While obviously English in Higher Education is still practised in diverse institutional contexts, it seems a safe bet that it will increasingly be taught within vocationally-oriented institutions and its worth assessed (by potential students as well as funding managers) in terms of skills. At this juncture one route leads towards sardonic dismay, retreat and denial. A few souls will be fortunate enough to cluster together on the higher ground of more hospitable or genteel habitats. They will be our botanists burying a bank of seeds to preserve biodiversity against better times. Those occupying more hostile environments will have to choose between internal exile and service teaching—though realistically redeployment or redundancy might beckon first. Another route leads to dialogue with the surrounding systems, acknowledging the force of the discourse of 'outcomes', while pointing out that these might take a lifetime to become apparent. This article recommends the second route. One of the strengths of the community of ‘English’ is its plurality. But if we are to avoid becoming simply a repository of cultural capital, to resist a decline akin to that of Classics in the early twentieth century, we shall need to evolve common strategies.
Robert Scholes’ admittedly transatlantic preoccupations help make a point. The ‘highly textualised and mediated nature of our society has constructed for teachers [of language and literature] a position of great importance as educators—if we are willing to change our discipline so as to occupy this position’. Other propositions follow which bear upon how we relate to our students and our potential students: indeed upon the whole debate about the ‘public face’ of English Studies. We are preached at in a relentless neo-utilitarian discourse designed to produce economic/social/educational/penal/medical success (and along the way generating failure in plenty). This discourse—and what Noble refers to as its associated ‘get-tough accountability’—goes with a literalism about language (in the very moment when the PR people are practising the wildest semiotic extravagance—modernist forms and utopian dreams colonised for making a profit), and an inhibition against grasping large systems of relations.
One pedagogic consequence is to discourage both students and staff from taking risks. Another, that the production (‘value-added’) of autonomous learners tends paradoxically to breed consumer dependency. In the midst of all that, the practitioners of English Studies have to insist upon attention to the figural nature of language and to the difficulty and slowness of reading. (‘Readers who dominate texts,’ points out Elizabeth Flynn, ‘become complacent or bored because the possibility for learning has been greatly reduced.’) Against complacency and boredom we must defend the position that what you acquire through the experience of disciplined reading is not a straight road to psychological or any other sort of truth, nor even a toolkit of skills, but a sense of the provisional nature of versions, the inter-reaction of figure and referent, of the collaborative interpretative work which humans have to do. The difficulty of reading is simultaneously the challenge of creating and performing imaginative systems adequate to represent and change our world, and the enterprise in which teacher and student join is, in a Bakhtinian sense, a boundary activity. (Every ‘internal experience ends up on the boundary.... To be means to communicate.’)
So our uncomfortable business will be what Aronowitz and Giroux call ‘border pedagogy’. Let’s briefly list some of the cross-border activities with which English Studies already engages and where our strengths lie. (These tentative recommendations point neither to higher synthesis nor to the subordination of one term to the other.) One such zone comprises transactions with adjacent disciplines: much of the energy of English Studies has always been generated at the moments where the subject passes through the force fields of History, Philosophy, Linguistics, Fine Arts or Cultural Studies.
1. Unmasking and demystification? Or celebrating the aesthetic? Of course we must help our students find the way towards critical skills and the courage to use them. (As Ronald Barnett insists, ‘the exercise of critical reason calls for brave acts.’) But our necessary zest for critique must also respect the desire for celebration. Snootiness towards heritage, against which the late Raphael Samuel pungently warned historians, shades in the literary case into contempt for the legitimate desires of students and readers: the right to the canon, or the will to explore character and motivation. Setting up a handful of more intellectual students as cognitive heroes—with the rest cast as the empirical and confused Other—was always a game of diminishing returns. And this inward-turning has further meant that, like the Left, we have been unerringly good at self-sabotage. Internecine warfare may be invigorating, but we cannot keep undermining ourselves in the interests of critical or ideological purity: there are better uses for our formidable unmasking tools.
2. Analysis, criticism, interpretation? Or production and writing? English Studies will need to embrace production and writing in other modes in addition to the critical essay. A commitment to writing, as Kathleen McCormick has shown, need not mean succumbing to subjective expressivism. The graduates for whom we are responsible will have acquired critical skills and some sense of the existential demands imposed by using them. They will have developed and be equipped to go on developing a set of expressive and cultural resources, a linguistic repertoire, which enables them to become active within the culture. They will have access to a lexicon of expressive resources which enable interventions inside and outside organisations. They will be aware of a variety of discursive horizons; inward with a spectrum of cultural forms; able to access a range of histories and cultural resources, to think reflexively, and have the confidence to engage in what Jerome Bruner calls subjunctive or conditional thinking.
3. Research? Or pedagogy? English Studies generates a rich diversity of learning and teaching practices. While this is not a plea to embrace pedagogy at the expense of research, we need to give more of our attention to celebrating and building on our own communicative activity, and in the process learn to promote our subject in terms of the models of learning which it articulates. As teachers we have to use our authority to hold and protect the spaces within which formative interchange between the affective and the cognitive may take place. In doing so—and while acknowledging that didactic zeal can itself be a form of power—we will need to resist the current (and fiscally convenient) trend towards delegitimising teaching and persist in a dialogue between learning as participle and learning as noun.
References
Aronowitz, Stanley and Giroux, Henry (1991), Postmodern Education: Politics, Culture and Social Criticism, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press
Bakhtin, Mikhail (trans. Caryl Emerson) (1984), Problems of Dostoyevsky’s Poetics, Manchester: Manchester UP
Barnett, Ronald (1997), Higher Education: A Critical Business, Buckingham: Open University Press
Bruner, Jerome (1986), Actual Minds, Possible Worlds, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press
Flynn, Elizabeth ‘Gender and Reading’ (1986) in Elizabeth Flynn and Patrocinio Schweickart, Gender and Reading: Essays on Readers, Texts, and Contexts, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press
Garnham, Nicholas (2000), Emancipation, The Media, and Modernity, Oxford: Oxford University Press
McCormick, Kathleen (1994), The Culture of Reading and the Teaching of English, Manchester: Manchester University Press
Noble, Douglas, ‘Let Them Eat Skills’ (1997) in Henry A. Giroux and Patrick Shannon (eds.), Education and Cultural Studies: Towards a Performative Practice, New York and London: Routledge
Samuel, Raphael (1994), Theatres of Memory, London: Verso Scholes, Robert (1998), The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline, New Haven: Yale University Press
