Abstract
Nigel Wood assesses the contemporary institutional status of English and English Studies, addressing three areas of concern: the relevance of tertiary level study, changing definitions of knowledge and the connection of higher education to the ‘public sphere’. Not all present influences are unwelcome, he argues. The new investigations possible in a digital economy — mining large volumes of data and contextualizing individual items with more precision — are progressive. Accountability and transparency in promoting the public good’, however, incorporate limiting levels of scrutiny and self-censorship, inviting the academy to conform to external pressures. Truly democratic humanistic enquiry should aim at as free and engaged an exchange of ideas as possible, bringing a truly critical and ‘oppositional’ perspective to bear on the present and the past.
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Notes
Jonathan Swift, A Tale of a Tub and Other Works, Angus Ross and David Woolley (eds), Oxford, Oxford University Press, 1986, p.17.
Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848–1932, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 1983, pp.1–17.
Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979, p.213.
A contribution to a module created by Melissa Bailar for Rice University’s Digital Scholarship series, ‘Emerging Disciplines: Shaping New Fields of Scholarly Inquiry in and beyond the Humanities’, OpenStax-CNX, 13 May 2010, <http://cnx.org/content/col11201/1.1/>. See also Mark Osteen and Martha Woodmansee, ‘Taking Account of the New Economic Criticism: An Historical Introduction, in Osteen and Woodmansee (eds), The New Economic Criticism: Studies at the Intersection of Literature and Economics, London, Routledge, 1999, pp.3–50.
Cultural capital is a notion used to help explain the at times drastic differences in educational achievement quite apart from actual, economic, investment, where there is a social rate of return (embedded in indicators such as accent, dress or even expression of intellect) derived from a particular family’s level of willing sacrifice and mission. The term was first used in an article by Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, ‘Cultural Reproduction and Social Reproduction’ in R. K. Brown (ed.), Knowledge, Education, and Cultural Change: Papers in the Sociology of Education, London, Tavistock, 1973, pp.71–112.
See also Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, in John G. Richardson (ed.), Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York, Greenwood, 1986, pp.241–58.
John Hodgson, The Experience of Studying English in UK Higher Education, Report Series no. 20, The Higher Education Academy, English Subject Centre, February 2010.
Michel Foucault, ‘What Is an Author?’ in Paul Rabinow (ed.), The Foucault Reader, New York, Pantheon Books, 1984, pp.101–20.
Jürgen Habermas, The Theory of Communicative Action, trans. Thomas McCarthy, 2 vols, Cambridge, Polity Press, 1984, 1987, 1.273–319, and 2.153–97, and The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere, trans. T Burger and F. Lawrence, Cambridge, MA, Polity Press, 1989, pp.89–140.
This impulse, to ‘snatch up a vehement opinion in ignorance and passion or to wish to crush an adversary by sheer violence’ is to succumb to the tactics of the populace. Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1960, p.107.
See the reports available online: Deborah Cartmell, English in the Workplace, English Subject Centre, April 2003;
Rebecca Allan, A Wider Perspective and More Options: Investigating the Longer Term Employability of Humanities Graduates, Southampton, Subject Centre for Languages, Linguistics and Area Studies, March 2006,
and Jeanette Sakel and Jeanine Treffers-Daller, Wider Perspectives and More Options for English Language and Linguistics Students, Bristol, University of the West of England, August 2010.
‘In any given social formation, the PW [pedagogic work] through which the dominant PA [pedagogic action] is carried on always has a function of keeping order, i.e. of reproducing the structure of the power relations between the groups or classes, inasmuch as, by inculcation or exclusion, it tends to impose recognition of the legitimacy of the dominant culture on the members of the dominated groups or classes, and to make them internalize, to a variable extent, disciplines and censorships which best serve the material and symbolic interests of the dominant groups or classes when they take the form of self-discipline and self-censorship.’ Pierre Bourdieu and Jean-Claude Passeron, Reproduction: In Education, Society and Culture, trans. Richard Nice, London and Beverley Hills, Sage, 1977, pp.40–41.
See also Bourdieu, The Field of Cultural Production: Essays on Art and Literature, Randal Johnson (ed. and trans.), Cambridge, Polity Press, 1993, pp.76–77.
The distinction adopted here is that of E. D. Hirsch, Jr., Validity in Interpretation, New Haven, Yale University Press, 1967.
Franco Moretti, Graphs, Maps, Trees: Abstract Models for a Literary History, London and New York, Verso, 2005, p.1.
Matthew L. Jockers, Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History, Champaign: University of Illinois Press, 2013.
See also Susan Schreibman, Ray Siemens and John Unsworth (eds), A Companion to Digital Humanities, Oxford and New York, Blackwell, 2004, and the special issue of differences containing such staunch defences of digital knowledge as Matthew Kirschenbaum, ‘What Is “Digital Humanities” and Why Are They Saying Such Terrible Things About It?’, differences, 25.1, 2014, pp.46–63, and
Fiona M. Barrett, ‘The Brave Side of Digital Humanities’, differences, 25:1, 2014, pp.64–78.
Michel Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge, trans. A. M. Sheridan-Smith, New York, Pantheon, 1972, p.55.
RCUK Public Engagement with Research Strategy, January 2013, <http://www.rcuk.ac.uk>, p.3.
National Co-ordinating Centre for Public Engagement, The Engaged University: A Manifesto for Public Engagement, 2010, n.pag.
See Cary J. Nederman, ‘Rhetoric, Reason and Republic: Republicanisms — Ancient, Medieval and Modern’, in James Hankins (ed.), Renaissance Civic Humanism: Reappraisals and Reflections, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2000, pp.247–69;
Steven Pincus, ‘The State and Civil Society in Early Modern England: Capitalism, Causation and Habermas’s Bourgeois Public Sphere’, in Peter Lake and Steven Pincus (eds), The Politics of the Public Sphere in Early Modern England, Manchester, Manchester University Press, 2007, pp.213–31;
C. G. Nauert, Humanism and the Culture of Renaissance Europe, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2006, pp.60–101.
Richard Mulgan, ‘Accountability’: An Ever-expanding Concept?’, Public Administration, 78, 2000, pp.555–73, p.566.
See also Barry Bozeman, Public Values and Public Interest: Counterbalancing Economic Individualism, Washington, D.C., Georgetown University Press, 2007, pp.124–26 (on justifying public values and collective action) and pp.181–82 (on ‘Public Service Motivation’) and
Denis McQuail, Media Performance: Mass Communication and the Public Interest, London and New Delhi, Sage, 1992, pp.20–34 and
Z. Papacharissi, ‘The Virtual Sphere: The Internet as a Public Sphere’, New Media and Society, 4, 2002, pp.9–27
See Viktor Mayer-Schönberger, Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Princeton, Princeton University Press, 2011, pp.169–95.
Plato, Malcolm Schofield (ed.), Plato: Gorgias, Menexenus, Protagoras, trans. T. Griffith, Cambridge Texts in the History of Political Thought, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 2009, pp.462b–472c; pp.480c-492c, where the most effective use of discourse is self-examination, not self-defence or egotistical display.
See also James Boyd White, ‘The Ethics of Argument: Plato’s Gorgias and the Modern Lawyer’, The University of Chicago Law Review, 50.2, 1983, pp.849–95.
Mark Johnson and George Lakoff, Metaphors We Live By, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1980; from the Afterword, 2003, p.273.
See also James Lawley and Penny Tompkins, Metaphors in Mind: Transformation Through Symbolic Modelling, London, The Developing Company Press, 2000, pp.21–48, 146–72;
Dan McAdams, The Stories We Live By: Personal Myths and the Making of the Self, New York and London, The Guilford Press, 1993, pp.91–132 and
Paul Ricoeur, The Rule of Metaphor: The Creation of Meaning in Language, trans. R. Czerny with K. McLaughlin and J. Costello SJ, Toronto, University of Toronto Press, 1977, pp.74–156.
Edward Said, The World, the Text, and the Critic, London, Faber, 1984, p.29. See also his Humanism and Democratic Criticism, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2004, pp.80–82.
See Thomas Docherty, For the University: Democracy and the Future of the Institution, London and New York, Bloomsbury Academic, 2011, pp.69–95, and Aesthetic Democracy, Stanford, Stanford University Press, 2006, pp.61–88.
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Wood, N. (2015). The Public Sphere and Worldliness: The Present Dialogue within English Studies. In: Gildea, N., Goodwyn, H., Kitching, M., Tyson, H. (eds) English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478054_5
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