Notes
Notes Introduction:Working Past the Profession 1. In “The Implications of the New Literacy Studies for Literacy Education,” Brian Street traces a line of development that parallels my analysis. Literacy ceased being deWned as an autonomous object of study as the focus shifted to the institutional and ideological contexts that shape the composition, circulation, and reception of literate practices.These trends have been articulated in complementary ways by those studying language, writing, literature, and teaching. For example, Gee’s “Literacy, Discourse, and Linguistics” shows how such linguistic categories such as contact codes, interference , pidginization, and creolization can be used to examine the social practices that constitute varied literate discourses. 2. In “Arts of the Contact Zone,” Pratt deWnes contact zones as “social spaces where cultures meet, clash, and grapple with each other, often in contexts of highly asymmetrical relations of power” (34). Her concept has proven useful in discussions of the classroom . See, for example, Bizzell, “Contact Zones and English Studies,” and Richard Miller. Pratt has deWned transculturation as the “processes whereby members of subordinated or marginal groups select and invent from the materials transmitted by a dominant or metropolitan culture” (36). 3. Robert Scholes is about the only historian from outside rhetoric and composition who has examined how literary studies evolved out of their opposition to writing studies. Scholes’s Rise and Fall of English is also one of the few histories to come from any area of English studies that acknowledges that if we are to change these debilitating hierarchies, we will need to build coalitions with teachers of English in the schools. 4. DeLuca reviews how articulation theory has inXuenced rhetorical studies in communications , and Kimme Hea analyzes how it can be used to explore new technologies of literacy, while Griswold, McDonnell, and Nathan Wright relate those technological developments to shifting class relations in a way that is congruent with both work on social movements and new literacy studies. 5. As Scholes has discussed, the eighteenth-century “concept of belles letters . . . served as a transition . . . from an older view of literature as including all kinds of written works worthy of study, to a diVerent view that led to a curriculum dominated by Romantic notions of genius and imagination, along with their Arnoldian development as ‘high seriousness’” (12). 6. Cotton Mather’s ritual pronouncement at graduation and the decision of the Harvard Corporation on the appeal of graduate tutors are reprinted in Richard Hofstadter and Wilson Smith’s American Higher Education:A Documentary History, along with related texts that are reprinted there (18, 21–27). 7. Franklin’s involvement in the establishment of the Wrst professorship of English in America has all the rich historical resonance of the fact that one the Wrst professors of English in Britain was Adam Smith, who taught rhetoric and belles lettres in the years that he was formalizing the political economy of consumer society. Franklin also provided formative models for the reading public, and like Smith, his models were inXuenced by civic humanism. According to Bender, “Franklin best represents the Notes to Pages 19–27 activist, pragmatic, and institution-founding character of early American civic humanism ,” which had an amateurish quality that proved vulnerable to rapid expansion, geographical dispersal, and social stratiWcation (“Erosion” 86). 8. GraV recognizes the merits of the antebellum literary networks, but is Wnally dismissive of the “classical college”: “From the point of view of subsequent literary criticism , the old college’s conception of literary study as an extension of grammar, rhetoric, and elocution was merely evidence of hopeless provincialism. But this modern view was formed only after literature had largely ceded to journalism and other media whatever power it had had to shape public opinion” (50–51). 9.The evolution of English textbooks can be traced back to the eighteenth-century elocutionary anthologies that preceded the McGuVey Eclectic Readers, which sold hundreds of millions of copies. In the antebellum period, literature began to be studied in historical surveys such as Cleveland’s A Compendium of English Literature that included selections along with biographical and historical commentary. An example of how technologies shaped pedagogies is provided by how the paperback revolution of the 1920s and 1930s contributed to the close reading pedagogies of New Criticism, which set itself in opposition to the massiWcation of literacy. 10. As Bender examines in his volume on the social histories of English and three other disciplines, between 1950 and 1970, governmental expenditures on higher education rose more than tenfold (from $2.2 to...
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