Re-Reading English

Peter Widdowson

• Publisher: Taylor & Francis
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781136490675
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: English Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

First Published in 2002. It is easy to see that we are living in a time of rapid and radical social change. It is much less easy to grasp the fact that such change will inevitably affect the nature of those disciplines that both reflect our society and help to shape it. Yet this is nowhere more apparent than in the central field of what may, in general terms, be called literary studies. 'New Accents' is intended as a positive response to the initiative offered by such a situation. Each volume in the series will seek to encourage rather than resist the process of change. To stretch rather than reinforce the boundaries that currently define literature and its academic study.

1

Introduction: The crisis in English studies

PETER WIDDOWSON

I

This book is an attempt to take stock of the current state of that area in higher education traditionally referred to as ‘English’ or ‘Literary Studies’, and to redirect it in response to pressing social and political needs. An increasing number of people teaching and studying in this field are aware that their subject is in the midst of some kind of crisis. At the moment of writing, in early 1981, there is a bitter debate in the University of Cambridge English faculty about what should constitute an ‘English’ syllabus, and this, which even The Guardian recognised as ‘partly political, partly intellectual’ (17.1.81, p. 1), is front-page news in the ‘quality’ press at least, and has air-space on the other media. In 1980, a similar debate, almost exclusively (and significantly) instituted by the students, was under way at Oxford. But it is also worth noting that just as Oxford and Cambridge were relatively late on the scene in establishing schools of English, so too are they now belatedly confronting issues which have been on the agenda for some years elsewhere – arguably, most productively in the public sector of higher education. They simply were not front-page news until they came of age in Cambridge.

There is a quaint irony, then, in Professor Christopher Ricks's recent remark, quoted in the same issue of The Guardian, that ‘it is our job to teach and uphold the canon of English literature’, because that is exactly what is in question. In recent years in Britain (as in America and elsewhere), there has been a growing debate amongst radical critics about the value of ‘Literature’; about the principles by which we evaluate different literary productions; and, indeed, about the validity of the category ‘Literature’ itself. The causes of this are complex and wide-ranging, but we can remark, as one immediate instance, the exposure of ‘Literature’ and ‘Criticism’ to the glare of other subjects’ methodologies and interrogations within the interdisciplinary courses developing in some institutions of higher education. ‘Why’, the historian or the sociologist asks, ‘is “major” Text A so much more valuable for an understanding of society than “minor” Text B? And in any case, who decided it was “major”, and on what grounds?’ Any answer to such questions based exclusively on formalistic criteria is no answer at all. And any critic who acknowledges the force of those questions must begin to suspect and analyse the received tradition of ‘great’ literary works (designated ‘Literature’ here, as distinct from the older, generic, term literature which subsumes, in one of Raymond Williams's ‘keywords’, ‘the whole body of books and writing’); to scrutinise the premises on which Criticism has operated; and to ask how far Criticism has itself created ‘Literature’ by way of its preselections, evaluations and tacit assumptions as to what constitutes ‘literary value’. In other words, received notions of the whole ‘discipline’ of Literary Studies are fundamentally challenged. Equally, the development of alternative, but contiguous areas of study (such as Cultural or Communications Studies), which engage with other ‘popular’ forms of communication (‘low-brow’ fiction, for example, or television and film), challenge the hierarchical and élitist conceptions of Literature and Criticism, both in the range of material made available for serious study (culture not Culture) and in the theoretical and methodological models they bring to it.

It is, however, this last point which signals the dominant cause of the accelerating critique of Literary Studies. In the wake of the past ten years’ marxist-structuralist debate – particularly about Ideology – there has developed a body of theory concerned to produce a fully-articulated marxist aesthetics. These theoretical positions (often engendered by Althusserian structuralism) have sharply focused those questions about Literature and Criticism which were already being formulated independently. The focus – predictably, perhaps – has been on the ideological space which literature as a specific category occupies (whether it has a ‘relative autonomy’, and what, by virtue of this, its value may be), and on the exposure of Criticism as an ideological practice. ‘Literature’ is, in effect, being recognised as the construct of a criticism which, while assuming and proclaiming its ‘descriptiveness’, its ‘disinterestedness’, its ideological innocence, has so constituted Literature as to reproduce and naturalise bourgeois ideology as ‘literary value’. Literary value, therefore, as perceived by criticism in the ‘great tradition’ of master works or ‘classic’ texts, correlates closely with the values of liberal individualism in general, and substantially helps to underpin them.

This process is focused most exactly and concretely by the way it has been institutionalised and reinforced – at least in Britain and America – as a central element within the educational system. The significance of Matthew Arnold's conceptions of Culture and Education, as capitalism attempted to consolidate itself in nineteenth-century England, cannot be overestimated, nor can his influence on later, formative, critics like T. S. Eliot and F. R. Leavis, both of whom have been profoundly instrumental in making (forging?) a ‘Literature’ and a ‘Tradition’ for study and criticism in the twentieth century. Equally significant, perhaps, was the development, at another critical moment for bourgeois society (the years immediately after the First World War), of professional criticism, and the concurrent rise of ‘English’ in Britain and America as an important factor in the higher education curriculum. The reciprocal relationship between the construction of Literature by modern criticism, and the establishment of that criticism as ‘English’ in higher education is a nexus of great importance in the sustaining of liberal ideology. What students do, in fact, if they are ‘reading English’ in sixth form, university or polytechnic, is to spend most of their time ‘approaching’ or ‘understanding’ Literature by way of listening to criticism (lectures) and reading criticism (books and articles) in order to make criticism (seminar discussions, essays, etc.) and to become passable critics themselves (this in effect, is what is being assessed in the final examinations). Two related assumptions underlie and are fostered by this. One is that there is something called Literature – given, and of great value – which criticism addresses itself to, explains and approves; it assumes, that is, that Literature exists independently of criticism, not that the literature actually studied is itself constituted for the student by the critical attention paid to it. The other assumption is that the common purpose and function of criticism is the fuller understanding of Literature, and that, therefore, criticism exists as a largely undifferentiated corpus of scholarship – undoubtedly representing many different individual ‘views’ of literary texts, but innocent of other ulterior design or motive. Such criticism thus suppresses any sense of its informing ‘approaches’ which carry in their train tacit attitudes to the nature and value of Literature, to how Literature should be read, to criticism's own status and function in relation to Literature, and ultimately to the notions of social order which underlie it. Both Literature and Criticism, in other words, are naturalised by the process, floating free of any ideological determinants. The primary focus of the current critique of Literary Criticism has been, quite simply, a questioning of the assumption that there is a given Literature of inherent value by which, if we can learn to ‘read’ it properly (and it is Criticism's job to teach us how), we can all be nourished. It is on the demystification of this myth of ‘literary value’ as a universal and immanent category, that the debate pivots.

I should make it clear at once, however, that this debate is by no means as widespread or as potent in Literature Departments in British and American institutions of higher education as it should be, nor, despite the barrage of finely-honed theoretical work aimed at their destruction, are those departments reeling as they might be. The power and resistance of such a vested interest is not so easily shaken. A bland empiricism, congenitally inimical to theory, a profound belief in a Literature replete with ‘value’ and in a Criticism which has not yet been proved, point for point, to be other than ‘impartial’, oppose such a catastrophe. That this is so is confirmed by the reiteration, in the Cambridge English debate, of the centrality of the ‘canon’ and the need ultimately to dispense with the distractions of history and theory in order to return to the unproblematic reality of the ‘literary works themselves’. The fact that history and theory may have called into question that very reality is, of course, why they must be finally ignored or rejected. And it is noteworthy, too, that in 1980 a large publisher (Routledge & Kegan Paul), whose list includes several examples of radical critical theory, produced a book entitled The Anatomy of Literary Studies, by Marjorie Boulton, which is clearly aimed at those going on to read English in higher education, and in which ‘good literature’ is regarded much as it was by Matthew Arnold and by the Newbolt Report of 1921 on The Teaching of English in England: that is, as a humanist surrogate for religion. That the process does not always work, Boulton concedes, and offers us, with pained incredulity, the case of William Joyce (‘Lord Haw Haw’) who took a first in English at London University and who, even ‘knowing some of the things he must have known to achieve this’ (p. 7), could still go on to be a Nazi traitor. But this, we infer, is an aberration. Normally literature in its revelation of ‘universals’ – ‘its main business is to show us some of the more permanent mysteries and multiplicities of our human nature and social relations’ (p. 45) – is a ‘civilizing’ influence, and the study of it the privileged access to its ‘mysteries’. If this is ‘Literary Studies’ in the 1980s, it is indeed trapped in a time-warp of its own making. But such attitudes remain a dominant force in the educational-political field of ‘English’. It is therefore imperative, if literature (past and contemporary) remains a massively consumed product in society, and if the study of it widely persists, that a criticism be mobilised which can positively engage with them. The theoretical work of the last decade had made the space for this, but it has not, in itself, filled it.

The immediate pragmatic consideration is the largely unshaken dominance of conventional criticism, precisely within its principal arena of activity – secondary and tertiary education. Such a criticism is predicated on empirical practice, on the study of ‘texts’, and heavily reinforced by the publishing industry, both in its large investment in Literary Criticism – even, increasingly and significantly, versions of marxist criticism – and in its publication of ‘Libraries’ of ‘classic texts’ and ‘student editions’. Theory, articulated at a high level of abstraction, in fact has little material purchase here. Now I do not wish to identify myself with a crude ‘new empiricism’, opposed to Theory in principle. I recognise that the major advances beyond a poverty-stricken literary criticism have been made possible only by the production of a sustained theoretical critique and that a rupture with the empiricism, the questions, discourse, and hence the assumptions, of bourgeois criticism was fundamental to the development of a marxist criticism. But the result has been, in effect, that marxist criticism now means ‘critical theory’.

Here a danger emerges: marxist criticism (i.e. Theory) has vacated – or at least can too easily and opportunistically be seen as having done so – the domain of the practice of the criticism of literature. In other words, it becomes (or is regarded as) ‘something else’, a ‘different’, autonomous, self-generating intellectual field, tending to leave the empirical field of study (Criticism) clear for the continuing operations of literary critical practice. At least, I should say, it does this within the untransformed education system of a still powerfully entrenched bourgeois culture. And it does so in two main ways – the second more serious than the first. First, pathetically but damagingly, it enables the established critics/teachers of higher education to dismiss or ignore such ‘theoreticist absurdities’ with mocking disdain: the wild young persons (they would say men) of the Left striking despairingly at the immanent phenomena of Literature and Criticism, when we can all see (can't we?) that the texts are solidly there (in attractive covers on the shelves of the university bookshops), are there to be ‘understood’, and when understood to be ‘valued’ – as students join (by the rites de passage of Finals) the serried and historical ranks of common(-sense) readers. Second, it allows little or no operational space to those who are not primarily theoreticians, but who wish to occupy the new spaces created by the theoretical work, and who are still teaching Literature in schools, colleges, polytechnics and universities. They are trapped: on the one hand by existing courses, by course-validating bodies, by students’ expectations of what Literature courses are, and by their academic opponents; on the other, by the existence of a body of abstract, often abstruse, theoretical work which is inaccessible to their students and so easily dismissed by precisely those academic opponents. This predicament results in teacher/critics abandoning the field to establishment criticism. They may actually leave it for other, more ‘progressive’, studies (Cultural and Communication studies, for example) – which amounts to saying ‘Here is a problem to which we theoretically know the answer but cannot resolve, let us discard it and take on another’. Or they develop an intellectual schizophrenia whereby they teach within English or Literary Studies, knowing all the while that their real practice should be an application of those theoretical models which they possess but cannot deploy.

This situation is explained, I think, by the very rapid developments of the last ten years or so. It has meant that certain theoretical positions and perceptions have not had the space fully to realise themselves before being superseded by others. In particular, the fear of being cast as an ‘empiricist’ has led to positions being abandoned (often to the opposition) before any substantial work has been done. And it has meant that teacher/critics have not been able to fight their daily battles with a body of substantive empirical work to hand, that would enable them to controvert the achieved (and hence proprietorial) enterprises of literary criticism. This is not to imply, of course, that there should be a moratorium on Theory. What it does imply is the need for critical work to be produced which challenges the assumptions and practices of conventional criticism, not in the form of theory, but as a detailed rebuttal of them in practice and as a substantive replacement for them which teachers at all levels may draw on and refer to in their classes and courses. It implies a criticism which must reveal, identify and describe the value it discerns in whatever literature it elects to address, according to precise criteria which it explicitly propounds. Such a criticism must offer both a sharply conscious explanation of what is being criticised, why, in what conditions and to what end, and an exact accountability to the text-for-study and to the reader of the analysis offered. This is essential if a materialist criticism is to develop the tools, as well as the models, to penetrate the special space occupied by literature in the social process.

II

The ‘crisis’ in English, then, is no longer a debate between criticisms as to which ‘approach’ is best. Nor is it directly, yet, a question of English Departments being closed down along with other economically unproductive (and ideologically unsound) areas – although in Thatcherite Britain that is all too real a possibility. Rather it is a question, posed from within, as to what English is, where it has got to, whether it has a future, whether it should have a future as a discrete discipline, and if it does, in what ways it might be reconstituted. This is the situation in which this book has developed and seeks to intervene. The business of making one's own academic discipline itself the object of scrutiny, of deconstructing and/or reconstructing it, has not been commonly undertaken, and certainly not for English. Such seemingly simple questions as: when did English begin to occupy a crucial position in the higher education curriculum, and why? what are its relations with certain schools of criticism? who or what determined the formation of a normative ‘English Literature’? and what is the genesis of the present crisis in English? – reveal themselves, in this context, as new, difficult and disquieting. They do so precisely because the answers are not there for the taking.

The aim of this book is two-fold – as is witnessed by its structure. First, it assembles the information which is wanting in order to understand and answer the questions about English and its present situation. To this end, it presents essays on the history of the rise of English as an academic discipline; on the dominant critical practice which has sustained it; on the critical theories which are challenging and deconstructing it; and on certain institutions which have both hastened and accommodated this challenge. Second, it offers a collection of ‘instances’ of empirical projects which may help to occupy the space created between a moribund literary criticism and the pioneering theoretical work which has made that space available. These instances may, indeed, prove to be only too easily and rapidly incorporated by the dominant latitudinarianism of English Studies in higher education. But they are, nevertheless, examples of a materialist criticism in progress, which acknowledges its conception in theory and yet is applicable in critical and educational practice.

The first essay in Part I, by Brian Doyle, shows how, over a very long period of time, English evolves from complex and changing ensembles of cultural and ideological pressures into the academic discipline of the twentieth century. This is not a ‘history of English Studies’, but an explanation of why the ‘national Language and Literature’ finds its place as the ideological centre of the bourgeois educational curriculum. It is particularly interesting both in its exposure of the determinants which ‘produce’ a seemingly innocent academic discipline and in its insistence that the study of a subject should include that subject's own history – a point which is later taken up by John Oakley and Elizabeth Owen. The ‘texts-for-study’, in other words, are meaningless without some account of the material processes which place them there. The following essay, by Tony Davies, complements this by suggesting how silently and spontaneously the practice of teaching Literature in higher education naturalises the subject and the critical presuppositions on which it is based. Criticism, and particularly its expression in the seminar room, represents a common-sense philosophy which finds its legitimation in the literature it selects, and in the modes of discourse it employs to teach and assess its students. Catherine Belsey and Antony Easthope later extend this perception to the written literary criticism which they discuss, whilst Michael Green and Derek Longhurst confirm Davies's highlighting of pedagogic practice as the vehicle of ideological transmission.

John Hoyles and Peter Brooker, in different ways, critically survey the theoretical developments which have challenged the established aesthetic and critical premises of English Studies, indicating very clearly how insular the Englishness of English has been, and how the incursion of European schools of thought has proved instrumental in exposing the theoretical vacuum at the centre of its empiricism. Hoyles takes the longer perspective of marxist and structuralist theories, whilst Brooker concentrates more closely on post-structuralist and ‘deconstructionist’ critics and their role in making ‘the text’ – that central element in the bourgeois critical project – so problematic that it cannot survive as a substantive concept. What is important about both these essays is that they are not merely ‘surveys’, which finally endorse the latest theoretical positions, but are critical analyses of them, revealing their weaknesses and limitations and proposing ways in which a materialist criticism may go beyond them.

The last three essays in Part I form a small section in themselves, and a word of explanation is necessary. The challenge to conventional conceptions of English...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• General Editor's Preface
• List of Contributors
• 1 Introduction: The Crisis in English studies
• Part I: History, Theory, Institutions
• Part II: Case Studies
• Consolidated Bibliography
• Index