Disciplining English

<p><b>Offers historical and present-day perspectives on what English departments do and how and why they do it.</b></p><p>These provocative essays explore the unwritten often unacknowledged codes conventions and ideologies overseeing the evolution and current practice of English as a discipline. The first section of the book offers historical perspectives: how composition became distinguished from literature how key intellectuals shaped the discipline and how various specialties-Renaissance literature American literature theory-became subfields. The second section focuses on how certain aesthetic categories of art and universal experience persist today in the actual teaching and writing of English. While it is fashionable to say that we are living in the age of poststructuralism or that literary theory has delivered us from idealized conceptions of authorship and inherent meaning these essays examine how these conceptions nevertheless remain and are transmitted: in different types of classroom settings in textbooks and in the self-fashioning of academic careers. At a time when the role and function of English departments have become matters of both academic and public debate this book will be a welcome resource for students professionals and anyone interested in the Culture Wars of the past two decades.</p>