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Ronald Strickland Curriculum Mortis: A Manifesto for Structural Change From College Literature 21 (February 1994), 1-14. (This essay was reprinted in After Political Correctness edited by Christopher Newfield and Ron Strickland [Westview, 1995], and in Beyond the Corporate University, edited by Kostas Myrciades and Henry Giroux [Rowman and Littlefield, 2001]). Since the early 1980's, in the wake of the paradigm shift from New Criticism to the politically self- conscious postmodernism and poststructuralism currently dominant in English studies, teachers of literature have been under attack from conservative academics and journalists.(1) The terms of this attack, and of the counter-critiques mounted by politically- and theoretically-oriented scholars are by now quite familiar. Conservatives and liberal humanists charged that radical English teachers were ignoring traditional canonical texts in favor of indoctrinating students in an alternative canon of "politically correct" texts espousing Marxist, feminist, and "multicultural" agendas. Theorists and radicals responded that the traditional canon itself constitutes a "politically correct" set of values of a different sort, and that the focus of English studies should be critical interrogation of cultural texts and other discursive systems rather than uncritical appreciation of "great" literature. |
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My sympathies in this debate lie entirely in the theorist/ radical camp. In this essay, however, I want to take up a question that has not been sufficiently addressed by either side of the debate over the English curriculum: what is the role of English studies in an increasingly technical-vocational academy? In relation to this question, I think the conservatives who are concerned that theoretically self-conscious and politically oriented approaches will mean the death of literature have been barking up the wrong tree. In the current postmodern, post-industrial academy, quasi-professional and vocational courses rub shoulders with traditional arts and sciences courses; workers, not just managers, are now trained in colleges and universities. Traditional literary study--conceived in post-Romantic terms as an escape from economic and political concerns--is fast becoming an expendable luxury in universities whose primary function is the training and credentialing of the growing technical-professional-managerial work force. In this climate market pressures, not critical theory, will doom the study of literature.(2) Yet, if conservatives have, for the most part, misread the symptoms of literary study's current "dis-ease," radical scholars and teachers have been too often distracted by the conservatives' rear-guard attacks; we have not yet developed the kinds of institutional structures and practices necessary for engaging the challenge to democratic education posed by the technical-vocational mission of the academy. Most of us are complicit in this technical-vocational mission. We maintain the luxury of teaching literature or literary theory in relatively comfortable conditions at least partly by appropriating resources generated by "service" programs attached to English departments. These programs--composition, technical writing, English as a second language, etc.--are disproportionately staffed by graduate assistants and non-tenured faculty, and they are typically marginalized within English departments in a variety of contexts such as office space, departmental committee representation, curricular offerings and graduation requirements. Within the larger professional arena, we have a scholarship publishing structure that tends to reward those whose specialized research is most remote from the concerns of these "service" courses. This hierarchy of privilege needs to be dismantled not merely because it unfair for our colleagues who teach technical-vocational courses, but also because it limits the critical scope and effect of literature teachers as well. We need to meet the challenge of the growing technical-vocational hegemony in the academy within our own departments, in our curricula. The most promising models for curricular change currently on the horizon are the "cultural studies" and "textual studies" models, in which both elite and popular texts are taken as objects of study, in which the traditional canon is opened up to include more texts by women and people of color, and in which critical literary and cultural theories are given primary emphasis in the curriculum and in individual courses. These innovations are necessary and valuable, but they don't go far enough toward redressing the narrow parochialism of traditional literary studies because they don't engage and contest the values and assumptions of the technical-vocational training courses in the university at large and, often, in English departments themselves. In the following pages, I will explore some possible models for an English curriculum more directly engaged in a contestatory dialogue with the technical-vocational mission of the academy in a postmodern, post-industrial society. Theoretical
Frames: Transdisciplinarity and Cultural Studies Each
department or great division of the university makes a pitch for itself,
and each offers a course of study that will make the student an initiate.
But how to choose among them? How do they relate to one another? The
fact is they do not address one another. They are competing and contradictory,
without being aware of it. The problem of the whole is urgently indicated
by the very existence of the specialties, but it is never systematically
posed. The net effect of the student's encounter with the college catalogue
is bewilderment and very often demoralization. Unless
one fudges the definition of intellectuals in terms of purely formal
and statistical educational criteria, it is fairly clear that what modern
society produces is an army of alienated, privatized, and uncultured
experts who are knowledgeable only within very narrowly defined areas.
This technical intelligentsia, rather than intellectuals in the traditional
sense of thinkers concerned with the totality, is growing by leaps and
bounds to run the increasingly complex bureaucratic and industrial apparatus.
Its rationality, however, is only instrumental in character, and thus
suitable mainly to perform partial tasks rather than tackling substantial
questions of social organization and political direction. (Piccone,
116) The first passage was written by Allan Bloom, and the second was written by Paul Piccone--two writers who hold diametrically opposed conservative and progressive views on university education but who share an increasingly widespread dissatisfaction with the myopic over-specialization of most academic disciplines. Despite the wide range of disagreement between conservatives and progressives in the academy, the undesirability of over-specialization is one thing that both sides can agree on. The university curriculum should be a site in which different perspectives--political and intellectual positions--can confront one another. One result of over-specialization is that political and intellectual conflicts among faculty and students are displaced to the level of administration. Instead of a situation in which colleagues with different political, intellectual, and institutional positions debate specific issues, the power struggles are hidden behind closed doors as administrators negotiate funding levels. The net effect of this displacement is a systemic retardation of intellectual vitality. I came face to face with just this sort of crippling effect of over-specialization in my own institution recently when one of my English department colleagues submitted a new course proposal for a graduate level cultural studies course--Introduction to Cultural Theory--to the university curriculum committee. The Communications department protested the proposal, and a committee of four English faculty, including myself, met with a committee of four Communications faculty in a special meeting, chaired by a member of the university curriculum committee, to see if we could amicably work out the objections to the course. At the meeting I was surprised to learn that the Communications department objected to the English department offering such a course because, they argued, "literature" was our proper area, and "media"--which they took to be the purview of cultural studies-- was theirs. We should stick to "literature," they suggested, and they would teach "media." We explained to our colleagues from Communications that we see our field as somewhat wider than that of "literature," that we're not sure what "literature" is anyway, and that, in any event, we think it's necessary to read what is not "literature" in order to understand what is "literature." Furthermore, we argued, since cultural studies is by definition a field that crosses disciplinary boundaries, the courses should be taught in more than one department--we would have no general objection to cultural studies courses offered by the Communications department. They responded that this sort of intellectual quibbling was fine for the amusement of faculty arguing in coffee rooms or writing in scholarly journals, but that what was really at stake here was a real-world academic turf battle--and "cultural studies" was their turf. So, neither side gave any ground, and this conflict was bumped upstairs to be settled by the university curriculum committee. The university curriculum committee eventually decided in our favor; nonetheless, I think it's unfortunate that our institutional structures discourage public debates on these kinds of curricular conflicts. In this particular instance, the objection rested on such flimsy intellectual grounds that it probably wouldn't have been made in a forum open to a general audience of faculty and students. This is "academic politics" with a vengeance. The flimsiness of the objection itself is merely a symptomatic effect of a sloppy pluralistic institutional structure that discourages the political conflict of serious intellectual debate. If a curriculum based on liberal pluralism seems inadequate to the development of critical literacy from a left perspective, it is no more attractive to the right. The neoconservative response to the problem of over-specialization was inaugurated several years ago by William Bennett's call for limiting pluralism and establishing a coherent, traditional curriculum based on the classic texts of Western civilization--a version of the "great books" curriculum. Bennett assumes that the most important function of humanities education is to pass on a common legacy of Western civilization to all college students. He describes this canonical tradition, in terms adapted from Matthew Arnold, as "the best that has been thought, written, or otherwise expressed about the human experience" (3). Some obvious objections to this goal are that this legacy isn't, in fact, "common" to all American citizens, that it leaves out a good deal of human experience, and that to subject students from oppressed social groups to an unqualified celebration of this tradition amounts to cultural imperialism. On the other hand, the classics of Western civilization represent an important body of cultural capital to which all students should be given access. The more urgent question may be not what &hibar; should be taught, but how &hibar; it should be taught. As Gerald Graff has pointed out, "a Shakespeare text taught by Bennett would bear small resemblance to the same text taught by [Terry] Eagleton"(1987, 193). At its best, that is, critical theory requires a rigorously critical approach to whatever is taught. Similarly, cultural studies specifically attempts to promote a critical, oppositional engagement with traditional culture, often by juxtaposing texts and perspectives of non-western and suppressed cultural traditions to those of the European canonical tradition. The main obstacles to a unified, coherent curriculum, as the conservatives see it, are "politicized" transdisciplinary movements that often have the effect of breaking down the walls between traditional disciplines: feminism, with its primary focus on gender as a category that is more significant than any particular discipline, and multiculturalism, which seeks a curriculum that would be more reflective of and responsive to the experiences of minorities. But women's studies and ethnic studies programs actually tend to work against over-specialization by enlarging the area of general interaction among disciplines. Here the neoconservatives have a blind spot that corresponds to their blindness to the true source of the crisis facing traditional literature. The most serious obstacle to a unified traditional curriculum is the proliferation of and increasing importance given to technical, professional, and vocational education within the university, though this development is almost always unnoticed by the conservative critics. Among radical teachers, on the other hand, the presence of technical and vocational programs within the university, and the presence of such courses within English departments, should be seen as opportunities and institutional contexts for challenging the corporate-sector values and practices that characterize these programs. We need to develop curricular structures within our departments in which a debate among positions representing different value-systems and social and professional paradigms can be carried on. Amid the ongoing controversy about the ways that intellectual and political forces like critical theory, feminism and multiculturalism are changing the English curriculum, one of the most powerful forces for change has received the least attention--the students. In demographic and economic terms, the academy is being asked to educate different students, and for different purposes, than was the case forty or even twenty years ago. More of our students are non-traditional college students--minority students, recent immigrants, first-generation college students from working-class backgrounds, and older, returning students. English departments are being called upon to provide a wider variety of services--including training in critical thinking, writing and rhetoric, and exposure to traditional cultural values--to students whose main purpose for attending the university is to gain specific and directly applicable training for employment. Thus, in addition to the benefits in intellectual rigor and political accountability to be gained from an ongoing critical engagement between faculty teaching technical-vocational and service courses and faculty teaching traditional humanities courses, these courses offer us access to groups of students--particularly working-class students and African-American students--who often shun the humanities majors in favor of majors offering more immediate and more lucrative career opportunities. There are some formidable obstacles to a critical engagement between literature faculty and faculty teaching what I have called the "technical-vocational" and "service" courses in English departments. Cross-disciplinary interaction is always difficult to achieve and maintain in the academy because of the institutional forces for specialization that I mentioned earlier. But in this situation that problem is compounded by the overlay of institutional status hierarchy. There is a persistent attitude among literature faculty that those who teach rhetoric, composition, technical-professional writing, or English for speakers of other languages are people who would rather be teaching literature but don't "have what it takes" (whatever that is). This attitude is generally reinforced by the uneven distribution of institutional resources, rewards and prestige among the different subdisciplines of English studies. The professional environment strikes me as a close parody of a feudal society--the literature teachers are the "aristocrats," living off the appropriated surplus labor of the "peasants"--teaching assistants, part-time and temporary faculty, and the teachers of the marginalized courses. And "literature" performs some of the same functions for us that it performed for the feudal aristocracy--it confirms (for us) that our exalted professional status is the natural result of our cultural superiority. The first move toward changing this crippling status hierarchy is to begin to treat our marginalized colleagues with more respect. By this I don't mean that literature faculty should accept uncritically the value or credibility of the marginalized positions. Quasi-professional technical and vocational programs in the universities valorize themselves as academic disciplines precisely on the basis of their association with traditional academic disciplines. Too often, we have allowed them to enter that arena without demanding the price of admission; an engaged participation in the ongoing intellectual debate over social and cultural values. Any course of study within the university should be held accountable for its fundamental aims and purposes in relation to the aims and purposes of other disciplines and programs within the university and in relation to the general aims of education in a democratic society. Departmental and disciplinary boundaries are not easily crossed, but the multi-disciplinary structures of many English department offer viable starting points for transdisciplinary work. If literature teachers can begin to seriously engage the too-frequently ignored teachers and students of technical and vocationally-oriented courses in our own departments, eventually, perhaps, we can develop ways to interact more directly with those in other departments as well. My use of the term "transdisciplinary" instead of the more familiar term "interdisciplinary" marks an important distinction. "Transdisciplinary" scholarship and pedagogy goes beyond a common practice of "interdisciplinary" work that merely appropriates knowledge produced in one discipline for use in another discipline without questioning the basic assumptions, or conceptual frameworks, of either discipline. "Transdisciplinarity," as it has been described by Mas'ud Zavarzadeh and Donald Morton,
. . . is aware of the status of knowledge as one of the modes of ideological construction of reality in any given discipline; through its self-reflexivity, it attempts not simply to accumulate knowledge but to ask what constitutes knowledge, why and how and by whose authority certain modes of understanding are certified as knowledge and others as para-knowledge or non-knowledge. (10) Transdisciplinary pedagogy is not a matter of ignoring existing disciplinary knowledge, or of merely substituting some other body of knowledge for, say, an existing literary canon. Instead, it constitutes what Dominick LaCapra calls a "transformative endeavor" that requires an "intimate knowledge of the disciplines and the related canons or disciplinary practices one is criticizing and attempting to refashion, including the sometimes valid resistances to change that they may pose." The goal of such work "is not to valorize `blurred genres' in general," but to explore connections that appear blurred only from within narrow disciplinary frameworks (5). What LaCapra terms the "transformative endeavor" identifies what I see as the theoretical challenge to open literary study up to transdisciplinary and counter-disciplinary paradigms. We need to break down disciplinary barriers that have the effect of trivializing the work of the scholar/teacher by narrowing the range of questions that can be addressed. It requires a deliberate and concerted effort to broaden one's perspective both for teachers and students habituated to the narrow specializations of our discipline, but the rewards--both political and intellectual--will be worth the effort.
Changing the Curriculum The English department at Illinois State University, where I teach, is a large, multi-purpose department. In addition to traditional literary studies, courses in literary theory, film, cultural studies, children's literature, women in literature, and African-American literature, we offer a specialization in English education for secondary teachers; we offer technical and professional writing courses at both the graduate and undergraduate levels; we offer linguistics courses and courses in English as a second language at both the undergraduate and graduate levels with an optional master's degree emphasis in TESOL; and we have a large composition-rhetoric program. Yet our undergraduate curriculum remains literature-centered. Our writing courses, our linguistics courses, and our English education courses are relegated to the margins of the curriculum, while the core of traditional literature remains relatively undisturbed. All students are required to take two introductory courses in literary genres and a senior seminar designed as a "capstone" course, looking back at the courses the student has taken. Students are encouraged to take a chronologically distributed sampling of six courses in English and American literature. This leaves room for two or three electives, which could be in literary theory, rhetoric, creative writing, technical writing, or linguistics. The English education majors, training to be high school teachers, are routinely exempted from the full complement of English and American literature in order to make room for required education courses.
In respect to this curriculum, I think the opposition of theory vs. literature is largely irrelevant--just a family squabble among a fairly narrow sector of the department. What the current curriculum suppresses are oppositions like literature (including literary theory) vs. rhetoric; literature vs. composition; literature vs. linguistics; literature vs. technical writing, etc. My department's curriculum, and the problems that attend it, are typical and symptomatic of curricula and problems found in many other English departments. The literature-centered focus of our curricula and our departmental organizational structures inhibit our theoretical self-consciousness and our ability to engage each other in serious debate. This affects our scholarship as well as our teaching. For instance, among all of the excellent work in postcolonial criticism and theory from literary and cultural studies scholars in the past ten years or so, I haven't encountered any mention of the ongoing effects of cultural imperialism reproduced in our ESL programs. I have read many brilliant critiques of colonialist ideology focusing canonical works, on non-literary documents, and on popular culture, but none of the postcolonial critics is thinking about the issue of cultural imperialism in ESL. The work published in TESOL Quarterly, meanwhile, tends to be positivistic and apolitical, though there have been some recent efforts to bring the insights of literary theory and cultural studies to bear on TESOL issues, and the newsletter TESOL Matters provides an informal forum for geopolitical issues.(4) But teachers of literature should be putting pressure on teachers of ESL, and vice versa. If the emergence of postcolonial and subaltern criticism in literary studies has no relation to the teaching of ESL in the academy, how can we expect such developments to have any impact beyond the academy? As long as ESL remains a marginalized and often ignored "service" function of English departments--or worse, a service program functioning autonomously apart from the English department--we are missing an opportunity for a productive critical engagement with these colleagues and students. Similar critiques can be--and have been--made of the relationship of composition and technical writing to literature in English departments. The point I want to emphasize here is that the ill effects produced by our traditional professional hierarchies go beyond the widely acknowledged problem of exploitation of graduate teaching assistants and adjunct faculty. The marginalization of these subdisciplines limits the scope of our critical and theoretical awareness as well.
To counter this intrinsic parochialism and elitism, we need curricula that would require all students to take a representative sample of the broader field of English Studies and that would systematically require students and faculty to think through the interrelations of various functional divisions (rhetoric, literature, cultural studies, applied and theoretical linguistics, technical and professional writing, etc.) and philosophical orientations (humanism, Marxism, aestheticism, logical positivism, feminism, etc.) within our departments and the discipline at large. Such conditions aren't reflected even in the course catalogs of departments that are often hailed and reviled as leaders in the theory revolution--Duke University, Brown University, and the University of California at Santa Cruz, for example--because the undergraduate English curricula at these institutions remain firmly literature-centered. In the curricula of these progressive elite institutions theory courses and literature courses co-exist in an unproblematized pluralistic framework that can only be maintained in an environment uncontaminated by have-nots; classrooms free of students determined to get access to social power through the mastery of writing, technical communication, or language skills. Some English departments have consciously restructured their curricula in attempts to limit the trivializing effects of pluralism, however. An interesting model is that of Carnegie Mellon University. From Carnegie Mellon's English department students can take degrees with emphases in creative writing, literary and cultural studies, and rhetorical studies, and the department offers separate majors in professional writing and technical writing. All of the students in these programs are required to take a core of four courses (Creative Writing students take a core of five courses). According to the university's undergraduate catalog, the core is designed to "include work in all three disciplinary areas of the department: creative writing, literary and cultural studies, and rhetoric" (Carnegie Mellon, 192). The catalog recommends that all students take courses called "Survey of Forms" (fiction or poetry) and "Discursive Practices, Language, Structure, Signs" during their first semester in the major. In subsequent semesters students take courses entitled "Discourse and Historical Change" and "Reading Twentieth Century Culture." Creative writing majors take both fiction and poetry courses in the "Survey of Forms" category. At the time the new curriculum was established Gary Waller (then Head of Carnegie Mellon's English department) described it, in a somewhat self-consciously ironic parody of advertising hype, as "the first poststructuralist literary curriculum" (6). Waller's "packaging" of the curriculum as the latest-up-to-date-new-model English studies prompted Donald Morton and Mas'ud Zavarzadeh to characterize the change as a "recuperative, complicit curriculum":
As befits his technocratic audience, Waller's rhetoric is that of an efficient manager concerned with the "application" of ideas (produced by others) and with "dovetailing" their various parts so that he can achieve a "breakthrough," producing the first (post)structural curriculum for (consumption in) the profession. Waller's proposed curriculum is purely and safely cognitive; the students are taught to "understand" but not to "intervene." (23) This critique was not unwarranted, particularly in view of the way Waller was capitalizing on the "new and improved" image of Carnegie Mellon's curriculum while down-playing the potential political implications of the change. Nonetheless, there are some significant gains here. By requiring all students to be familiar with a variety of discursive strategies, Carnegie Mellon's curriculum displaces literary formalism from its center. And it seems designed to give all students some exposure to skills of ideology critique in courses such as "Reading Twentieth-Century Culture" and "Discourse and Historical Analysis." One wonders whether the students experience the discursive paradigms of the different required courses as discrete bodies of knowledge or as transdisciplinary fields of discourse that often overlap and contest each other. One way of restructuring a curriculum to foreground contestatory relations among various discursive fields is that of the new English and Textual Studies major at Syracuse University, where I was formerly a graduate student. The department's course catalog description of the new curriculum bears quoting at length: The new curriculum is organized not by coverage of a literary or critical canon but by a focus on the problematics of reading and writing texts. Such a curriculum attempts to distinguish between a traditional pluralism, in which there are many separate viewpoints and each exists without locating itself in relation to opposing viewpoints, and a multiplicity of positions, each of which acknowledges its allied or contestatory relation to other positions. The purpose of a curriculum based on the latter model is not to impose one way of knowing on everyone but to make the differences between ways of knowing visible and to foreground what is at stake in one way of knowing over and against another. The goal is to make students aware of how knowledge is produced and how reading takes place and thus to make them capable of playing an active and critical role in their society, enabling them to intervene in the dominant discourses of their culture.(5) The Syracuse curriculum can be schematized as a triangle with groups of courses clustered under three particular modes of inquiry: historical, political, and theoretical. Students begin by taking two introductory courses, entitled "Reading and Interpretation I: From Language to Discourse," and "Reading and Interpretation II: Practices of Reading." Then students are required to take two courses each from two groups, one course from the remaining group, and three courses of electives that can be from any of the groups, or chosen from creative writing or advanced expository writing courses that are not in any group. What is particularly valuable about the Syracuse curriculum, in my view, is that it self-consciously attempts to place different intellectual positions in contestatory relation to each other. One aspect I find disappointing, however, is that the Syracuse program remains entirely literature- and culture-focused. The composition and rhetoric program was separated from the English department as part of the transformation from "English" to "English and Textual Studies." The technical writing program was always small and marginalized at Syracuse, and it seems to have been entirely left out of this new curriculum, as does the creative writing program. I don't know the exact reasons for these exclusions, though I know enough of the departmental political battles at Syracuse to suspect that the story is much too long to go into here. Instead, humbly acknowledging that it's much easier to propose a curricular change than to get one approved by an entire department, I want to sketch out a variation of the Syracuse triangle as it might be adapted for the department I teach in at Illinois State:
As you can see, the corners of the triangle represent "history," "rhetoric," and "poetics," respectively. Each student would enter the major by taking two required introductory courses of three credit hours each: Strategies of Representation and Strategies of Interpretation. In these introductory courses attention should be given to a full range of discourses practiced in the English department--linguistics, literature, rhetoric, technical communication, etc. Then students would proceed into the triangle: here each student would take 18 hours on one corner and six hours each on the other two corners. All students would be required to sample from each of the three major divisions. Finally, all students would take the senior seminar, as is now required, for a total of 40 hours. The broad categories of history, rhetoric, and poetics are intended at once to correspond to and in some ways to disrupt our current divisions. Some existing courses could be adapted to fit in these divisions. Our current genre courses and the creative writing courses might fit under poetics, while the composition, rhetoric, and technical writing courses would generally go under rhetoric. Conventional period surveys of literature might ordinarily fit under the history rubric. Literary theory courses would go under the poetics category; rhetorical theory courses would go under the rhetoric category. But a key goal of this curriculum would be to displace literature from its center in order to allow new conjunctions and juxtapositions of such fields as technical writing, cultural studies, and literature. Hence, such a curriculum would require a rethinking of the goals and assumptions of existing courses. All course syllabi should be self-conscious about the paradigms of knowledge and value that frame and enable their construction, and all courses should acknowledge their boundaries and boundary-crossings in relation to the discursive paradigms of other courses. My hope would be for the emergence of new courses designed specifically to engage the particular problems and issues which constitute two or more categories. For instance, I recently team-taught a course entitled "The Concept of Authorship and the Problems of Literary Authority" with a member of our technical writing faculty. We investigated issues of authorship and authority in ways that foregrounded the conflicts among various historical, political and theoretical perspectives. At least partly because of the inclusion of a technical writing perspective in the course, we gave considerable attention to changes in the material conditions of authorship arising from the transition from manuscript culture to print culture and from the uneven but steady growth of literacy over the past few centuries in England. In addition, we attracted an unusually diverse mix of literature- oriented and technical writing-oriented students who came to the class with conflicting assumptions and expectations. This required constant adjustments of emphasis and produced a heightened sense of perspectival limits for both the students and the teachers. Or, for another example, we have a special topics course entitled "The Rhetoric of History and the History of Rhetoric," team-taught by a member of our rhetoric faculty and a colleague from the History department. I can envision a course exploring the consequences and parameters of English as an "international" language that would examine international uses of English in different economic, political, and cultural contexts, and that could put the values and assumptions of ESL, technical writing, and postcolonial subaltern theory in productive interaction with each other. Such courses should aim to address the potential conflicts and interrelationships among different discourses within the broader field of English studies. In the triangulated curriculum courses specifically designed to investigate the interrelationships of different discourses would be encouraged, but regulated. In these instances I would have the professor(s) develop a syllabus that demonstrably addresses the cross-sectional implications of the course, and have such courses certified as counting either way for students. The department's curriculum committee (constituted in a way that includes faculty who identify themselves as representatives from the various corners of the triangle) would arbritrate the designations. My intention here would be to reward cross-sectional courses by making such courses more attractive to students. Finally, I would set up an ongoing colloquium series on topics of broad interest among the various subdisciplines of English studies, and require students from the introductory sections and the senior seminar to attend and participate in these colloquia each semester. In addition to the aim of requiring students to be exposed to a broader cross-section of English studies and encouraging them to consider the inter-relations of various positions and orientations within the field, another goal of this curricular model would be to encourage us as faculty to interact more directly with each other. There would still, of course, be room for professors who prefer not to interact to teach in relative isolation, on one corner of the triangle. But there would also be expanded opportunities (and a sort of informal intellectual reward in the form of a heightened atmosphere of collegial discussion) for those who wish to teach in the interactive model. This, of course, is just one of many possible patterns and many different rubrics for the various subdisciplines within an English curriculum that could be devised for different local situations. The number of sub-disciplines and their names is not as important as is the need for them to be put in productively interactive relationship to each other. The teaching of literature, rhetoric, and cultural studies should be viewed as a discursive arena in which intellectuals can develop a sustained critique of existing social values through which a critical literacy can be produced. Above all, the study of literature as the uncritical cultivation of aesthetic appreciation or the unreflective transmission of values--whether progressive or conservative--should be avoided. I know from discussions with colleagues in my own department and other departments that the kinds of curricular changes I am calling for will encounter resistance and skepticism from those--including theorists and many radicals and progressives--who are comfortable with the current dominant hierarchy of privilege within the discipline. After viewing my Illinois State triangle plan one of my colleagues observed that such a change would leave him, as a literature teacher, completely out of the department's mission. When I pointed out to him that the curriculum I am proposing still gives primary emphasis to literature in at least two thirds of the curriculum (the history and poetics corners of the triangle) he was genuinely surprised, though not exactly persuaded. The fact is, in his mind the department's mission is the teaching of literature, and everything else we do is just incidental. Or literature is the center around which various satellites such as technical writing, composition, and linguistics orbit. Yet this model for the department marginalizes about one-third of the faculty--of approximately forty-five tenured and tenure-track members of our department, only thirty or so teach literature. Nonetheless, I must acknowledge, the curriculum I have outlined is really only a very modest beginning toward the development of an open-ended critique of values and power relations that could resist the considerable pressures for the human sciences to serve uncritically the changing needs of the late capitalist global labor market. Juxtaposing subdisciplinary discourses as I have suggested will not necessarily lead to a critique of what we are being asked to do. The changes I am recommending could produce a public, institutional arena for literature teachers to talk with teachers of composition, rhetoric, technical and professional writing, ESL, English education, etc., about our interrelated roles and responsibilities in the production of educated citizens. However, we would still face the difficult task of learning how to talk to each other, and, yet more difficult, how to critique each other's positions. The task at hand for English teachers of all specializations is to recognize that our work is always-already highly politicized and to exploit that condition. Conflicting political demands are being made upon us in the form of the neo-conservative call for us to guard the gates of traditional high culture, and in the form of the corporate labor market pressure for us to give students skills training without critical consciousness raising. Our success in resisting these pressures will be limited unless we can change our curricular and other departmental structures to allow, even to require, full participation in the academic life of the department by all faculty, including those teaching the presently marginalized and devalued "service" courses. It is up to us to find new ways to engage all students and faculty in the debate on culture and social values at as high a level of sophistication and intellectual rigor as possible. NOTES
(2)The one neoconservative writer who has given most attention to these economic pressures against traditional literary study is Alvin Kernan, in The Death of Literature. Yet, even after a detailed and informative analysis of the social and economic forces arrayed against traditional cultural values, Kernan returns to attack deconstruction and poststructural theory in a highly oversimplified critique at the end of his book. (3)For an extended critique of the "field coverage" curriculum, see Graff, Professing Literature. (4)See, for example, Bronwyn Norton Peirce, "Toward a Pedagogy of Possibility in the Teaching of English Internationally: People's English in South Africa"; Alistair Pennycook, "The Concept of Method, Interested Knowledge, and the Politics of Language Teaching"; and the exchange in TESOL Quarterly between Martha McCall, "Comments on Alastair Pennycook's `The Concept of Method, Interested Knowledge, and the Politics of Language Teaching': A Reader Reacts," and Alistair Pennycook, "The Author Responds." In addition, the newsletter TESOL Matters provides an informal forum for debate on geopolitical concerns. (5)
Taken from an unpublished departmental announcement, Syracuse University
English Department, Fall, 1990. Works
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