The Rise and Fall of English

Reconstructing English as a Discipline

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by Robert Scholes

Yale University Press

Due/Published November 1999, 224 pages, paper

ISBN 0300080840

New in paper (F99)

In this critical look at the nature and direction of English studies in America, Robert Scholes offers an intervention into current debates about educational and cultural values and goals. He shows how English came to occupy its present place in our educational system, diagnosing the educational illness he perceives in today's English departments, and recommending theoretical and practical changes in the field of English studies.

Scholes begins by examining the rise of English at Yale and Brown at the end of the ninteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. He argues that the subsequent fall of English is the result of both cultural shifts and changes within the field itself. He calls for a fundamental reorientation of the discipline--away from political or highly theoretical issues and from a specific canon of texts, and toward a canon of methods, to be used in the proces of learning how to situate, compose, and read a text. He proposes a discipline based on rhetoric and the teaching of reading and writing over a broad range of literatures, a discipline that includes literariness, but is not limited to it.

Review

He began as a reader of comic books and is now a professor of Humanities at Brown University. What has remained constant is Scholes’ love for the English language. However, the discipline he loves so much, English, has come down with a case of “hypocriticism,” a condition where theory and political concerns begin to have too much influence. While criticisms of English departments has become almost routine in this day and age, Scholes’ engaging and insightful critique is far from the ordinary. Thus, you will find no conspiracy talk about English Professors’ plans to dismantle Western civilization nor will you read critiques of concepts such as “truth” and “reality,” instead Scholes takes the position of the “militant middle.” Scholes calls for a return to the roots of the discipline from the turn-of-the-century, looking back to the development of the English departments at Brown and Yale up to the present-day. Scholes also makes a very convincing argument for the establishment of a canon of not texts, but rather a canon of methods to be used on the process of learning how to situate, compose and, read a text. Combining theoretical and practical approaches, Scholes’ work stands out for its thoughtfulness, usefulness, and readability.