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  • English after the Fall: From Literature to Textuality by Robert Scholes
  • Diego Báez
Robert Scholes . English after the Fall: From Literature to Textuality. Iowa City: University of Iowa, 2011. 176 pp. Paper: $21.00. ISBN: 978-1609380557.

In his 1998 forerunner to this book, The Rise and Fall of English, Robert Scholes diagnoses the nosedive of English as an academic discipline. Anyone familiar with the interdepartmental tension between the empirical sciences and the humanities will appreciate the controversy of such a claim. And scholars of higher education should have liked to invoke Scholes as a high-water mark in the shifting tide of studies on competing curricula. Yet Scholes's claim that literature superseded rhetoric and oratory and thus signaled the English discipline's titular fall, reads more like what Walter Broman (1999) calls "the lucubrations of a committee chairman" (p. 229) than an urgent, accurate, or useful assessment, and allows ample room for revision.

English after the Fall is Scholes's follow-up project, one that should have addressed the shortcomings of its predecessor. But Scholes commits many of the same vagaries, sweeping omissions, and confused and confusing claims of his original indictment. He seems to have sacrificed his larger thesis—that English departments nationwide must shift their entire focus (no overnight task)—in favor of several cases of seductive explication.

In doing so, he not only presents an unconvincing case for curricular overhaul but also demonstrates the danger of relying on attractive rhetoric in lieu of data-driven analysis when dealing with topics as fiscally sensitive as departmental raisons d'être. As such, the book may be appropriate subject matter for graduate seminars in curriculum development or as a case study for scholars of current issues in departmental review. Likewise, administrators may find it a compelling look into the mind of a recognizable faculty member of modern media and culture.

In English after the Fall, Scholes argues that because television, Hollywood, and internet celebrities have replaced difficult literature that begs for explication in the attentive spotlight of U.S. culture, English departments must shift their critical focus from literature to what Scholes calls "textuality." He prescribes an emphasis by English scholars on operatic, theatric, and filmic treatments of original (and derivative) works.

Scholes opens the book with a chapter on the history of literature, criticism, and aesthetics, which he manages in only a dozen cursorily swift pages. He argues that English scholarship has always wrenched texts into categorically oppositional camps: "literature" and "not-literature." By framing the issue as one of literary alterity, Scholes simplifies radically the (maenadic and territorial) discord among English scholars about the criteria for canonical inclusion. But the complementary plurality of competing canons lies well beyond the purview of Scholes's project, so I shall return to his main line: If we admit poetry, drama, and fiction into the canon, why not journalism and scripture? Likewise, if we treat scripture and daily news as explicable texts, why not film and television?

In the second chapter, Scholes frames the problem as he sees it: the popular conception of literature works against a productive future for humanities by (a) excluding texts arguably worthy of study, and (b) preventing widespread access to high art by elevating onto a proverbial pedestal difficult texts like Ulysses and The Wasteland, texts packed so densely with historical allusion, linguistic play, and literary innovation that they require no small degree of professional interpretation. [End Page 101]

This latter claim—that an emphasis on difficult texts has devalued the study of English—Scholes elaborates, albeit briefly, with a note on the practical value of poetry. Poems, he says, are "diminished if we confine them to our current restricted notion of literature" as they "are often meant to address real problems in the world" (p. 18). He provides examples in Frost's "Design" and Wordsworth's "London, 1802," texts with the power to teach oratory and rhetoric to the same degree that they demonstrate the highest pleasures of literary art. Yet Scholes demonstrates the usefulness of poetry—the logical coherence and rhetorical modes of Frost's "Design," the grammatical play and contemporary relevance of Wordsworth—through textual explication, exactly the sort...

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