Abstract
The history of ‘English’ cannot be sundered from its pedagogic traditions. For this loose bundle of often warring and periodically cross-fertilizing subjects is, above all, a family of overlapping and often rivalrous verbal and social practices. During its twentieth-century development and up to the present day, ‘English’ as a university subject has maintained an ambivalent relationship to both scholarship and schools. Underlying its practice in universities, in adult education, and, for extended periods, in schools was a contrarian energy that aimed not so much to create or transmit knowledge as to transform its students. In this essay, Ben Knights sketches a performative history of the subject in its embattled position, in continuing negotiation with both educational institutions and the wider cultures of readers and reading.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
Arthur Quiller-Couch, The Art of Writing, New York, Putnam, 1916, p. vii.
See Terry Eagleton, ‘The Rise of English, Literary Theory: An Introduction, Oxford, Blackwell, 2008, pp. 15–46. For examples of recent more material histories of English, see Carol Atherton, Defining Literary Criticism: Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of Literary Knowledge, 1880–2002, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2005;
Rachel Sagner Buurma and Laura Heffernan, ‘The Common Reader and the Archival Classroom’, New Literary History, 43.1, 2012, pp. 113–35 and
Alexandra Lawrie, The Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study, 1885–1910, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2014.
See Colin Evans, English People: The Experience of Teaching and Learning English in British Universities, Buckingham, Open University Press, 1993, pp. 166–82. The concept of ‘boundary’ here draws heavily on the theory and practice of the Tavistock group relations conferences, in which the creation of a bounded space allows the ‘here and now’ to be read for the light it throws on behaviour in groups. For a description of the ways in which the Development of University English Teaching (DUET) project drew, at its inception in the 1980s, upon both the Tavistock group relations conferences and psychoanalyst Wilfred Bion’s work on groups,
see Ben Knights and Chris Thurgar-Dawson, Active Reading, London, Continuum, 2006, pp. 27–9.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge, Polity, 1990, pp. 53–5.
There are marked parallels with the struggles between the Philologists and the New Critics in the USA. See Gerald Graff, Professing Literature, an Institutional History, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 2007, and
Mark Jancovich, The Cultural Politics of the New Criticism, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1993.
F. R. Leavis, The Common Pursuit, London, Chatto and Windus, 1952, p. 9.
Stefan Collini, ‘“The Chatto List”: Publishing literary criticism in mid-twentieth-century Britain’, Review of English Studies, 63, 2012, pp. 634–63.
For a contemporary analysis of seminar interaction see Susan Bruce, Ken Jones and Monica McLean, ‘Some Notes on a Project: Democracy and Authority in the Production of a Discipline’, Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture, 7.3, 2007, pp. 481–500 and
Susan Bruce, ‘Using your Profanisaurus: Comparisons, Analogies, and Cultural Capital in Two English Literature Seminars’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 12.1, 2012, pp. 53–69.
Vicky Gunn, ‘Mimetic Desire and Intersubjectivity in Disciplinary Cultures: Constraints or Enablers to Learning in Higher Education?’, Studies in Continuing Education, 36:1, 2014, pp. 67–82, p. 73.
The Scrutiny movement has recently been re-examined from two very different but complementary angles. See David Ellis, Memoirs of a Leavisite: The Decline and Fall of Cambridge English, Liverpool, Liverpool University Press, 2013, and
Christopher Hilliard, English as a Vocation: The ‘Scrutiny’ Movement, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012.
F. R. Leavis, Education and the University: A Sketch for an ‘English School’, London, Chatto & Windus, 1943, p. 43.
Laura Wilder, ‘“Get Comfortable With Uncertainty”: A Study of the Conventional Values of Literary Analysis in an Undergraduate Literature Course’, Written Communication, 19.1, 2002, pp. 175–221, and Rhetorical Strategies and Genre Conventions in Literary Studies: Teaching and Writing in the Disciplines, Carbondale, Ill., Southern Illinois University Press, 2012. In remarking on the clunkiness of tropes like ‘the mistaken critic’ or contemptus mundi’, I am probably simply re-enacting my own critical formation.
Louise M. Rosenblatt, The Reader, the Text, the Poem: The Transactional Theory of the Literary Work, Carbondale, IL, Southern Illinois University Press, 1978.
Virginia Woolf, To the Lighthouse, Stella McNichol (ed.), London, Penguin, 2000, p. 8.
Michel de Certeau, The Practice of Everyday Life, trans. Steven F. Rendall, Berkeley, University of California Press, 1984, p. 30.
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2015 Ben Knights
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Knights, B. (2015). English on Its Borders. In: Gildea, N., Goodwyn, H., Kitching, M., Tyson, H. (eds) English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478054_2
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478054_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-50221-9
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-47805-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Literature CollectionLiterature, Cultural and Media Studies (R0)