English as a Discipline

ELT 42 : 2 1999 bound to wait until they are fetched, and Hopkins' women, whose martyrdom brings them directly to Christ." Johnson finds that "Hopkins' impulse to apotheosize women while marginalizing them, opposed by Rossetti's attempts to assert their humanity, were both legitimate developments of Tractarian ideals." She emphasizes that Hopkins's "dislike of women ... is never fully overcome. Attempts to show that Hopkins became more attuned to the feminine within himself, like Sulloway's, or that Hopkins was not part of the dominant male creator ethic of his time, like Bump's, do not answer Hopkins' consistent disparagement of women in his poetry." His virgin martyr poems "support a reading that suggests that the only good woman is a dead one." I am sure that Hopkins would have been shocked by such a reading. In the article cited in Johnson's bibliography I point out how well Hopkins fits "the traditional myth of creativity as the product of the isolated, suffering male," but suggest that his creativity also derived from a revolt against simplistic dualisms such as masculine versus feminine (1989). Sulloway argues not only that Hopkins became more attuned to the feminine within, as I do, but that he was inspired by androgyny in women as well as men. Sulloway points out that in his poetry "the Virgin Mary can become a 'mighty mother,' and Mary's earthly surrogate, the tall nun in The Wreck of the Deutschland, can become a lioness and a prophetess, roles not then normally considered appropriate for Eve's descendants " ("Hopkins, Male and Female, and the Tender Mothering Earth," 1989). Nevertheless, according to Johnson the "Tractarian devotion to the Virgin," which developed after 1840 under the influence of Catholicism, "seemed to develop in inverse proportion to the adorer's interaction with ordinary femininity." Johnson insists that "the Mary of Hopkins' poems does not balance this negative view of femininity. Although her role as mediatrix is recognized, she is 'merely a woman,' and her power depends , as does Eve's, not on a contract with God but on her subordination to a male. . . . Such a reductive view of womankind retains the worst stereotypes of femininity while denying the best." No doubt this will not be the last word on this subject. Jerome Bump ______________ University of Texas at Austin English as a Discipline Robert Scholes. The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998. xvi + 203 pp. $20.00 236 BOOK REVIEWS O ROSE thou art sick... etc. So goes the refrain of many a recent small volume on the sorry state of the field (lately called "profession") of English. Why does English, among all the academic disciplines, cry out for discipline—why does English stand out even among the humanities departments? To indulge in such speculations would require explaining why literary studies, presumably the most esthetic and cloistered of pursuits , became the hotbed of campus radicalism in the last decades of this century—before a cold bath of political invective and talkshow satire made "political correctness" a laughingstock. Yet even in the absence of good reasons for its spectacular decline, English remains the object of many a published rumination. Despite the historical narrative promised by its title, The Rise and Fall of English is largely concerned with the future, with the anxious question, What next? As the repetition in his title and subtitle suggests, Robert Scholes limits his aperture to the field itself; despite invocations of historical contextualization to explain previous—and his own ideal—programs of literary studies, he's not inclined to consider social phenomena in an account of our present fortunes. Historicizing here works by contrasts: lining up the Yale curriculum of 1822-1823 with the current diversity traces the distance we've come, if it doesn't tell us what we need to know (how we got there). It seems there was a Fall—the familiar one into postmodern skepticism and other forms of professional uncertainty. Scholes adds another long heard lament, giving it more weight as an explanatory factor than others have done: the great divide in English between teaching/teachers of literature and those of writing. A series...