The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline

by Robert Scholes

Paperback, 1999

Status

Available

Call number

420.71

Publication

Yale University Press (1999), Paperback, 222 pages

Description

In this lucid book an eminent scholar, teacher, and author takes a critical look at the nature and direction of English studies in America. Robert Scholes offers a thoughtful and witty intervention in current debates about educational and cultural values and goals, showing how English came to occupy its present place in our educational system, diagnosing the educational illness he perceives in today's English departments, and recommending theoretical and practical changes in the field of English studies. Scholes's position defies neat labels-it is a deeply conservative expression of the wish to preserve the best in the English tradition of verbal and textual studies, yet it is a radical argument for reconstruction of the discipline of English. The book begins by examining the history of the rapid rise of English at two American universities-Yale and Brown-at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Scholes argues that the subsequent fall of English-discernible today in college English departments across the United States-is the result of both cultural shifts and changes within the field of English itself. He calls for a fundamental reorientation of the discipline-away from political or highly theoretical issues, away from a specific canon of texts, and toward a canon of methods, to be used in the process of learning how to situate, compose, and read a text. He offers an eloquent proposal for a discipline based on rhetoric and the teaching of reading and writing over a broad range of literatures, a discipline that includes literariness but is not limited to it.… (more)

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In the early American University, ‘the rhetorical power of persuasion and the aesthetic power of literature are conceived as one thing, not differentiated as we regularly differentiate them but seen as a unified power to move and stir an audience with language.” “When the twentieth century

arrived,” American teachers drew “strength…from the powerful attempt of Matthew Arnold to replace dogma with literature.” ‘The New criticism, on the other hand, was an attempt to generate a rigor that was not scientific but distinctly humanistic.” The New Critics instituted…the replacement of doxa with paradox. Under this regime, canonical texts were seen not as repositories of truth and beauty or touchstones of high seriousness but as embodiments of a discourse so ambiguous that it could not be debased and applied to any practical or dogmatic end. The study and teaching of the new canon of specifically non-cognitive texts would of necessity fall to those trained not to extract truth from these texts but to show that they are canonical precisely because they resist any such reduction to doxa or dogma. Literature departments, “and especially departments of English literature, represented the last, purest bastion of liberal education. Under this regime, the study of English was as “disinterested as Matthew Arnold himself could have wished, but on firmer ground, the ground of literariness itself, defined as a place of paradox and interminable analysis.”
“Later developments show the pendulum swinging back and forth, as structuralism veered toward science and poststructuralist theory back toward and antiscientific point of view.” The “disciplinary shift from New Criticism to the American form of deconstruction should be seen as a still more desperate nd constricted attempt to keep the transcendental aura of literature alive. Under this dispensation the great books are those that deconstruct themselves most fully, making the ethics of reading an act of endless expiation for an original sin of difference, from which no Redeemer will save us.”
However, if one begins instead with a “Jakobsonian sense that literary language differs from ordinary language not absolutely but only by different emphases,” one finds that the most precious resource English departments have is a body of texts that embody the expressive possibilities of the English language.’ Thus the case can be made for “the importance of literariness—and the usefulness of many texts we call literary—precisely by denying the special mystical privileges we have accorded to literature. Under this sign, there is no difference between the theory of composition and the theory of literature” because this theory “rests upon the shared stance of students and teachers as practitioners of reading and writing – textuality.”

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