The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns

Introduction

 Introduction Working Past the Profession Very much depends upon what we select from which to start and very much depends upon whether we select our point of departure in order to tell . . . what . . . ought to be or what is. John Dewey in 1954, The Public and Its Problems, 9. My history of college English studies begins by looking past the rise of the profession in the last century to explore how the teaching of English in American colleges has been shaped by broader developments in literacy since the colonial period. ReXecting upon those developments can help us to come to terms with the changes in literacy that are redeWning what we teach and how we study it. Most English departments have come to include a diverse array of critics, compositionists, writers, applied linguists, and educators who sometimes seem to share little more than a mailing address. If English is a discipline, what are its parameters and priorities, and how does it encompass the varied subjects that are taught in courses that run the gamut from Wrst-year composition to graduate seminars in literature and ESOL?The incoherence of the Weld is amply documented in the bundle of courses that make up the traditional undergraduate major in English. Rather than being guided by research on students’ changing needs, curricular requirements often reXect historical compromises and accommodations . As detailed in the national surveys that will be examined in later chapters , a traditional literature major generally includes a token course on language and an advanced writing course, though many departments have responded to the popularity of writing courses by adding a parallel major or track in creative writing, and perhaps business or technical writing. Rarely do the transcripts of English majors provide any cohesive sense of the range of concerns that are  Introduction:Working Past the Profession addressed in departments that have expanded to include studies of world Englishes, online literacies, and the other areas of English studies that have grown up around a modern sense of literature.This incoherence is a product of our history, and I believe that a review of that history can help us make sense of what college English is, and perhaps what it ought to be as well. English departments generally include a collocation of subject matters that can be grouped into four general areas: literature, language, English education , and writing. Each of these areas includes varied subspecialties. For example , writing is a disjointed area of study divided up by the developments in composition and creative writing that have tended to set them at odds. Because our concerns are so wide ranging, the historical developments of the four corners of our Weld have largely been examined in isolation from each other. The best-known account of our discipline is Gerald GraV’s recently rereleased history of “the profession of literature,” Professing Literature: An Institutional History. As GraV acknowledges in the preface to the new edition (2007), the reduction of English studies to literary studies has tended to marginalize the teaching of writing, language, and English education. For their part, histories of rhetoric and composition have tended to concentrate on the development of composition courses, and have paid little attention to the eVorts of teachers of Wction and poetry to distinguish themselves from journalists and other teachers of writing. Few histories of English have attended to the development of grammar, philology, or linguistics within English studies , in part because linguistics is presumed to have its own disciplinary history (even though departments of linguistics are generally conWned to research universities).The institutional history of English education has also not been studied, though that is changing as historians have begun to reexamine how English education became peripheral to English studies. Each of these areas has a history that predates the establishment of English departments, and those histories are integral to the institutional development of the teaching of English in American colleges. I integrate those areas’ histories into that institutional development by characterizing English studies not as literary studies but as literacy studies. I realize that using the term literacy studies in this way is problematic. With the “New Literacy Studies,” literacy studies (like cultural studies) has become an interdisciplinary, even postdisciplinary movement. Literacy studies cannot really be claimed by any particular discipline—and if it could, professors of education could make a better claim than professors of English.1 Nonetheless, deWning English studies as literacy Introduction:Working Past...