Abstract
Robert Eaglestone argues that English as a subject faces a number of threats. These include: shrinking student numbers and departments and the redundancies this entails, top-down changes to the GCSE and A-level system that embroil the subject in national debates about teaching texts and who dictates their suitability, and the ongoing debate about open access publishing and what this means for English research. However, Eaglestone writes, there are positive actions we can take together to strengthen and support the discipline. Universities could move to an open and self-organized publishing system, and take journals — as well as innovative new forms of publishing — back in house. Eaglestone also advocates for academics and graduate students to become involved with English at secondary school level.
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Notes
Some portions of this chapter stem from an article which I co-wrote with Simon Kövesi, ‘English: Why the Discipline May Not Be “Too Big To Fail”’ Times Higher Education, 31 October 2013, and a similar piece, Eaglestone and Kövesi, ‘The State of English 2014 — A View from Higher Education’, Teaching English, 4, 2014, pp. 18–21.
John Carey, The Unexpected Professor, London, Faber and Faber, 2014, pp. 205–6. He goes onto say that he resolved ‘never to write such stuff myself and to deride it whenever I came across it’.
For more on the university per se, see Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For?, London, Penguin, 2012; and, in a more theoretical vein,
Simon Morgan Wortham, Counter-Institutions: Jacques Derrida and the Question of the University, New York, Fordham University Press, 2006.
Ben Knights, ‘Intelligence and Interrogation: The Identity of the English Student’, Arts and Humanities in Higher Education, 4.1, 2005, pp. 33–52, pp. 33–4.
Alexandra Lawrie, The Beginnings of University English: Extramural Study 1885–1910, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2014.
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© 2015 Robert Eaglestone
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Eaglestone, R. (2015). The Future of English and Institutional Consciousness: Threats and Disengagement. 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_8
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478054_8
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