English in America Updated: An Interview with Richard Ohmann

Jeffrey Williams English in America Updated: An Interview with Richard Ohmann Jeffrey Williams: The question I want to start with is about English in America, which strikes me as having been ahead of its time in dealing with issues—like institutionalization and professionalization—that are very current now. What was the field like when you wrote it? Richard Ohmann: I remember when I came to think that I was writing a book—rather than just the stray article—and I knew that I wanted to write about the institutions of English, I looked around to find out what the historians and the sociologists had said about departments, and I was astonished to find that they had very little to say at all. There was literature on professionalism that was some help, especially an older scholar named Everett Hughes, but the sociologists were remarkably silent about departments—the institutions in which they themselves and we work. So I felt that I was making it up as I went along, clearing the brush, and I'm sure that the path was erratic, but it was a kind of a path. I don't claim credit for all of the explosion of interest in professionalization in the institutions of the academies, but I think that what I did in English in America, along with work that was underway simultaneously by Burton Bledstein and by Magali Sarfatti Larson, really opened up a field of inquiry, and with a certain political urgency in doing so. So I'm satisfied about that, though I have not read parts of English in America during the intervening eighteen years, and I'm sure that there are parts that I would find very embarrassing now if I read them again. But some parts of it seem to have set some energies going for people in our field or in other fields—the section on composition and the sections on departments especially. JW: A colleague once told me that it changed the way he looked at this profession and in some ways brought him to marxism. RO: Really? You said it was a work that was slightly ahead of its time, but in another way, it was entirely part of its moment, which was really a few years before it came out. That was the time when a whole bunch of people in the U.S. were engaging in a ruthless critique of all things existing, to use one of my favorite phrases, and when it seemed as if every day when you went to a meeting, new knowledge and thought opened up, and it was very exciting. There's no possibility that English in America could have turned into what it was without the Radical Caucus of the Modern Language Association, without the 58 the minnesota review New University Conference, and the people in literary and cultural studies who had small meetings within the bigger NUC meetings and astonished ourselves mutually with the way we were looking again at the work that we did. In short, its ideas came out of the politics of that time and the efforts of mostly younger intellectuals. I was the one, as it turned out, that specialized in departments and the institutions of writing instruction, but the book itself, as can be said of almost all books, can best be thought of as a kind of collective project, or the result of a collective project of that time. It was unthinkable without The Movement, as we used to call it. JW: What do you think of the current concern with these issues? RO: I hope that there is more and more of it. I value very much things that people like Evan Watkins and Bruce Robbins and Jim Berlin have done. They've gone, in some ways, well beyond what I did, and it seems to me that there are also a lot of historical studies of the discipline and institutions, especially of writing. People like Robert Connors have been grounding the kinds of points at which I more or less conjectured about the history of composition, both in English in America and in Politics ofLetters. JW: How did you come to do...