Disciplining English: Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives (review)

Toward the end of “A New Kind of Work: Publishing, Theory and Cultural Studies,” an essay appearing in Disciplining English, Ronald Schleifer recounts the “more or less” rhetorical questions posed to him by a director of a university press, someone whose job is to evaluate work that is, increasingly, and almost by definition, undisciplined: “what, in this new world [of cultural studies], counts as expertise? What counts as intellectual method or scholarly technique?” (189). To some, such questions may seem but another sign the disciplinary apocalypse is upon us. To others, such as the contributors to and editors of Disciplining English, the questions signal an opportunity to reconstruct our work. As the editors observe in their introduction, English is historically constructed and any exploration of its construction should “lead us to question whether particular practices and objects that English entails are justifiable” (1).

The contributors contend, implicitly or explicitly, that many practices or objects are not justifiable: the persistent urge to purge and purify, the execrable treatment of graduate students and most Ph.D.s, the bare toleration of composition or creative writing or teaching generally, especially of undergraduates. About half of the essays here detail moments of disciplinary construction, while also admirably recounting, in consistent terms, the approximately 130 year history of the discipline as a whole. Patricia Harkin dissects several readings of the career of Harvard’s first professor of English to show how “academic work [is] described, analyzed (into binary oppositions), evaluated, and made exemplary” (21). David S. Russell and Elizabeth A. Wilson each describe the ways the discipline purified itself of threats, whether internal or external. Craig Dionne and David R. Shumway each analyze similar processes at the level of the literary field, offering a genealogy of, respectively, the Renaissance and the American canon.

Filling out the volume are essays addressing the current conditions of our discipline. In an essay that some might see as promoting unhealthy early professionalization, that others might see as promoting a dumbing-down of the graduate curriculum, and that still others might see as offering a welcome dose of realism to it, John Schilb urges us to teach our graduate students how to write scholarly or critical prose. Molly Hite offers a new vision for the creative writing workshop, which unsettles its still dominant humanism but maintains a “notion of agency and subjectivity” so that authors may be at once “conscious, self-conscious, and self-consciously contextualized in social and cultural constructions of identity” (152, 154). And Laurie A. Finke and Martin B. Schichtman explain why textual editing became, in the middle decades of the 20th century, almost a sure path to unemployment, and why it may regain its prestige now, as a result of the increased viability of humanities computing.

The collection successfully exposes the constructedness of the discipline in interesting historical specificity, and makes worthwhile reading for anyone engaged in reflection about what we do as professors of English. Less successfully does the collection promote the “desirable changes” (10) necessary to effect what Cary Nelson wants (as do many others): ending the exploitation of graduate students and adjuncts and, therefore, our discipline’s “special responsibility” for enabling a likely “precipitous decline of higher education . . . in the coming decades” (195). The suggestions noted above, for instance, may be desirable but they do not address structural problems that compel “English departments . . . to hire non-Ph.D.s . . . when Ph.D.s cannot get jobs” (210; emphasis in original). In this regard, the reader should heed Richard Ohmann’s “Afterward,” which situates the collection’s concerns within the theory and praxis of professionalism. For Ohmann, the practices criticized here—purification, boundary-work, the creation of hierarchies of workers—must be seen as attempts, however inefficient, to achieve “the professional goal of winning and sustaining privileged conditions of labor” (215). The genealogies presented here might then be compared with those generated for other professions, and the current situation of English compared with those of other professions. Doing so suggests that...