Abstract
This chapter examines an intramural conflict that took place in the Cambridge English Faculty in the early 1980s, and aims to develop a theoretical analysis of disputes as they unfold within the academy. The analysis shows how broad structural changes that were taking place within the English Higher Education system at the time reverberated through to local contexts, investigates the reception of paradigms originating in other countries and disciplines within English studies in the United Kingdom, and shows the significance of local institutional factors in structuring the dispute. The chapter also investigates the symbolic strategies and counterstrategies of the debate, unlocking the cultural codes upon which the success of these strategies depended.
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Notes
- 1.
At Cambridge, admissions and small-group “supervision” teaching is conducted within the colleges where students live, and employs a certain number of College Teaching Officers who usually do not hold any University post. Most lecturing, however, is delivered by the University’s relevant Faculty or Department, via University Teaching Officers (UTOs). Most UTOs employed by the Faculty or Department also hold college positions.
- 2.
The two books MacCabe had published by the time the affair erupted demonstrate, respectively, his interests in new forms of French literary theory, and in extending the application of literary criticism beyond literature to cinema.
- 3.
For a more detailed account of these shifts see Morgan (2019).
- 4.
- 5.
A sense of its social standing can be grasped from a participant in a debate before its establishment at Oxford opining that “women should be considered, and the second and third-rate men who were to become schoolmasters” (Palmer 1965, 111).
- 6.
To put this in context, the first department of our own subject, sociology—usually considered a fledgling discipline—was established at the London School of Economics some ten years earlier.
- 7.
Heath quotes from an early discussion over a proposed English Lectureship in Cambridge, in which it was argued that “literary attainments should be acquired through erudition in the Greek and Latin languages” (Heath 1994, 23–24).
- 8.
A journalist wrote at the time of the MacCabe quarrel that “the shadow of Leavis hangs heavily over Cambridge” (Jenkins 1981, 112).
- 9.
Richards’s (1929) “practical criticism” helped systematize and formalize the discipline, distancing it from its earlier dilettantish and belletristic characteristics, and providing a method of analysis that could be readily examined in a methodical manner. This method emerged from his practice of distributing poems—highly variable in quality and with no indication of author or date—to students for critique. Richards prescribed a close encounter with texts themselves that focused on an analysis of the complex relations between their internal compositional elements. While this approach and its later development by Empson, and its influence upon the American “New Criticism,” allowed for formalization, it also treated texts as autonomous things, abstracted from the contexts of their production.
- 10.
MacKillop claims that a “sociological” sensibility was central to the Leavis crowd, and fundamentally at odds with the “gallant individualism” of the Bloomsbury set (MacKillop 1995, 214).
- 11.
Malinowski had written a chapter in Ogden and Richards’s (1923) The Meaning of Meaning that was interested, among other things, in the “sociological and scientific understanding of language.” However, it was precisely over this issue of allying English studies too closely with more “scientific” forms of analysis that Leavis (far from uncharacteristically) fell out with Richards, even though as a student he had been inspired by his lectures, and Leavis’s wife Queenie’s PhD had been supervised by him.
- 12.
Leavis’s reputation for public controversy, combined with his avoidance of the Faculty that had done so much to retard his promotion, earned him the affectionate moniker from a grateful former student of the “Ogre of Downing Castle” (Jacobson 1963).
- 13.
Although MacCabe was of course younger than most of his Faculty opponents, and the younger student body generally sided with him, many of his more powerful allies (most obviously Williams and Kermode) were nearing retirement age. For more on the use of “positioning,” see (Baert 2012).
- 14.
See Note 13
- 15.
In the index of MacCabe’s (1979) book on Joyce we find a list of authors—Althusser, Barthes, Cixous, Derrida, Foucault, Irigaray, Jakobson, Kristeva, Lacan, Saussure—some of whom would nowadays be grouped under the heading “poststructuralism,” itself a notoriously inadequate label, and one that commanded less widespread currency in the early 1980s. The name Levi-Strauss is conspicuously absent. Edmund Leach was Provost of MacCabe’s college until 1979, and the primary exponent of anthropological structuralism at Cambridge, but his scathing (1981) review of MacCabe’s edited collection of essays on Lacan underlines the distance between the approaches going on under the same label within these two disciplines.
- 16.
Examining the contribution of career-mobile physiologists in helping establish the new field of psychology in Germany, Ben-David and Collins (1966) show how—as long as roles exist for the innovators to occupy—such innovation sometimes results in the establishment of new scientific fields.
- 17.
SHD: all citations refer to the Senate House Debate on the “State of the English Faculty” (February 3–4, 1981), the transcript was published in the Cambridge University Reporter, February 18, 1981.
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Morgan, M., Baert, P. (2020). A Case Study of the Reception of “Structuralism” in English Studies in the United Kingdom. In: Sapiro, G., Santoro, M., Baert, P. (eds) Ideas on the Move in the Social Sciences and Humanities. Socio-Historical Studies of the Social and Human Sciences. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-35024-6_4
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