinds of ‘plural’ and ‘eclectic’, ‘critical and creative’ approaches to the subject featured in Parts One, Two and Three. ‘English’, here again then, is what you make as well as find it to be: in your own terms and times and places as well as those of others; in your immediate academic community as well as the communities around and beyond, before and to come. This is ‘Changing English Now’ – whatever, whenever, wherever, whoever . . . that may be.

@ Prologue contains the following:

Actual and Virtual ‘English’, Local and Global Community
Key terms and concepts
Prelude one – individual response
Prelude two – joint response
Prelude three – taking one another for a ‘walk’

Initial Impressions of . . . ‘Actual’ Community
Sample seminar format:  ‘Green-space, Street-scape, Museum/Gallery’

Further Impressions of . . . ‘Virtual’ Community
Examples from print and the intranet
Reflecting on the practice, theorising the action
Ten more propositions and provocations
Connecting with the rest of the book

Part 1

@ 1 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
Turning up, taking part
Taking and making notes
Close reading – wide reading
Writing an essay to make a mark
Doing a presentation to prompt a response
Revision – preparing to take an exam

1.3   Fields of Study: Language, Literature, Culture

1.4 English in education – a short cultural history
English as a school subject
English as a foreign or second language
English as a university degree subject
English and Classics
English and Theology
Rhetoric, composition and writing
History and English
From Literary Appreciation to Literary Criticism
English into Literary Studies
English with Theatre or Film Studies
English into Cultural, Communication and Media Studies
Critical Theory into Cultural Practice
Subjects Past, Present and Future: Activities and Discussion

Part 2

@ 2 CRITICAL AND CREATIVE STRATEGIES FOR ANALYSIS AND INTERPRETATION
                    
           
This carries through the commitment to systematic and sensitive textual analysis and to forms of interpretation that are as critical as they are creative.  There are further examples of the strategies for initial analysis and full interpretation in action, along with an alternative framework organised by linguistic level. This part of the website is also rich in examples of and further ideas for longer projects. These are the kinds of thing that might be undertaken for independent study, dissertation or major project. Many of them cut across ‘English’ as language and/or literature and/or culture, and some of them push at the edges of what the subject might yet be. All of them can be inflected in variously critical and creative, historical and contemporary ways. There is an extra section devoted to kinds of re-reading and re-writing.  The, emphasis, as always, is on developing your own responses and lines of enquiry in relation to those of others.

@ 2 contains the following:     

2.1 Initial Analysis, further examples
Prose fiction – worked example
Critical essay – worked example

2.2 Full interpretation continued

Poetry + +
(a) Analysing Blake's 'London' by levels/stages
(b) Critical—creative interpretation of Blake's 'London'

Play script + +
(a) Analysing Oscar Wilde's The Importance of Being Earnest by levels/stages
(b) Critical—creative interpretation of The Importance of Being Earnest

Critical essay
(a) Analysing Childs' critical essay by further levels/stages
(b) Critical—creative interpretation of Childs' critical essay

2.3.  Longer projects: further sample study patterns
Adaptation and continuation
Great Expectations
Children’s literature and childhood revisited
Little Red Riding Hoods and Childhoods
Language, media, power and pleasure
(a) Word-Image relations
(b) Word-Sound relations
(c) Pleasure power pain
English at the edge: further ‘limit’ cases
translating—transforming
games—playing
life—work

2.4   Further re-readings and re-writings:
Emily Dickinson ‘I’m Nobody’
Nonsense narrative: ‘There was an old man . . .’
Re-Joyce!
Patient (and not-so) Griselda: Chaucer’s ‘The Clerk’s Tale’
Whose Dora? Freud’s ‘Fragment of an Analysis . . . of Hysteria’

Part 3

@ 3  THEORIES AND APPROACHES

This gives an extended illustration of theory in practice and suggests Activities and questions for Discussion for each of the theories and approaches represented. Web links are supplied for every area.  There is an additional section reviewing Linguistic and Stylistic approaches to the subject, including current developments in the area of Cognitive Poetics. The overall aim continues to be active theorising with specific texts rather than the dutiful rehearsal of theories in the abstract. The ‘approaches’ involved will therefore tend to be adapted not simply adopted, and richly singular and complex not uniformly orthodox. Strong theorising challenges and changes itself. An interesting approach transforms its objects. The materials supplied here are designed to help you do this in and on your own terms as well as those of other people.

@ 3 contains

3.1 Theory in Practice
3.1 1 Theorising in a nutshell – or daffodil...
3.1 2 Further activities and discussion
3.1 3 Hamlets - Shakespeare's and other's

3.2 Practical Criticism and (old) New Criticism
Activities, discussion and web links

3.3 Formalism into Functionalism
Activities, discussion and web links

3.4 Psychological approaches
Activities, discussion and web links

3.5 Marxism, Cultural Materialism and New Historicism
Activities, discussion and web links

3.6 Feminism, Masculinity and Queer theory
Activities, discussion and web links

3.7 Poststructuralism and Postmodernism
Activities, discussion and web links

3.8 Postcolonialism and Multiculturalism
Activities, discussion and web links

3.9 The new Eclecticism? Ethics, Aesthetics, Ecology
Activities, discussion and web links

3.10 Linguistics, Stylistics and Cognitive Poetics
Overview
Major figures and models
How to practise...
Example
Activities, discussion and web links

Part 4

@ 4   KEY TERMS, CORE TOPICS 

These are full entries on some further terms and topics that prove powerful across the full range of English Studies, in Language, Literature, Culture and Communication. The ones here are slightly more specialised or theoretically challenging than those featured in the book. Addresser, address, addressee, for example, draws primarily on linguistics and communication studies but is widely applicable in areas beyond. Difference and similarity, preference and re-valuation draws together a complex configuration of concepts which extend the notion of perceptual differentiation to aesthetic and ethical discrimination. Some of these terms signal areas of growing interest and importance that are pushing at the edges of what counts as literary or even linguistic activity. Auto/biography and travel writing is one such traditional area that is currently being revitalised and reconfigured. Multimodal, cyber and hypertexts, however, is a technologically vibrant and to some extent entirely new domain: it is opening up fresh perspectives on what texts can be and do, while also prompting radical revisions of the multidimensional nature of words in the world pre-print and performance-based cultures. All these terms and topics are still ‘key’ and ‘core’. But they turn in partly different locks, and confirm that cores are always plural and re-forming.

@ 4 contains the following entries (in alphabetical order)   

Addresser, address, addressee
Aesthetics and pleasure, art and beauty
Auto/biography and travel writing: selves and others
Bibles, holy books and myths
Creative writing, creativity, re-creation
Difference and similarity, preference and re-valuation
Multimodal, cyber and hypertexts
Subject and agent, role and identity

Part 5

@ 5  ANTHOLOGY – SUPPLEMENTARY TEXTS
  

The Anthology on the web, in its virtually open-ended design, confirms explicitly a couple of things that were heavily implicit in the Anthology in the book:

• All such collections of texts are selections from a potentially infinite array; they could have been slightly or very different and organised otherwise.

• The line between texts that complement one another (and are directly comparable) and those that offer supplements (perhaps heading off in other directions and dimensions) is a wavy one; one text leads to another or yet another and the grounds of comparison and contrast are constantly shifting.

This first ‘supplement / complement’ to the book Anthology has two immediate and quite pragmatic functions. One is to include all those out-of-copyright texts that were in the second edition of this book’s precursor, The English Studies Book, but are not between the covers of the present book. The other function is to gesture – or at least begin gesturing – to other instances of material that might have been included in the present book but either weren’t or couldn’t be. In particular, mindful of the medium, there is an emphasis on links to other electronic texts, including those which are multimodal and not just printed word. The present offering is a modest and very selective start. But we hope it proves suggestive and shall be building on it regularly in future.

The overall organisational principles of this Anthology are the same as in the book. There are three main sections broadly corresponding to the three conventional mega-genres of poetry, prose and drama, again pluralised asPoetries and Proses and Voices. There is, also again, a fourth, more capacious section called Crossings, which draws together clusters of materials by topic or approach or event and not only genre. Many of the subsections are the same. But there are also some fresh ones, such as that on Essays by various hands (@ 5.2.1 c) to support the practical and analytical work on Writing essays (1.2.7) and the Critical essay (2.2.5). There is also extensive and authentic representation of, for example, Media messages and street texts (which were simply transcribed in the book, 5.2.6). In particular, then, there is a more direct engagement with both the contemporary multimedia and performance aspects of English in action (e.g. 5.1.4—5 and 5.2.7—8). This is palpably (visibly, audibly) English that does as well as is things: people doing English as well as being done to; participating even while observing. More generally, the emphasis continues to be on the rich and restless heterogeneity of a subject that is always notionally one but effectively many – constantly pushing at the edges and into the gaps of whatever is currently received and conceived. In a phrase that itself becomes two, three . . . English other-wise.  

@ 5 currently features the following texts:              

5.1 Poetries

5.1.1 Early English verses
William Langland, Piers Plowman
Anonymous (‘Gawain’ poet), Pearl
Anonymous, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight

John Gower, Confessio Amantis
Anonymous border ballad, ‘Lord Randall’

5.1.2 Sonnets by various hands      
Lady Mary Wroth, ‘Unseen, unknown, I’
Percy Shelley, ‘Sonnet: England in 1819’
Elizabeth Barrett Browning, ‘To George Sand – A Desire’    
Wilfred Owen, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’
Robert Frost, ‘Acquainted with the Night’

5.1.3 Heroics and Mock-heroics
William Blake, ‘And did those feet’ (‘Jerusalem’)          
Lewis Carroll, ‘Jabberwocky’ (Alice Through the Looking Glass)

5.1.4   Poetry that answers back
Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘If I Woz a Tap-Natch Poet’

5.1.5 Performing poetry, singing culture
Linton Kwesi Johnson, ‘Sonny’s Lettah’ 
Benjamin Zephaniah, ‘Rong Radio’

5.2 Proses

5.2.1b Letters and diaries
Margery Brews, ‘A Valentine’, from the Paston Letters
Samuel Pepys, ‘Diary’

5.2.1c Essays by various hands
Michel de Montaigne (trans. John Florio), ‘Of the Force of Imagination’
Francis Bacon, ‘Of Studies’          

5.2.2 Slave narratives by name
Frederick Douglas, The Narrative and Life

5.2.3 Romance revisited
Delarivier Manley, The New Atalantis

5.2.4 Science and Fantasy Fiction – genre and gender
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein, or The Modern Prometheus   

5.2.5 War on – of – Terror
US government ‘9-11’ Commision report
Wikileaks archives: Iraq and Afghanistan

5.2.6 Media messages and street texts
Anonymous, ‘Migration . . . is not a crime’
Text/Images 1, 2, 3 & 4

5.2.7 Metafictions
Laurence Sterne, The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Gentleman
George Eliot, Adam Bede

5.2.8 Electronic, multimodal, and installation literature
Caroline Bergvall, various works
Tim Wright, various works

5.3 Voices

5.3.1 Dramatizing ‘English’ in education
Cross-cultural talk in class: from Rampton, Crossings   

5.3.2 Voices with a difference        
Chester Mystery Cycle, Noah’s Flood (Noah’s wife and family)
Shakespeare, The Tempest (Caliban and Prospero)                     
Synge, The Playboy of the Western World (Christy and Pegeen)              

5.3.3 Voice—play, dream—drama
BBC Radio 4 plays

5.4 Crossings       

5.4.2 Mapping Journeys
Sir Walter Raleigh, The Discovery of . . . Guiana
Charles Darwin, Beagle Diary   
Joseph Conrad, Heart of Darkness

5.4.3 Translations / Transformations
Versions of Psalm 137: ‘By the Rivers of Babylon . . .’
Three versions of a haiku by Basho , ‘Old pond . . .’      

5.4.5 Epitaphs and (almost) last words
Emily Dickinson, ‘I felt a Funeral, in my Brain’
A very ‘Ambridge’ memorial (The Archers) 

Part 6

@ 6  TAKING IT ALL STILL FURTHER: ENGLISH AND THE REST OF LIFE

This part may be towards the end of the website but, as with this corresponding part of the book, you should turn to it early on and keep clicking on it from time to time. For both continue to address the crucial relations between ‘English’ and ‘the rest of life’. Most immediately this concerns you and your particular course of study. But its  significance reaches far beyond the end of a specific programme, into the rest of life around and beyond – other people’s as well as your own. So the emphasis is still upon the ongoing dynamic among Study, Work and Play or, alternatively, Learning, Earning and Re-creation – where play is taken seriously, and re-creation can amount to much more than mere ‘recreation’ in a weak sense. Given the increasingly mobile and immediately networked nature of much work and recreation nowadays, ‘lifelong learning’ of one kind or another – or alternating periods of training and work and leisure, or of over-work and un- or under-employment – are likely to become more common. The connections made below seek to keep you in touch with that ‘nowadays’. And they continue to be made under the capacious and flexible sign of ‘English now and again and afresh’.

To all these various ends, this part of the website offers up-to-date information, advice and links on jobs and study, as well as further checklists and guidelines to help you personally gauge where you are now, and where (and how and when) you want to go – or what you want to become – next. There are Sample Student Profiles to compare and help you develop your own, essential steps towards doing an MA, further frameworks for thinking about interviews and applications, and an extended invitation to reflect on the relations between ‘research’ and ‘learning’ and ‘development’ – personal and social as well as educational and industrial. So there are still plenty of critical and creative questions about Why? and Why not? and Who? and How else? too. People who have ‘done English’ are often acutely aware of and capable in such things. They are also usually skilled in saying so and keen to think about the possibilities, including alternatives. But the immediate as well as ultimate questions persists: what am I going ‘do with English’ in the rest of my life? what’s it to me? and what’s it all about?!  The materials below should help you keep on addressing these questions with a grasp of what’s really desirable as well as possible.

@ 6 contains:           

6.1 Studying, working, playing – an ongoing relation
6.1.1 ‘Opening moves’ and ‘core questions’ applied to yourself

6.2 English again, afresh, otherwise
6.2.1 English language, literature, culture – a personal reprise

6.3 Further study
6.3.1 Qualifications in need of further qualification?
6.3.2 Steps towards choosing an MA
6.3.3 Training and/or education – a distinction and connection

6.4 Into work
6.4.1    Examples of student profiles
6.4.2    Further transformative knowledges
6.4.3    Applications and Interviews – ‘6 Wh- and a H-?’ at your service again

6.5 Play as re-creation, re-vision, re-search