Disciplining English: Alternative Histories, Critical PerspectivesDavid R. Shumway, Craig Dionne 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 became distinguished 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. |
Contents
Childs Ballads Narrating Histories of Composition and Literary Studies | 21 |
Institutionalizing English Rhetoric on the Boundaries | 39 |
A Short History of a Border War Social Science School Reform and the Study of Literature | 57 |
Period Making and the Discipline A Genealogy of the Idea of the Renaissance in ELH | 81 |
Emerson and the Shape of American Literature | 97 |
The Posttheory Generation | 113 |
THE CURRENT ARRANGEMENTS | 133 |
Composing Literary Studies in Graduate Courses | 135 |
Inventing Gender Creative Writing and Critical Agency | 147 |
Profiting Pedants Symbolic Capital Text Editing and Cultural Reproduction | 157 |
A New Kind of Work Publishing Theory and Cultural Studies | 177 |
What Hath English Wrought The Corporate Universitys Fast Food Discipline | 193 |
211 | |
Contributors | 219 |
Index | 221 |
Other editions - View all
Disciplining English: Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives David R. Shumway,Craig Dionne No preview available - 2012 |
Disciplining English: Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives David R. Shumway,Craig Dionne No preview available - 2002 |
Common terms and phrases
academic disciplines aesthetic American literature argued authority Beowulf boundaries Boundary-Work called canon Canterbury Tales century Chicago Child claims composition constructed course creative writing critique cultural studies curriculum discipline of English discourse editor electronic text emerging Emerson English departments English Studies essay feminist field Foerster Foucault Francis James Child genres graduate students Graff Harvard higher education humanist humanities idea ideology individual institutional intellectual journals kind knowledge labor lish literary criticism literary history literary studies Literary Theory manuscript mediation medieval texts Modern Language narrative natural networks Norman Foerster Ohmann part-time Ph.D philology Piers Plowman PMLA political Posttheory practices produce profession professional Professor of English programs progressive education published purified R. W. B. Lewis readerly Renaissance rhetoric Schleifer scholarly scholars scholarship Shumway social sciences teachers teaching tenure text editing textual tion tradition ture Veysey York
References to this book
The Origins of American Literature Studies: An Institutional History Elizabeth Renker No preview available - 2007 |