Studying English

A Guide for Literature Students

Robert Eaglestone, with Jonathan Beecher Field

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781135043162
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Clearly focussed on the needs of students, Robert Eaglestone and Jonathan Beecher Field have revised the best-selling Doing English specifically for English literature courses in America.

Studying English presents the ideas and debates that shape literary studies in America today. This overview of the discipline explains not only what students need to know, but how and why English came to be the way it is. This uniquely comprehensive guide to the subject gives students the background they need to understand and enjoy their studies more fully.

The book covers arguments about criticism and theory, value, the canon, Shakespeare, authorial intention, figural language, narrative, writing, identity, politics and the skills that are learned from studying English for the world of work.

In a clear and engaging way, Robert Eaglestone and Jonathan Beecher Field:

• Orient you, by exploring what it is to study English in America now.
• Equip you, by explaining the key ideas and trends in English in context.
• Enable you to begin higher level study.

Part I

How we read

1

Studying English

• Who is this book for?
• What is it for?
• How to use this book

Who is this book for?

This book is about why and how we study English. It aims to explain key ideas about the subject called English and the study of literature in general. If you are studying English literature either as a major or minor at a college or university or in AP classes in English in high school, this book is for you. In fact, whatever literature course you are taking, this book is not only an ideal stepping-stone to higher education but also an introduction to significant new questions and ideas about English and literature of all periods.

English often seems very different from other subjects. It isn’t just that reading literature is (usually but not always!) pleasurable. More than that, in English, knowledge is made through the experience of reading and isn’t simply passed down from authorities. And that form of knowledge, too, can’t be easily explained. Knowing that a story moves you deeply is certainly a form of knowledge but a hard one to write about for a test. Indeed, the result of studying literature can be unpredictable, not least because, when we read, our own experiences and imaginations – our own lives and communities – are inevitably bought into the class or seminar. English, like the experience of literature, is bound up very closely with how we live, how we are with others, with ethics. It’s a strange subject, then, partially within the systems of education (you have to pass tests) and partially outside (it’s about who and how you are). This is part of the reason that students find themselves drawn to it (and, perhaps, that some don’t like it). This book aims to explain why this is. Moreover, as I’ll show later in the book and centrally in chapter 13, English teaches vital skills and broadens capacities for life and for work.

Even though English is probably the most popular arts and humanities subject, perhaps rather surprisingly there isn’t a clear answer to the question, “What is English?” To say that it is the study of literature, analyzing writing or simply reading novels, poems and plays and then thinking and writing about them doesn’t really answer the question. What does “learning about literature” or “studying English” actually mean? What ideas does it involve? Why do it one way rather than another? Why do it at all? People usually begin “studying English” without thinking about what they are doing in the first place and, perhaps more importantly, why they are doing it. The answers to these questions are vital because they shape what you actually do and how you react to the literature you study. And because the study of English is “half in and half out” of the normal processes of education, these questions are all the more complex.

Teachers of English at all levels in education have had long and tortuous debates (and even so-called “culture wars”) over these questions – over what the subject is and how to study it – but these debates have rarely been explained to you, the person who is actually studying English, even though they affect your assessments, papers and projects, as well as what and even how you read. Some people think the ideas are too complex for students beginning to study the subject: I disagree. I think lots of questions about English (such as, “Is there a right answer?” or “Why are we doing this?” or “Why is it called English?”) crop up right at the start. Studying English aims to explain these ideas and show how they influence you.

Why is it important to know about these ideas? John Hattie, an expert in education, undertook a huge “study of studies,” covering some 80 million (!) students over many years. He argues that what he called “metacognition” – he means, roughly, “knowing what you are doing” – is crucial to improving a student’s work. This makes sense: I believe that if you know why you are studying something, the subject becomes easier to understand, and you become better at it. In English, this means what helps you to do your best is not just knowing the texts but knowing what you are doing with them and why. Moreover, these ideas are interesting and important in their own right.

This book is shaped by four core ideas about English.

One: Reading is active

First and most important is the idea that reading is an active process. It can seem passive – you often do it sitting or lying down, after all – but it isn’t a natural process; it doesn’t just happen. Reading is a dynamic act of interpretation. And knowledge is made through the experience of reading and can’t simply be “poured into you,” as if it were water and you were a bucket. This means that “reading” and “interpreting” mean almost the same and you’ll see I use the words almost as synonyms in this book.

When you interpret, it means that you find some things important and not others or that you focus on some ideas and questions and exclude others. You bring your ideas, your tendencies and your preferences – yourself – to reading a book, hearing a poem, seeing a play, watching TV or a film or looking at social media on a screen: your interpretation is shaped by a number of presuppositions. These are the taken-for-granted ideas and preferences you carry with you, and you always read through them, like glasses that you can’t take off. On a surface level, your interpretation is affected by the context in which you read and by the expectations you have of the text. For example, if you read a novel about the Civil Rights Movement for a history project, you’ll think about it differently than how you would if you read it for entertainment. At a deeper level, your view is shaped by your presuppositions about yourself, other people and the world, presuppositions you may take so much for granted that you might not even realize you have them. At this level, everyone has different presuppositions because – simply – everyone is different, to a greater or lesser degree, and have been shaped by different experiences. People from different backgrounds, sexes, sexualities, religions, classes and so on will be struck by different things in any text. And everything you have read and experienced previously affects how you interpret everything you read now. This idea can be summed up by saying that everyone is “located” in the world. Some people argue that your interpretations will always be constrained by these presuppositions; others think that you can escape them. Whichever is the case, you can think about and analyze them.

All this means that no interpretation is neutral or objective but has to be argued for and explained. And it means that how we read is as important as what we read because our presuppositions to a great degree shape the meanings we take from literature. Part of the aim of this book is to explore the impact of this rather obvious but often forgotten idea that texts are interpreted. This book also aims to make us think about our presuppositions and how they shape how we read.

It is because of the importance of interpretation that I have used the word “text” regularly throughout this book. Apart from being shorter to write than “novel, poem or play,” it emphasizes that reading is an act of interpretation – texts are things that are interpreted. The word “text” also makes it clear that it’s not only literature that is interpreted; so are people’s actions, television, music and posts on social media, for example. News is interpreted both when it is watched, heard or read and when it is put together by journalists.

Two: English is a discipline

Second, and stemming from this first idea, is that, although English can seem as if it is just reading books, it is a subject or, more formally, a discipline. All educational disciplines and perhaps all forms of knowledge grew from very basic human activities. Chemistry grew from cooking and making clothes (dyes and so on). Geometry means “measuring the earth,” vital for early farming societies. Creative writing and criticism both come from listening to stories and poems or watching dramas – interpreting texts – and then responding by asking questions and talking about them, as well as writing about them in different ways. Moreover, every discipline is made up of the questions it asks of the material it has chosen as its subject: originally, practical questions (“What to mix together to make red dye?”); then, slowly, more abstract questions (“How does the process of dyeing actually work? How do the different substances involved react to one another and change?”). Similarly, acts of interpretation lead pretty quickly to quite complicated questions, ideas and debates (including debating what might count as literature and what might count as an interpretation). These sorts of ideas have come, through complicated histories, to form the discipline and shape what we do in English today. I look at those histories in chapters 2 and 3 because, even though these ideas are often “below the surface” and rarely discussed with students, they still shape how English is taught and learned. It can be a bit of shock to think of reading and talking about books, and so about ourselves and others, in terms of being a discipline. But English is a discipline that has spent a long time thinking about precisely this: it is a discipline that thinks about its own nature as a discipline, precisely because it can appear not to be discipline. And as a discipline, English has all sorts of questions and ideas that it brings to the study of literature: this book explores some of these. And I’ll argue in chapter 4 – and in the rest of this book – that studying English involves coming to know about these questions and ideas and how they might change our understanding of texts.

Three: English is controversial

People who practice the discipline of history are historians, and those who study biology are biologists: however, for reasons that the next two chapters will make clear, even the name for people who study English is controversial. Indeed, the third idea that shapes this book is that English is not only very popular but also a very controversial subject – controversial often because of its subject matter but controversial also as a discipline itself because it is woven into deep moral and political visions about who we are, how we should live and how we see the world and others. People with very different views on politics, morals, religion, education, history (and everything else!) have clashed time and time again over the subject of English, and these clashes have shaped the discipline and how we read in particular ways. To think about English and how we look at literature is to see a reflection of these clashes among ourselves and among our cultures. This idea is developed throughout the book, and part of the reason for this book is to explain why this subject is controversial.

Four: English is constantly changing

Finally, this book tries to show that English, as well as how we see literature, is constantly changing. All disciplines change over time: chemistry is very different now than how it was three hundred, one hundred or even fifty years ago. Moreover, disciplines are born, grow and die out over time. English is a relatively new subject: its modern form is only just over three or four generations old. It is also one of the most quickly evolving and developing subjects: indeed, the study of literature has been transformed radically in the last thirty years or so, as have the studies of literatures in other languages. One result of this has been that there can sometimes be a large gap – even a disconnection – between the way you study English at college and the way you study it in high school. This gap exists because there has been a huge influx of new ideas into the discipline of English: ideas about, for example, feminism and gender, sexuality, the mind and the body, race, globalization, the environment and the contemporary world, about the use of digital technology and about other art forms, as well as ideas drawn from all sorts of other disciplines. These new ways of thinking about literature have stimulated new forms of studying literature and even helped rediscover books, trends and authors that were previously passed over or ignored. These new ideas, often summed up as “literary theory,” created this gap, and studying English today means having a sense of what these ideas are and, crucially, why they have arisen. Because of these new ideas, English as a subject has become much more wide-ranging and challenging, and these changes have affected all of us who study or teach English. This book’s aim is not to explain in great detail all the new ideas that make up so-called literary theory but to explain why they are studied.

How to use this book

This book is for anyone who wants to know why they are studying English. It aims:

• To orient you by explaining what you are doing when you are studying English and why you are doing it.
• To equip you by explaining basic key ideas.
• To encourage you to explore new ways of studying English.

Often courses, exams and assessment seem to be more concerned with facts than with ideas: people focus on dates, for example, and not why things happen. But this is a book about ideas and should be read in that light. For example, although I mention various people throughout the book, what is important about them is not so much their names or dates as the ideas they have had and passed on to others.

The book has four parts:

• How we read (chapters 1–5)
• What we read (chapters 6–7)
• Reading, writing and meaning (chapters 8–11)
• English and you (chapters 12–13)

Each part contains chapters that explore one idea that is central for English today. The book finishes with a “Further reading” section, which is broken down by chapter. This final section shows you where the ideas covered in each chapter came from and where you can read about them in more detail.

Each chapter starts with a list of questions and finishes with a summary highlighting the main ideas covered. A couple of chapters also have diagrams that help clarify important ideas. The book is designed to be read in chapter order and gets more complex as it progresses. Because each chapter builds on the preceding one, you may prefer to read one chapter at a sitting and allow the ideas it raises to sink in before you start reading the next one. Or you may not.

Having outlined how the book works and what it’s for, I will now turn to the first question. Where did the subject of English come from?

Summary

• This book is an introduction to ideas about English and literature.
• Reading is an active process: it is an act of interpretation.
• All interpretations have presuppositions. We can explore and analyze our presuppositions.
• English is a discipline, shaped by certain ideas and by its history.
• English is controversial because both literature and how we read literature are involved in debates about who we are, how we should live and how we see the world.
• Like any discipline, English is constantly changing.
• If you know why you are doing something, you are better at doing it. This book seeks to explain why we study English in the ways we do.

2

Where did English come from?

• What are disciplines?
• How did English develop?
• How do those ideas still shape English today?

Subjects that seem so taken for granted in school course catalogs or that simply crop up in the names of college departments didn’t just appear. Instead, subjects, or, more technically, disciplines, are constructed over time and reflect the worldviews of those who construct them. Moreover, disciplines are not just ways of studying things that already exist: oddly, disciplines shape what they study as much as what they study shapes them. The discipline of English and the category of things it studies – what we now call literature – are no exception. Like every discipline and category, they developed through specific decisions, general trends and historical movements: indeed, studying English as we do now would seem very strange indeed to somebody from the early nineteenth century. In this chapter, I’ll look at the intellectual, artistic and social forces that shaped the discipline of English. This is a complex story because the invention of a discipline is more diffuse and harder to pin down than the invention of a particular thing (the lightbulb or the airplane,...