Table of Contents
Table of Contents
Blackwell Manifestos
In this new series major critics make timely interventions to address important concepts and subjects, including topics as diverse as, for example: Culture, Race, Religion, History, Society, Geography, Literature, Literary Theory, Shakespeare, Cinema, and Modernism. Written accessibly and with verve and spirit, these books follow no uniform prescription but set out to engage and challenge the broadest range of readers, from undergraduates to postgraduates, university teachers and general readers – all those, in short, interested in ongoing debates and controversies in the humanities and social sciences.
The Idea of Culture | Terry Eagleton |
The Future of Christianity | Alister E. McGrath |
Reading After Theory | Valentine Cunningham |
21st-Century Modernism | Marjorie Perloff |
The Future of Theory | Jean-Michel Rabaté |
True Religion | Graham Ward |
Inventing Popular Culture | John Storey |
Myths for the Masses | Hanno Hardt |
The Future of War | Christopher Coker |
The Rhetoric of RHETORIC | Wayne C. Booth |
When Faiths Collide | Martin E. Marty |
The Future of Environmental Criticism | Lawrence Buell |
The Idea of Latin America | Walter D. Mignolo |
The Future of Society | William Outhwaite |
Provoking Democracy | Caroline Levine |
Rescuing the Bible | Roland Boer |
Our Victorian Education | Dinah Birch |
The Idea of English Ethnicity | Robert Young |
Living with Theory | Vincent B. Leitch |
Uses of Literature | Rita Felski |
Religion and the Human Future | David E. Klemm and William Schweiker |
The State of the Novel | Dominic Head |
In Defense of Reading | Daniel R. Schwarz |
Why Victorian Literature Still Matters | Philip Davis |
The Savage Text | Adrian Thatcher |
The Myth of Popular Culture | Perry Meisel |
Phenomenal Shakespeare | Bruce R. Smith |
Why Politics Can’t Be Freed From Religion | Ivan Strenski |
What Cinema is! | Andrew Dudley |
The Future of Theology | David F. Ford |
A Future for Criticism | Catherine Belsey |
After the Fall | Richard Gray |
After Globalization | Eric Cazdyn and Imre Szeman |
Art Is Not What You Think It Is | Donald Preziosi and Claire Farago |
The Global Future of English Studies | James F. English |
This edition first published 2012
© 2012 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd
Wiley-Blackwell is an imprint of John Wiley & Sons, formed by the merger of Wiley’s global Scientific, Technical and Medical business with Blackwell Publishing.
Registered Office
John Wiley & Sons Ltd, The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
Editorial Offices
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148-5020, USA
9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK
The Atrium, Southern Gate, Chichester, West Sussex, PO19 8SQ, UK
For details of our global editorial offices, for customer services, and for information about how to apply for permission to reuse the copyright material in this book please see our website at .
The right of James F. English to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted in accordance with the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.
All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, except as permitted by the UK Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988, without the prior permission of the publisher.
Wiley also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books.
Designations used by companies to distinguish their products are often claimed as trademarks. All brand names and product names used in this book are trade names, service marks, trademarks or registered trademarks of their respective owners. The publisher is not associated with any product or vendor mentioned in this book. This publication is designed to provide accurate and authoritative information in regard to the subject matter covered. It is sold on the understanding that the publisher is not engaged in rendering professional services. If professional advice or other expert assistance is required, the services of a competent professional should be sought.
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
English, James F., 1958-
The global future of English studies / James F. English.
p. cm.
Includes index.
ISBN 978-0-470-65494-1 (cloth)
ISBN 978-1-119-94464-5 (epdf)
ISBN 978-1-119-94465-2 (epub)
ISBN 978-1-119-94466-9 (mobi)
1. English language–Study and teaching. I. Title.
PE1065.E56 2012
420.7–dc23
2011042251
A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.
For Jimmy, John, and Eileen
List of Illustrations
1.1 Bachelor’s degrees conferred, by discipline, United States, 1983–2008.
1.2 Percent share of US bachelor’s degrees, by discipline, 1983–2008.
1.3 Number of graduating majors and share of total degrees, selected disciplines, United States, 1983–2008.
1.4 Percent change in share of undergraduate degrees granted, United States, 1983–2008.
1.5 Percent change in number of undergraduate degrees granted, United States, 1998–2008.
1.6 Percent change in number of undergraduate degrees granted, United States, 1983–2008.
1.7 Percent increase in undergraduate enrollments by discipline, United Kingdom, 1999–2009 – unadjusted HESA statistics.
1.8 Percent increase in undergraduate enrollments by discipline, United Kingdom, 1999–2009 – adjusted HESA statistics.
1.9 Total tertiary enrollments, 1980–2007, worldwide and by region.
1.10 Number of graduating English majors in selected countries and regions, 1996 and 2008.
1.11 Number of graduating English majors, 1996 and 2008, by broad groups of countries.
2.1 Number of teachers in tertiary education, 1980–2007, selected regions.
2.2 Student–teacher ratio in tertiary education worldwide, 1980–2007.
2.3 Number of instructional faculty by employment status, United States, 1970–2007.
3.1 Transcript for 2004 English BA recipient in China.
3.2 Reading list in the British novel, from the Chinese national curriculum.
3.3 Table of contents from a Chinese anthology of British literature.
3.4 Curriculum for the BA in English, University of Basel, Switzerland.
3.5 Curriculum for the BA in English literature and culture (2011 matriculants), University of Amsterdam, Netherlands.
3.6 Number of programs awarding BAs and master’s degrees in creative writing, 1984, 1996, and 2008.
3.7 Approximate average distribution of classroom hours for an English BA in selected systems.
Preface
This is not a prescriptive manifesto on method, calling for a new approach to research, a new theorization of the literary object, or a new form of pedagogical practice. There are always plenty of books in circulation announcing new programs of research and teaching; such books are indeed one of the great constants of our discipline, one of the products it most reliably produces – one of the signs, indeed, of its stability and vigor. Yet when we step back to take a long view of literary studies, even the most contentious debates over specific disciplinary assumptions and practices tend to appear as minor eruptions on a placid surface, affecting a relatively small number of faculty and graduate students who are housed in a few exceptional institutions. As Barbara Herrnstein Smith observed in the midst of the fierce conflicts of the early 1990s, when English faculty were accused of pursuing a wholesale assault on the discipline’s traditional texts and values, “nothing in higher education has been more stable over the past 40 years than the curriculum of departments of English.”
This is not to deny that important changes have taken place. Recent decades have witnessed seismic shifts on the global terrain of higher education and English has not escaped the disruption and turmoil. But the changes it has been undergoing are not of the sort that can be addressed in a standard-issue manifesto on critical method. The overabundance of English PhDs in Western Europe and North America and the acute shortage in many countries of South and East Asia; the explosion of creative writing programs throughout the Anglophone world; the widening effort, now evident in China, to reform the “English Plus” model and decouple English literary studies from the teaching of business writing and English for engineers: these kinds of changes are large scale – often too large scale for us even to register them in any coherent way, let alone to incorporate them into our disputes over theory and method. My aim here is to draw these kinds of tectonic shifts, and the tensions underlying them, into the compass of our more immediate matters of concern. To be sure, this widening of attention leads to certain implications for critical and pedagogical practice: that we should veer off from the orthodoxies of the (now almost elderly) “new” historicism; that we should adjust departmental formations, degree requirements, and standard coursework to emphasize the critical learning inherent in creative writing and the creative element in critical writing; that we should extend beyond the comfort zone of our habitual interdisciplinarities to form alliances with the quantitative social and informational sciences; and so on. But the purpose of this book is not so much to lay out my own agenda for English studies as to offer, however sketchily and imperfectly, the groundwork for clearer collective thinking about what the agenda should be. While I will maintain that our discipline’s future is not nearly so bleak as most commentators imagine, it does face major challenges. And our success in meeting those challenges will depend, to begin with, on our ability to map the new global landscape on which we are operating.
Acknowledgments
I could not have written this book without assistance from faculty and students in various English departments around the world. My colleagues at Penn, especially Peter Conn and Max Cavitch, have been among my most thoughtful and well-informed interlocutors. During my time teaching at Kings College, London, I learned much about the specificities of the British system from conversations with Mark Turner, Jo McDonagh, and Gordon McMullan. When he was at the University of Edinburgh, John Frow engaged me in a project of administrative data exchange between the English departments there, at Penn, and at the University of Melbourne. Elizabeth Anderson performed heroic labor in assembling the Penn data for that study, the results of which proved helpful to this book in a number of ways. David Carter arranged for me to make an extended visit to the University of Queensland, where my sense of the situation of English departments in Australia was sharpened by conversations with Nathan Garvey, Roger Osborne, Ian Hunter, and David himself. I also learned much from the Australian and New Zealand scholars at the 2011 SHARP Conference in Brisbane, and especially from Simone Murray of Monash University, who, among other things, explained to me the “Melbourne model.” Henrik Enbohm of the Swedish Writers’ Union invited me to a large gathering of writers, scholars, and translators in Stockholm, where I was able to speak with faculty and graduate students from literature departments in Sweden and elsewhere in Scandinavia. Andrew Shields at the University of Basel provided me with helpful information about English studies in Switzerland and Germany, as did Philipp Schweighauser and Ina Habermann. In Vienna, my Austrian guide was Hanno Biber, and I am grateful to Lianna Giorgi of the ICCR and the Euro-Festival Project for arranging my visit to that city, as well as to Bologna. Most recently, Rudolph Glitz arranged for me to visit the University of Amsterdam and provided clear and detailed answers to my queries regarding English studies in the Netherlands.
For helping me to learn something about English departments in China, I owe a particular debt to Danling Li, my tireless guide and native informant in Beijing, who has continued to assist me back in Philadelphia. Wang Ning arranged my visit to Tsinghua University and set up a series of meetings and meals there; Shen Anfeng gave me a most informative tour of the campus. Mao Liang arranged my visit to Peking University, where he, Ding Hongwei, Thomas Rendall, and Shen Dan all patiently answered my many questions about their students, curriculums, teaching methods, and funding arrangements. Zhang Hongxia was a charming and informative guide in Shanghai. Junsong Chen of Shanghai International Studies University led me on a most enlightening tour of the English literature section of the SISU bookstore. He Weiwen, vice dean of the School of Foreign Languages at Shanghai Jiaotong University, hosted me on his campus, where I enjoyed helpful discussions with him and Wang Zhenhua. Sun Jian, the chair of English at Fudan University, generously made time for me in the middle of a busy week. My visit to Nanjing University was especially productive, and Liu Haiping did me great service in arranging for meetings with groups of administrators, faculty, and graduate students. Especially helpful was the participation of Yang Jincai, the dean of the School of Foreign Studies, and Gao Wei, Zhu Gang, Zhao Wenshu, Zhu Xuefeng, Hu Jing, and Fan Hao. Finally, Phoebe Liu, my student at Penn, translated Chinese documents and websites for me, and canvassed her friends at universities in China for information that we could not find online.
No one has assisted me more with this book than David Dunning, who prepared all the charts and contributed much clarity of thought to the task of gathering and analyzing the statistical data. David also read the book in manuscript, steering me around numerous mistakes, as did the copyeditor Cheryl Adam at a later stage in the process. Fraser Sutherland worked rapidly to prepare an index. Aileen Castell was a superbly efficient project manager. Emma Bennett is the editor who originally encouraged me to write the book for her Manifesto series, and Ben Thatcher kept the project moving forward despite my habitual dodges, detours, and delays.
None of these people will fully agree with the analysis and arguments in the book. Nor do they share responsibility for whatever errors of fact and flaws of reasoning it contains. But the opportunity to discuss with them the present circumstances and possible futures of a discipline in which we are all invested has greatly enriched my understanding and enlivened my professional life these past few years.