ABSTRACT
More than any other subject, English has been at the centre of academic debates about the shaping and division of knowledge. As a relative latecomer to disciplinary consolidation, it has often been torn between the institutional imperative to stake out its own territory, define its activities and justify its autonomy from other areas of study, and its reliance on the approaches and subject matter of other disciplines. Indeed, it is possible to argue that all the major critical developments and controversies within English since its inception as a university subject have been related in some sense to the difficulty of containing its concerns within a single discipline and to its interdisciplinary possibilities. As Harold Rosen puts it, English is
From its earliest origins in British colleges and universities, English’s weak institutional base, its newness and insecurity as a discipline, meant that it was more likely than the established disciplines to interrogate its own assumptions and practices. Critics from D.J. Palmer onwards have traced the roots of English as the ‘poor man’s classics’ in Mechanics’ Institutes, evening classes and non-Oxbridge colleges and universities, where it was sometimes taught alongside other ‘national’ subjects such as history and geography (Palmer 1965: vii, 18). Since the birth of a new discipline is always partly dependent on the accumulation of intellectual prestige – and particularly on whether or not influential institutions and scholars recognize it as a separate entity – it was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that English was fully accepted as a reputable area of study, largely as a result of being established within the elite universities of Oxford and Cambridge. Even then, it was looked down upon by the more traditional disciplines as what would nowadays be called a ‘Mickey Mouse’ subject, an easy option for the less able students. William Sanday, Professor of Theology, supported the introduction of a School of English at Oxford at the end of the nineteenth century, for example, because ‘there were the women to be considered, and the third rate men who would go on to become schoolmasters’ (Bergonzi 1990: 41).
