The Rise and Fall of English

Broman, Walter E . Philosophy and Literature ; Baltimore  Vol. 23, Iss. 1,  (Apr 1999): 227-230.

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ABSTRACT
 
Since Phelps was a clergyman, does "truth" mean something like the edicts of divine revelation or is it
metaphysical truths, or simply such truths as "a preposition requires the accusative"? According to Scholes, our
project should be "to change what we are doing, for our present enterprise is a leaky vessel" . . . What we are doing
is fostering endless specialization and creating a mountain of useless publication, most of it remote from the
needs of students or any other human creature.

FULL TEXT
 
The Rise and Fall of English, by Robert Scholes; xi &203 pp. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, $20.00.

Robert Scholes addresses the gray situation of English as an academic field. The apocalyptic echo of Gibbon will
alert those who feel alarmed and uneasy about English. "What I am trying to do in this book," he says, "is work
through the very complex situation of a field of study that seems to me hollow, falling, though perhaps not visibly
fallen" (p. 18).

Preliminary to the dire part of the story, he sketches the rise of English as an academic field. This is the most
rewarding part of the book. Rhetoric and oratory dominated academe in the 1860's. It was not until 1889 that
English Literature superceded Latin at Yale. The gradual demise of rhetoric and oratory provided the opportunity
for the development of English departments in the early 1900's. Professor Scholes sees the apogee of English in
William Lyon Phelps, who reigned at Yale from 1892 to 1933. Scholes sees the "fall" of English beginning after
Phelps. This view seems questionable when one considers the great years after World War II, years with
outstanding professors such as R. S. Crane and so many others. Instead, we are told that the New Critics had
become "a clergy without dogma, teaching sacred texts without a God" (p. 27). The New Critics hardly fit this
ecclesiastical trope. If anything was "sacred" for them it was reading texts with all the insight possible. His claim
that Yale New Criticism and deconstruction "retained undercurrents of the Christian faith of Billy Phelps" (p. 25) is
difficult to see; one gets lost in this Yale fog.

When Scholes describes aspects of the malaise of English, many of us would agree. "I think we feel bad because
we do not believe in the research that is required of us for the Ph.D. itself and for professional progress afterward" .
. . (p. 44). Another familiar lament is that we are rewarded not for teaching well, but for the quantity we manage to
publish. We find ourselves more and more "requiring knowledge about texts instead of encouraging the direct
experience of these texts" (p. 80). We pile up a mountain of scholarship that is largely irrelevant to students or to
daily existence. Meanwhile, service courses are sniffed at; they "are for those benighted folk who are not permitted
to use the front door" (p. 85). English departments are divided into an ever-increasing number of specialties. Much
of this has been for years the familiar topics of faculty chat rooms everywhere.

However, when he goes on about "truth" at some length, I begin to feel like Pontius Pilate. The root of our feeling

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bad about ourselves is, he says, "our estrangement from the possibility of truth" (p. 48). "The 'love of truth,' "he says
elsewhere, "seems to me the first protocol of teaching, upon which any others that we might devise would depend"
(p. 57). We get the suggestion that William Lyon Phelps trafficked in truth, but that today we do not. Since Phelps
was a clergyman, does "truth" mean something like the edicts of divine revelation or is it metaphysical truths, or
simply such truths as "a preposition requires the accusative"? Does he mean that we are stuck in the post-
Nietzsche world bereft of God? What is "truth"?

At one point we are offered an exemplum: the education of Louis Althusser. The meaning of the exemplum is that
"truth is precisely what his teachers could not give him, though the best of them could give him a model of that
love of truth and eloquence in its service that constitutes the integrity of our profession" (p. 69). It is difficult to
believe that this love of truth has vanished from the field of English. It surely is likely that today's students can, like
Althusser, find professors that evince a love of truth. I have never encountered a good professor of English who
lacked faith that books can tell "the truth about anything important in the lives of those they are teaching" (p. 81).

According to Scholes, our project should be "to change what we are doing, for our present enterprise is a leaky
vessel" . . . (p. 81). What we are doing is fostering endless specialization and creating a mountain of useless
publication, most of it remote from the needs of students or any other human creature. One big change he
advocates would be to take seriously the teaching of writing, to end the situation where literature teachers are the
high priests, while compositions teachers are mere nuns. Writing should be taught as a serious skill that college
graduates can use for the rest of their lives. Many of us could agree with this view. One of the methods he favors
for teaching writing is what he calls intertextuality: how writing is nourished by other and previous writing, all the
texts that a person possesses. This works well for people such as Professor Scholes; he has a world of texts to
draw upon, but we are dealing with individuals who have never heard of Milton, Chaucer, Dante or Roger Maris.

This book produces the sensation of being trapped in one of those long committee meetings, relentlessly earnest
and throbbing with garrulity-where you hear what you have heard many times before, where ideas are produced
having a tenuous relation to the real world. When committees discuss curricula, there is usually heated and
protracted disputation. Chairman Scholes outlines at length a core course for English departments. He thinks of it
as an updating of medieval trivium. It will be language and text oriented. There will be poems and essays. "But it
will present these texts as examples of textual power for students to emulate" (p. 133). The scheme includes
studies in film, theatre, media and history, even though he later remarks that English departments can't do
everything. The students will be edified by Derrida, Rorty, et al., figures apparently more relevant than Chaucer or
Spenser. This core course represents the eternal academic hope of finding some curricular scheme that will stick
to the ribs of students-even though we suspect from experience that no plan survives student digestion. We are
often astonished to find what notions and shards do survive.

Another academic ignis fatuus is the yearning to become a discipline rather than a mere area, to move toward the
high hard ground of science. Professor Scholes has this dream. He proposes a "canon of methods" as against a
canon of texts. You wonder what committee meetings could undergird a canon of methods. You can hear them
now: A. diagramming sentences is a sine qua non in teaching English. B. Rubbish-that is a method totally without
merit. Then you reflect uneasily that mathematics, the support of physics and other sciences is light years from
discovering a canon of methods. You can imagine what this implies as to English.

"Canon" has become a contentious issue. The politically correct and others have given "canon" a decidedly
pejorative turn-partly because of the moral frisson evoked by opposing any hint of hegemony. Scholes pictures the
canon as some sort of holy writ administered by professors acting as priests; they have tyrannical power which
dominates the flaccid laity, or students. This hypercharged ecclesiastical trope hardly fits actuality, in which we

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can range freely in the world's riches. Most of us agree that there can be stultification in a rigid chronology from
Beowulf to the recently canonized. Scholes doesn't propose throwing out the canonized, but he views them with
diminished ardor. I could enjoy seeing myself as a high priest keeper of the canon. But where is this canon, holy
and fixed? Other than Shakespeare, I feel free to frolic in my own canon, which includes such off-key figures as
John Cowper Powys. Among the Gelehrten out there, I hear no mention of Powys. Oh, heretics!

Professor Scholes opposes the idea of a "cosmic canon that transcends all institutions" (p. 111). He feels that
Great Books and Western Civilization are notions that "have no disciplinary focus and hence no academic core" (p.
112). The spirit of literature is endless variety-news that never gets old. Theory has attempted to encompass it for
centuries with only modest success. Referring to the classics, Hume spoke of the durable admiration which
attends these works that have survived all the caprices of mode and fashion. The great thing is not "disciplinary
focus," but having the opportunity of encountering Chaucer.

In this committee meeting, Elizabeth Hardwick would like to say something like this: when she was a graduate
student at Columbia she was reading Milton and the Romantic poets and the Faerie Queene-books that she would
not have read on her own. That's the joy of it; that's the education. Why teach Toni Morrison? Any English major
can pick up significant new novels.

Then Leslie Fiedler says of English professors: a teacher of literature provides for those less experienced in song
and story, including the reluctant, the skeptical, the uncooperative, the incompetent. He provides a model of one in
whom what seemed dead, mere print, becomes a transport into the world of wonder, a world reached by the tested
and the best.

Given the title of Scholes's book, I almost expected something like the fulminations of a prophet rather than the
lucubrations of a committee chairman. A prophet would likely talk about how the power and glory of literature is
being vitiated by received cant such as "patriarchal hegemony" etc. He would likely notice that the "discovery" that
language is indeterminate or what Harold Bloom calls "the dungeon of language" has spawned theories that would
render the study of literature irrelevant or impossible.

There is much that is awry in the English field, but this book does not address some of the more lamentable
developments of recent years. If we can get past the poststructuralists laboring to nullify experiencing great
literature, English would rise again and we would go on enjoying shared meanings. This book, in short, does not
enable us to hear the threnodic gasps of a dying English.

AuthorAffiliation
Walter E. Broman
Whitman College

DETAILS

Publication title: Philosophy and Literature

Volume: 23

Issue: 1

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 Pages: 227-230

Publication year: 1999

Section: Book Review

Publisher: Johns Hopkins University Press

Place of publication: Baltimore

Country of publication: United States, Baltimore

Publication subject: Literature, Philosophy

Source type: Scholarly Journals

Language of publication: English

ISSN: 01900013

Document type: Book Review

ProQuest document ID: 751977633

Document URL: http://ezproxy.library.unlv.edu/login?url=https://search.proquest.com/docview/7519

77633?accountid=3611

Copyright: Copyright Johns Hopkins University Press Apr 1999

Database: Literature Online

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