Week 1: Ron Strickland's Introductory Comments
Welcome to the online version of English 401. This course is designed to introduce new grad students to the traditions and conventions of English studies in the United States, and also to introduce students to some of the distinctive local peculiarities of the English studies model we have developed at Illinois State University.

I'll begin by introducing some historical context on the study of English as a university discipline in order to situate the electronic reserve texts on the schedule. In order to read those texts, you'll need a special "login" and "password"; I'll send that to each of the registered students in a separate email message. The texts I have selected for this first week's reading trace the emergence of "literature" as the primary concern of English in the university from its origins in classical (Greek and Latin) studies and its early focus on "philology," or historical linguistics. In coming weeks, we will return to some of these same issues in the context of our discussions of contemporary linguistics and rhetoric and composition studies.

Literature out of Philology
The study of English as a university topic is a fairly recent phenomenon, dating only from the last half of the nineteenth century. And the study of English and American literature, which in the twentieth century has become the primary focus of English departments, is a more recent development still. Until the late nineteenth century university students generally studied rhetoric, literature and history as represented in Greek and Latin texts, but the study of "literature" in one's own mother tongue would have seemed too trivial for a university course. The initial focus of English studies in the academy was not upon literature but instead upon linguistics, or "philology." Nineteenth-century philology was a kind of historical linguistics that developed as a sort of an ideological prop to the modern nation-state. Philology was concerned to trace the origins of the modern European languages, and to trace their historical development in ways that inevitably tended to prove that the language-cultural groups represented in the various versions of national unity were socially and morally superior to others.

English and Modernity
Thus, the study of English as an academic discipline is closely related to the characteristic ideological assumptions of modernity, both good and bad. Here are some of those relationships, in no particular order:

(1) Nationalism: Nineteenth-century English Studies is tied to the consolidation of the nation-state that had begun in sixteenth-century Europe and was being completed in the nineteenth-century. Hence, the major concerns of linguistic and philological study was on determining the origins, histories, and relationships among the European languages that served as the cultural underpinning for nationalistic political ideologies.

(2) Colonialism/Racism: The reverse side of the coin of nationalism, also very much a "modern" phenomenon culturally, politically and economically. The improved navigational and ship-building technologies of the sixteenth century and after enabled a new kind of economic organization concentrated on emerging European nation-states and exploitation of non-European territories. This precipitated greater contact between the cultures of Europeans and non-Europeans, thus threatening the linguistic integrity of the national communities upon which the ideology of nationalism is based.

(3) Capitalism: The extension of the logic of the profit motive to an ever-increasing sphere of human activity, including, of course the university. This can be seen affecting English studies fairly directly at least from the early 20th century, with the inclusion of several waves of new kinds of vocationally-oriented students in American universities from the years following World War I to the present. See Gerald Graff's Professing Literature (on reserve) chapters 3-7 for a more detailed discussion of this topic.

(4) Mass Literacy: The spread of printing and the expansion of literacy from the late 15th century onward had significant consequences for language and culture, including, of course, for the study of English as a university discipine. In one way or another, the transformations that have swept over the modern university in the last hundred years are all related to developments in the kinds and levels of literacy and changes in literacy requirements among different demographic groups.

(5) The increasing pervasiveness of science as ideology in modernity: The development and extension of the scientific method in fields of scholarly inquiry and also in business and governmental contexts has had a reciprocal relationship to the way knowledge is organized, produced and disseminated in the modern university. As one example of this, consider the way that even such an abstract and humanistic field as literary studies underwent efforts to produce more scientific scholarship in the 1940s and 1950s. This can be seen, for example, in the shift from 19th century historical linguistics to the early 20th century movement of "structural linguistics" and "semiotics" in the work of Ferdinand Saussure, Charles S. Peirce and others. It can also be seen even in the field of literary studies in essays such as Wimsatt and Beardsley's "The Intentional Fallacy" (reserve; see also Terry Eagleton's discussion of such work in "The Rise of English," from this weeks electronic reserve readings).

New Criticism and the Expansion of the Academy
The intensely "cultural nationalist" character of late-nineteenth and early-twentieth century English studies gradually gave way after the First World War to a humanistic-aesthetic focus on literary appreciation. This model of literary study--generally called "New Criticism" dominated English in the academy until the last decades of the century. I think it was in some respects an institutional response to the needs of several successive waves of new demographic populations of students in the university. In the 1920s many new middle class students entered American universities as vocational groups who had previously trained their members as apprentices (such as engineers, architects, accountants, business managers, and, to some extent, even lawyers and lawyers) began to encourage young people (mostly young men) to take specific vocational training in college. In the 1950s there was another wave of expansion in the student body under the so-called "G. I. Bill"--a government plan that paid college tuition and living expenses for soldiers returning from World War II. In the 1960s, under the so-called "Great Society" legislation of the Johnson administration, an even larger wave of new students--including many more women and many more minority students--entered the universities. New Criticism, which had emphasized a socially, historically and politically detached analysis of the aesthetic features of literary texts, tended to assume that the reader's individual background was of no consequence in the reading of literature. In this, it was consistent with the modernist assumption of a "universal" human nature. However, these assumptions increasingly faltered under pressure from the more diverse student populations of the post-sixties academy. And, another source of pressure on the detached study of literature as English studies promoted by New Criticism came from a growing emphasis upon directly vocational training in the academy, and in English departments, in the post-sixties academy. I have discussed this history in my essays "Gender, Class and Vocationalism in the Corporate University" and "Curriculum Mortis". Other texts that address these and similar topics would include Richard Ohmann's English in America, Evan Watkins' Work Time, Stanley Aronowitz's The Knowledge Factory, and Bill Readings' The University in Ruins.

Normal English Studies
Here in Normal, the English department at Illinois State University has historically embraced these challenges of the post-sixties institutional environment as opportunities to develop a unique locally-defined program. In this response, our program is rare, perhaps even unique, among among English departments in the U.S. or abroad. Our institution had a traditional vocational focus, having begun as a state "normal university," or teacher-training institute, in 1857. And Illinois State University's expansion during the Great Society expansion of the 1960s was significant. In 1959 there were about 4,000 students at ISU, and all of them were training to be teachers. There were a couple of graduate programs in fields like school counseling and school administration. By 1969, there were over 14,000 students attending what was then called a "multi-purpose" university, with around 30 graduate programs in a variety of fields. I mention these facts in order to call your attention to the some of the differences between our university and the elite institutions that Graff, Eagleton and most of the other observers who have written about the history of English studies have focused their discussions upon. Partly as a result of our distinctive institutional environment, we have developed an English studies model that is less "literature" and "aesthetics"-- oriented, and more sensitive to the demands both of vocational education and to the needs of non-traditional college students--students from demographic groups traditionally excluded from the elite universities as a result of their class and race, and, in somewhat more complex ways, their gender.
Here is something I co-wrote with a group of students a few years ago to describe this phenomenon:

In literary and composition studies [modernist] neo-Aristotelian concepts such as the formal integrity of the text and the clear-cut separation of rhetoric and poetics have obscured the interdependence of text and reader, thereby reinforcing an oversimplified distinction between the 'public' and the 'private spheres. Nonetheless, within the limits of modernist humanism, neo-Aristotelian theories have had some progressive effects. Their trajectories in literary and composition studies can be plotted as historically overdetermined responses to the expansion of higher education after World War II. As opportunities for higher education were extended to larger numbers of Americans, the basic literacy needs of incoming college students increased [if I were revising this now I would write "changed"]. New students entering the expanding university system as a result of the G. I. Bill, the Great Society, and the Civil Rights movement were not lacking in general cultural knowledge. However, their background knowledges were increasingly those of marginalized subcultures rather than those of a shared consensus of upper and middle-class values. Finding themseelves in an environment where their background knowledges were likely to be discounted, the one element of the dominant culture that they could most readily appropriate was the [modernist] concept of universalized individualism. Each student's personal life experience knowledge could be valorized, to some extent, in the assumption that everyone is an authority on himself or herself, and that individual experience is intrinsically self-validating.

Hence, at a time when large numbers of the lower-middle and working classes were gaining access to higher education for the first time, pedagogies based on individualism were an empowering force for many first-generation college students in English studies. These pedagogies took several different forms. For instance, reader-oriented variations of New Criticism, developed in books such as Wayne Booth's The Rhetoric of Fiction, taught students to read literay texts as repositories of universal human experience and (somewhat paradoxically) also as a series of opportunities to affirm their own personal life experiences by association. This approach allowed some flexibility in interpretation of the literary text, thereby opening spaces for students differently situated in their relations to mainstream academic discourse to voice their differences--within fairly narrow limits imposed by the cultural homogeneity of canonical authors. [Modernist] Neo-Aristotelian composition theories offering objective rules or strategies available to all writers and writing pedagogies focusing on individual self-expression also offered points of access to academic discourse for non-traditional students. In the long run, these approaches have proven inadequate to the goal of democratic empowerment for students under the conditions of late capitalism. Women and students from marginalized cultural backgrounds were unable to bring the full scope of their different perspectives to bear on/against the dominant discourses of the classroom, the discipline, and the society at large because the literary text or writing process--understoond as the timeless expression of a universal human experience--set specific limits on the range of student knowledge and response that could be credited as relevant. [In modernist English studies] individualism was promoted as a universal goal, and then defined in such a way as to exclude the life experiences of students from marginalized groups.

From Ron Strickland, et al, "Postmodern Pedagogy and the Death of Civic Humanism," Social Epistemology vol 11 (1997), 340.