Preface
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 January 2010
Summary
Our motivation for writing this book came from our experience as teachers of English at civic universities in Britain. In particular it was conceived as a response to a number of questions which students, with varying degrees of precision, ask about their subject: what does it mean to ‘do’ English, and to ‘do’ theory; and how does theory in English relate to their practice of reading texts? Our interest in trying to answer these questions was initially prompted by a number of essays: ‘Usefulness in Literary History’ (British Journal of Aesthetics, 31 (1991)); ‘Re-writing Re-reading English’ (English, 40 (1990)); ‘Critical Opinion: English in Crisis?’ (Essays in Criticism, 39 (1989)); ‘Critical Opinion: English in Crisis? (2)’ (Essays in Criticism, 40 (1990)); ‘The “Literary”, Aestheticism and the Founding of English’ (English Literature in Transition, 33 (1990)). These articles rehearsed in a schematic form some of our preliminary ideas. However, the present book, while it incorporates some of these earlier points, is largely new, and most of the material in it is published for the first time.
We are conscious of the fact that we write as British academics. This experience prevents us from laying claim to comprehensiveness, and it would be over-ambitious to pretend an exhaustive knowledge of pedagogy in other countries, particularly the United States. However, it is clear to us that teachers of literature in the United States and Britain encounter a large number of similar problems, particularly those concerning politics and value, and we have tried to identify and analyse these areas of common interest.
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- Politics and Value in English StudiesA Discipline in Crisis?, pp. ix - xPublisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 1993