Disciplining English: Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives

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.

Author: David R. Shumway
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: 07/17/2002
Pages: 237
Binding Type: Paperback
Weight: 0.70lbs
Size: 8.96h x 6.02w x 0.52d
ISBN: 9780791453667

About the Author
David R. Shumway is Professor of English and Director of the Center for Cultural Analysis at Carnegie Mellon University. His books include Creating American Civilization: A Genealogy of American Literature as an Academic Discipline. Craig Dionne is Associate Professor of English at Eastern Michigan University.

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