In this article, I want to look at two ways in which the concerns of higher education English link up with those of other disciplines: in terms of time (or, rather of time period: the Victorian Age, the Renaissance, the Middle Ages) and in terms of space and/or place.
The traditional framework for interdisciplinarity in English – and, indeed, the traditional framework for English Studies as a whole – is, of course, chronological. In most higher education institutions, English BA degrees are structured predominantly in terms of time period. Nowadays, few departments aim to make all undergraduates study literature from all periods. Nevertheless, a majority feature period courses, and my impression is that most (or, at least, very many) require students to do at least one pre-nineteenth-century period course.
Why are time periods so important in English degrees? Well, for a start, this method of structuring things allows for considerable flexibility. It might appear, on the face of it, that periodicity would dictate a rather limited approach – an emphasis, perhaps, on literary history, on the relationships existing between literary texts of a given period and other texts from the same period. This is obviously true up to a point. But, at the same time, the period-based course is such a general – such a vague – way of linking disparate texts together that it provides openings for all sorts of more or less eccentric links between texts and between texts and the world – openings for all kinds of intertextuality and interdisciplinarity. In other words, the ordering of BA degrees by period allows the subject of English to retain its characteristically self-confident flexibility – its potential for free play. It is a framework that can be used simply to look at relationships between texts (literary and literary, literary and non-literary or – as is increasingly the case – non-literary and non-literary). Or it can be used to take literary texts out into the social and physical world.
This is an important advantage, I think – and I’d like to stress that in this article I won’t be trying to argue that this dependence on time periods should necessarily change. What I would like to highlight, though, is a shift that I think has recently been taking place in our subject – primarily at the research level, but increasingly entering teaching: a shift towards space and place as an interdisciplinary framework for English.
Shortly before starting work on this paper, I had a quick look at the notice-boards at the English Subject Centre’s host institution, the English department at Royal Holloway, confident that I would come across conference announcements that I could use to illustrate the discipline’s current preoccupation with the relationship between literature and place (and space). I found two almost immediately. The first was a call for papers for a conference due to be held at the University of Greenwich this June called ‘The Metropolitan and Urban Imaginary’.(1) The conference will ‘explore the different and complex ways in which literary texts inform and shape our perceptions of the city and the urban environment in the cities of China, the new Europe, the Americas, England post-devolution Wales and Scotland’. The second conference, held in Manchester in December 2004, focussed on a particular writer: its title was ‘Ford Madox Ford and Englishness’.(2) According to the publicity material,
Ford’s Englishness encompasses a variety of characters (both historical and imaginary), personalities, place-myths and classes. His life-long fascination with the Englishness of English, as expressed in his fairy stories, novels, poems, essays, regional studies, and the editorship of the English Review, will be explored in the conference. The topic coincides with a recent, post-devolution interest in a surviving, or reconsolidated Englishness. Great Britain may have lost its empire and a defined world role, but it is rediscovering ‘virtual’ Englishness; just as Ford was negotiating national ideas in his lifetime.
The ‘spatialisation’ of the curriculum is most visible in BA second and third year option courses and in MA modules. One obvious focus for this spatialisation is the area closest to the university in question: for example, London. At Queen Mary, the description for a course on ‘Dickens’s London’ tells students ‘You are advised to keep a map handy to clarify for yourselves the locations used in Dickens’s writings.’ One of the learning outcomes of this course states that ‘Students will have explored aspects of the social and physical geography of London in the nineteenth century’. Other option courses at Queen Mary with a ‘spatial’ emphasis (and a big ‘field trip’ element) include ‘Text, Art and Performance in London’, ‘an event-based course which examines the role of text in art, performance, installations, and public spaces in the city – specifically in London’ and ‘Representing London: the Eighteenth Century.’Twenty percent of the mark for this latter course is taken up by the students’ walking journal.(3)
At King’s College, London, meanwhile there is an MA course on ‘The Twentieth-Century City: From Modernity to Postmodernity’. This course focuses on ‘a number of the most significant topics in urban cultural production of the twentieth century’, including ‘global corporatism, postcolonial otherness, urban textualities, dystopias, the city as history’ and ‘the shift from metropolis to ‘postmetropolis’’, looking at not just London but also New York and Los Angeles.(4)
The creeping ‘spatialisation’ of English is clearly linked to the work of postmodern geographers such as Edward W. Soja (looking back ultimately to Henri Lefebvre), though the extent to which English researchers situate themselves in this tradition varies. I would put this spatialising turn in English among the reactions to new historicism, the dominant paradigm of the 1990s – a very text-based form of ideological criticism against which many critics have reacted by stressing physical contingencies of one sort or another: the body, the physical constraints on book production and consumption (the ‘history of the book’) and, of course, space.
The point I want to stress about this ‘spatial’ framework for the interdisciplinarity of English is that per se it forces the the study of literature out into the physical world, and thus necessarily engages a whole set of issues that period based courses might (and often do) engage with, but that they needn’t necessarily. In other words, it looks outside the inter-relationship of written texts.
The ‘spatialised’ curriculum of English can be subdivided into a number of different elements. Firstly, there’s the long-established link-up between English and the set of disciplines that have recently been gathered together under the umbrella term of ‘Area Studies’. Most English degrees contain courses on things like ‘American Literature’, ‘Irish Literature’, ‘Canadian Literature’ and so on, in an obvious overlap with Area Studies, and, indeed, some English departments are institutionally merged with departments of American Studies. In Scotland, the study of English literature is balanced with the study of Scottish literature: students can in some institutions do degrees in English literature, Scottish literature or English and Scottish Literature. Courses on the literature of an area, as part of English degrees, often open up into wider study of the ‘area’ in question.(5)
Arguably, as Dick Ellis has suggested, English is itself an Area Study. According to Ellis, English’s problem is that it does not recognise itself as an Area Study.
The fact that English is an Area Study too, albeit, as taught at present, a culture-bound one (and still, mostly, a high-culture-bound one) remains hidden. English literary culture and its supports and ramifications are,sometimes, instead, supposed to make English sufficient unto itself, and no sense of English as an area study need exist.(6)
Ellis, of course, deplores this situation. Perhaps the developments I am pointing to in this article are the stirrings of self-consciousness about English’s status as a sort of Area Study. Where I’d differ from Ellis, I think, is in seeking to stress that this is something which is and should be just one dimension in English Studies.
Two other elements in the ‘spatialised’ English curriculum deal with the crossing of spatial boundaries: travel writing and post-colonialism. I won’t say a great deal about them, as their significance for the argument of this article is self-evident. Travel writing is a flourishing subdiscipline with a national centre – the Centre for Travel Writing Studies at Nottingham Trent University – and a journal founded in 1997, Studies in Travel Writing. The Centre’s Director,Tim Youngs, argues that ‘Without travel narratives there would be no Canterbury Tales, Divine Comedy, The Tempest, Pilgrim’s Progress, Don Quixote, Robinson Crusoe, Gulliver’s Travels, The Ancient Mariner, Don Juan Moby Dick or Ulysses.’(7) Post-colonialism is of course very well-established as a category of literary analysis and there are many courses in English departments with this specialised form of Area Studies emphasis.All I’d like to say about it here is that my perception is that, increasingly, post-colonial studies are being structured (in both research and teaching) area by area, region by region, with fewer totalising courses in just (say) ‘Post-Colonial Literatures in English’.
Eco-criticism, which has been described as the work of scholars ‘who would rather be hiking’, is an area of English Studies more important in the US than here, but nevertheless making inroads. Eco-criticism focuses on ‘the way in which nature is represented in literature’, on the ‘interconnectedness between nature and culture’ and ‘cultural representations of relationship between humans and the rest of the natural world’. Central to it is the analysis of space and place.
The interdisciplinary links of eco-criticism are profoundly different from those usually found in English Studies. In the States, graduate students in Literature and Environment – according to the ASLE (Association for the Study of Literature in Literature and the Environment) graduate handbook – ‘take classes in geology, geography, ecology and biology’.According to the American eco-critic Michael P. Cohen, the idea is ‘Not that we should think like scientists (or economists or game theoreticians) but that we should know how they think’.(8)
As I said earlier, I am not arguing that English Studies needs further ‘spatialisation’ – that (say) space should begin to replace time period as the structural basis for most English degrees. But I do want to end by suggesting that the ‘spatialised’ area of the curriculum I’ve been talking about has two particular types of potential.
First, there’s clearly the potential to forge a whole new set of interdisciplinary links between English and other subjects, such as Geography, Environmental Science, Economics and Area Studies. These links don’t at the moment extend far beyond the research level – but there’s considerable potential for pedagogic development here.
Secondly, it’s clear that the developments in English Studies that I’ve been discussing in this article can, potentially, be used to tick lots of currently significant boxes. Emphasis on issues of space and place can open up a wide range of interesting and intellectually stimulating ways for our discipline to respond to important themes (and pressures) such as employability, widening participation, the need to encourage a variety of learning styles and so on. The Subject Centre’s forthcoming work on Education for Sustainable Development, discussed by Jane Gawthrope in this newsletter, is just one of the ways in which the ‘spatialisation’ of English can be taken forward.
References
1. See http://www.gre.ac.uk/pr/pressreleases/Metropilitan.htm
2. The conference was organised by Professor Dennis Brown of the University of Hertfordshire.
3. Details of all three courses are available on the Queen Mary website: http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/converted%20pdf/2004_05/Dickens.pdf http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/converted%20pdf/2004_05/TAP.pdf http://www.english.qmul.ac.uk/converted%20pdf/2004_05/RepLon.pdf
4. http://www.kcl.ac.uk/english/PG1/C20/city.html
5. The English Subject Centre is holding an event on ‘Teaching Scottish and Irish Literature’ at the University of Manchester on 21 October, 2005. For further details see the Events area of this website.
6. R.J. Ellis, ‘Decentering Area Studies’, available online on the website of the Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies at http://www.lang.heacademy.ac.uk/resources/paper.aspx?resourceid=2171
7.Tim Youngs, ‘The Importance of Travel Writing’, The European English Messenger 12.2 (2004), pp. 55-62 (p. 57).The Centre for Travel Writing Studies is holding an international conference in Hong Kong in July 2005: see http://english.ntu.ac.uk/centrefortravelwriting/
8. Michael P. Cohen, ‘Blues in the Green: Ecocriticism under Critique’, Environmental History 9.1 (January 2004), pp. 9-36, available online at http://www.asle.umn.edu/archive/intro/cohen.html; ASLE Graduate Handbook (http://www.asle.umn.edu/pubs/handbook/handbook.html).
