Disciplining English

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Disciplining English
Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives

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David R. Shumway - Editor
Craig Dionne - Editor

N/A
Hardcover - 237 pages

Release Date: July 2002

ISBN10: 0-7914-5365-0
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-5365-0

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Price: $33.95
Paperback - 237 pages

Release Date: July 2002

ISBN10: 0-7914-5366-9
ISBN13: 978-0-7914-5366-7

Customers outside the US/Canada purchase here

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Summary

Offers historical and present-day perspectives on what English departments do, and how and why they do it.

These provocative essays explore the unwritten, often unacknowledged codes, conventions, and ideologies overseeing the evolution and current practice of English as a “discipline.” The first section of the book offers historical perspectives: how “composition” becamedistinguished from “literature,” how key intellectuals shaped the discipline, and how various specialties—Renaissance literature, American literature, “theory”—became subfields. The second section focuses on how certain aesthetic categories of art and universal experience persist today in the actual teaching and writing of “English.” While it is fashionable to say that we are living in the age of poststructuralism, or that literary theory has delivered us from idealized conceptions of authorship and inherent meaning, these essays examine how these conceptions nevertheless remain and are transmitted: in different,types of classroom settings, in textbooks, and in the self-fashioning of academic careers. At a time when the role and function of English departments have become matters of both academic and public debate, this book will be a welcome resource for students, professionals, and anyone interested in the Culture Wars of the past two decades.

“The collection successfully exposes the constructedness of the discipline in interesting historical specificity, and makes worthwhile reading for anyone engaged in reflection about what we do as professors of English.” — symploke

"Highly informed, fascinating, and enlightening—taken together, these essays tell an absorbing story of the shifts in the functioning of the discipline and of the changing roles of teachers, researchers, and intellectuals associated with the field over the past two centuries." — Karlis Racevskis, author of Modernity’s Pretenses: Making Reality Fit Reason from Candide to the Gulag

"Though English departments have recently been critiqued and deconstructed, there still seems something inevitable and eternal about many of their habits. These well-informed essays offer an eye-opening picture of how virtually everything we take for granted about 'English,' from the conventions of research to the marginality of composition to the idea of 'literature' itself, was once conceived very differently and thus might be again." — Gerald Graff, University of Illinois at Chicago

"A number of Ph.D.–granting departments in the country are doing a significantly better job of educating graduate students about the daily realities of university work, but students need to know much more about why these so-called pragmatic concerns have become pragmatic, about what conditions of change are driving the reorganization of the university, and about what interventions might be possible. This book is a step toward providing that knowledge, in eminently readable form." — Evan Watkins, author of Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value

Contributors include Craig Dionne, Laurie A. Finke, Patricia Harkin, Molly Hite, Cary Nelson, Richard Ohmann, David R. Russell, John Schilb, Ronald Schleifer, Martin B. Shichtman, David R. Shumway, Jeffrey J. Williams, and Elizabeth A. Wilson.

David R. Shumway is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Carnegie Mellon University. His books include Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline.

Craig Dionne is Associate Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University.

Table of Contents

Introduction by David R. Shumway and Craig Dionne

PART I. EPISODES IN THE HISTORY OF ENGLISH

1. Child's Ballads: Narrating Histories of Composition and Literary Studies
Patricia Harkin

2. Institutionalizing English: Rhetoric on the Boundaries
David R. Russell

3. A Short History of a Border War: Social Science, School Reform, and the Study of Literature
Elizabeth A. Wilson

4. Period Making and the Discipline: A Genealogy of the Idea of the Renaissance in ELH
Craig Dionne

5. Emerson and the Shape of American Literature
David R. Shumway

6. The Posttheory Generation
Jeffrey J. Williams

PART II. THE CURRENT ARRANGEMENTS

7. Composing Literary Studies in Graduate Courses
John Schilb

8. Inventing Gender: Creative Writing and Critical Agency
Molly Hite

9. Profiting Pedants: Symbolic Capital, Text Editing, and Cultural Reproduction
Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Shichtman

10. A New Kind of Work: Publishing, Theory, and Cultural Studies
Ronald Schleifer

11. What Hath English Wrought: The Corporate University's Fast Food Discipline
Cary Nelson

Afterword by Richard Ohmann

Contributors

Index

Related Subjects

Cultural Studies
Higher Education
Literary History
Literary Theory

40636/40637(JP/DF/AV)

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