The Routledge Companion to English Studies

Constant Leung, Brian V Street, Constant Leung, Brian V Street

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781317918912
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Langues et linguistique
• Subtopic: Linguistique

English is now a global phenomenon no longer defined by fixed territorial, cultural and social functions. The Routledge Companion to English Studies provides an authoritative overview of the subject area. Taking into account the changing conceptualisations of English, this Companion considers both historical trajectories and contemporary perspectives whilst also showcasing the state-of-the-art contributions made by the established scholars of the field.

The Routledge Companion to English Studies:

• provides a set of broad perspectives on English as a subject of study and research

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• highlights the importance of the link between English and other languages within the concepts of multilingualism and polylingualism

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• investigates the use of language in communication through the medium of digital technology covering key issues such as Digital Literacies, Multimodal Literacies and Games and Broadcast Language

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• explores the role of English in education taking account of social, ethnographic and global perspectives on pedagogical issues.

This collection of thirty-four newly commissioned articles provides a comprehensive and up-to-date picture of the dynamic and diverse field of English Studies and will be an invaluable text for advanced students and researchers in this area.

Part I

ENGLISH IN LARGER CONTEXTS

1

ENGLISH AS A SUBJECT

Viv Ellis

Introduction

This chapter examines two contrasting stories about the school and university subjects of English, with a particular focus on how language figures in accounts of their development, in the evidence we have of their pedagogical practices, and in the relationship between language and literature in the construction of the subject. In nominally anglophone countries, the position of language and language study in the subject of English has always been problematic and contested and this issue alone has given rise to numerous debates that have ranged from intellectual turf wars to full-blown crises of disciplinarity (e.g. Spivak 2003). Indeed, the histories of English (wherever it is practised) are so riven with contradictory emphases, methodologies and divergent ideological commitments that any attempt to provide a comprehensive analysis of the multiplicity of accounts would require an ambitious historiographical project. Within the scope of a short chapter such as this one, a much narrower focus is essential, so the discussion will be organized around an examination of two of the most powerful, contrasting, even contradictory stories: English as an instrument of colonial and class domination and English as a socially progressive project. In the course of the discussion, it will become apparent that, far from being mutually exclusive, both capture some of the historical problems driving this particular curriculum formation and both demonstrate that the need to tell such stories refers us to the specific social and material circumstances in which they are told (see also Chapter 2). This chapter, then, will approach English as a subject in terms of the concepts of domination and development.

It is also worth acknowledging from the start that the chapter focuses on English as a curriculum formation and, mainly, from the perspective of the British Isles. In naming a domain of concepts and social practices as a “subject”, we are already understanding English as a selection made for specific pedagogical purposes and institutionalized as labour, both waged and unwaged, in particular national contexts. As a subject, it seeks to establish what Britzman (1991) has called “the limits of relevancy” of what counts as knowledge by “abstracting knowledge from its socio-cultural roots” (Britzman 1991: 35). Any attempt to understand the histories of the subject therefore needs to take into account the evolving social and cultural contexts of English work and to understand the basis on which any selection (for the purposes of curricular abstraction) has been made. Paying attention to the construction of the subject through the work of English to establish its “limits of relevancy” problematizes simplistic notions of a downwards transfer of “elite” university English literature into schools, just as it questions a “progressive” movement from mass literacy education into society. The chapter’s focus also requires that we look outwards from England to English in other geographic and social settings, whether in the colonial spaces of the old Empire or in the peripheral and subordinate parts of the British Isles: Scotland, Wales and the island of Ireland.

Critical issues: two contradictory stories

English as an instrument of colonial and class domination

We state what appears to us to be an incontrovertible primary fact, that for English children no form of knowledge can take precedence of a knowledge of English, no form of literature can take precedence of English literature; and that the two are so inextricably connected as to form the only basis possible for a national education.

(Newbolt 1921: 14)

This quotation from the Newbolt report, The Teaching of English in England, published in 1921, summarizes a nationalistic and imperialist position on the social importance of the English language and English literature that had been developing for at least the previous 50 years (following the commitment to universal elementary education in England in the 1870 Education Act) and for at least the previous 100 years in terms of Britain’s colonial activity (see Batsleer et al. 1985). To be English (or to be a good English subject outside England) involved knowing both the English language and the literature of England. The literature of England offered a set of cultural resources that permitted particular kinds of reasoning and a specific form of subjectivity; literature was therefore “both the medium and the standard of linguistic hegemony” (Batsleer et al. 1985: 23).

With reference to India, for example, Thomas Babington Macaulay’s Minute on Indian Education of 1835 was written to inform the colonial authority’s English Education Act of the same year. Macaulay’s Minute sought to suppress education in the indigenous languages of the subcontinent as well as the publication of texts in languages other than English. Macaulay argued that “English is better worth knowing than Sanskrit or Arabic” on the basis that:

I have conversed both here and at home with men distinguished by their proficiency in the Eastern tongues… I have never found one among them who could deny that a single shelf of a good European library was worth the whole native literature of India and Arabia.

(Macaulay 1835: n.p.)

Viswanathan (1989) has argued that the importance of English work in India has been under-emphasized in the histories of the institutionalization of English as a subject and that influential accounts such as those of Baldick (1983) and Eagleton (1983) have offered little more than a “token acknowledgement” (Viswanathan 1989: 57). Viswanathan conceptualizes English work in India as a “mask of conquest” – as a visible rendering of the containment and domination of the colonized population – but also as something that suggests mimicry and a camp performativity in the relation of colonized to colonizer. She traces the rise of English as a subject in schools and universities in India from the beginning of the nineteenth century and also in the examinations for the Indian Civil Service: examinations specifically designed to create an indigenous administrative elite. Reid (2004), however, in the course of seeking to install the poet William Wordsworth as the foundation of English studies, argues that Viswanathan’s analysis is not “fully applicable” to English work in other colonial situations, for example “settler societies such as the ‘white dominions’ [which] have undergone their own different versions of colonialism” (Reid 2004: 119).

Indeed, the less distant implications of the subject of English in England’s imperial project are subtly brought out in Walsh’s (2007) discussion of the school textbook industry for Ireland and British Canada (Ontario). Like Viswanathan, Walsh sees the colonial project of English linked to the formation of an indigenous administrative elite fluent in a “standard English” mediated through the study of English literature. However, in his analysis, Walsh stresses the importance of the peripheral and subordinate national cultures of Scotland, Wales and Ireland. Walsh particularly focuses on the Irish national school system, set up in 1831 by the British government’s colonial administration, and the textbook industry, installed by the administrators as the “ideological cornerstone” of the system (Walsh 2007: 54). Textbooks or “readers” produced for this system covered most of what we would now call the humanities under the single heading of “reading” and their purpose was to develop a standard in the language through the study of selections from literature, history and geography with an English (or Anglo-Irish, at least) identity as the objective. Walsh notes that these textbooks were also the most popular series of textbooks observed in use in schools in England, as well as in other parts of the Empire, during the 1860s. He exemplifies the typical pedagogic strategy of these textbooks for describing the world – knowledge, value, power is located in England and English and “the rest of the world is understood in these terms” (Walsh 2007: 57), as this extract from an 1859 textbook illustrates:

The British Islands are, to English and Irish people, of course, the most interesting portion of the globe; and a tour through the countries of Europe, such as we propose to make, must naturally begin from home… The people of these islands have one and the same language (all at least who are educated), one and the same Queen – the same laws; and though they differ in their religious worship, they all serve the same God, and call themselves by the name of Christ.

(Fourth Book of Lessons for the Use of Schools 1859: 52,
cited in Walsh 2007: 58)

The wildness of other languages and cultures in relation to “educated” English is established in this description of Ireland’s geography:

On the west coast is the province of Connaught. It is a wild district, where Irish is a good deal spoken, especially in one beautiful but barren tract, called Connemara. The people here dress differently from those of the other provinces.

(Fourth Book of Lessons for the Use of Schools 1859: 55,
cited in Walsh 2007: 58)

In these textbooks, the fear of the wild and strange, of the subaltern other, is apparent in the description of, for example, the Irish language and the Irish-speaking Irish people – subaltern and peripheral. It is this generalized societal anxiety that has underpinned many of the efforts to institutionalize English as a subject of study. Indeed, the school inspector George Sampson, who published English for the English in the same year as the Newbolt Report, was explicit in his assertion that any reform of the English curriculum was desirable not on mere instructional grounds but on the basis of a moral panic – a fear of a new society and a fear of a new kind of social class relations. English, for Sampson, was:

the one school subject in which we have to fight, not for a clear gain of knowledge, but for a precarious margin of advantage over the forces of evil.

(Sampson 1921: 14)

As Sinfield (2004) points out, however, accounts of English as a colonial project often mistakenly assume that the English (people) generally have been “in secure possession” of Shakespeare and other “cultural monuments” (Sinfield 2004: 148). Such “monuments” have acted as instruments of class domination in England, Sinfield points out, in the same way that they have acted in colonial and racial domination around the world. Sinfield and others (e.g. Hunter 1988) have argued that perhaps it is more appropriate to regard English as part of a wider set of technologies of social control rather than solely as the weapon of choice for British imperialism:

For a lower-class English person to join the Civil Service, she or he also will have to forsake the culture of family and neighbourhood and acquire knowledge of Wordsworth and George Eliot, or some comparable area of middle class culture.

(Hunter 1988: 148)

The changes in society and class relations throughout the nineteenth century have been discussed in relation to the rise of English as a subject in England (Baldick 1983, Doyle 1989, Eagleton 1983). One feature of the changes in society during this period was the emergence of a new kind of “professional” class, and teaching and teacher training were two examples of these new professionals doing English work. Formal training for elementary school teachers in day training colleges began to be taken over (from religious foundations) and developed by the state from the mid-nineteenth century to the early twentieth century, especially after the 1902 Education Act made teacher training the responsibility of local education authorities. The state set the curriculum and examinations for elementary school teachers that went through this system, right up to the interwar years of the twentieth century, and the use of English – the language, literature and history – as a tool for a kind of cultural standardization is apparent in this extract from the 1855 examination:

Reading

To read (December 1855) with a distinct utterance, with due attention to the punctuation, and with a just expression, a passage from Mr Warren’s ‘Select Extracts from Blackstone’s Commentaries.’

…

English Grammar

1 Its principles.

2 To parse (December 1855) a passage from the Chapter on ‘The Doctrine of the Hereditary Right to the British Throne’, and ‘The History of the Succession of the British Monarch’ in Warren’s Extracts from Blackstone.

3 To paraphrase the same passage.

(Report of the Committee of Council on Education for 1854/5: 17–21,
cited in Gosden 1969: 196–7)

The emphasis in this test of teachers’ competence on intonation and “just expression” in reading aloud along with the importance of explicit knowledge of grammar as a system and sentence parsing (and sentences from rationalizations of monarchy at that!) suggests the qualified teacher’s functions in setting and maintaining a standard English language through the study of English history and literature (cf. Ellis 2007). The rudiments of the late nineteenth-century state elementary school curriculum in England can be seen to be no less obvious in seeking to control and shape a population than the kind of English work that went on in England’s colonies and subordinated neighbours.

The importance of professionalization (of English work) as a phenomenon is underlined in Sinfield’s analysis by the increasing importance of literature in university education, as it has been by Garber (2001) in her examination of the relationship between the amateur and the professional in higher education teaching generally. The new professionals “needed qualifications … especially at the pivotal moment when leisure class authority was still substantial”: “The new professional would not, of course, have the income or general outlook of a leisure class person, but he or she might learn the culture – which after all, was allegedly universal” (Sinfield 2004: 61).

Sinfield traces this development – already under way from...