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). This comment points to a further problem which still vexes the
subject: unlike many other academic disciplines, English does not make a strong connection between education and training for future careers. Science and professional subjects, which partly developed as a response to the demand for specialists in capitalist societies, tend to be targeted at specific areas of the graduate marketplace, and service the economy with ‘human capital’ in concrete ways. Most English students will be familiar with the ribbing by students in subjects such as law, engineering and medicine along these lines, as in the graffiti underneath the toilet-roll holder, ‘English degrees, please take one’, or the equally
hilarious: ‘What do you say to an English graduate? Big Mac and Fries, please.’ This is part of a wider question about the non-specialized
nature of English and the fact that its object of study – literature – is generally accessible to those working outside the discipline in a way that, say, particle physics or differential equations are not. And this is still the case: even with the huge boom in popular science and history writing over the last few years, these kinds of books are still greatly outnumbered by fiction, poetry and drama in bookshops and libraries. One of the reasons for this is that literature is about everything – love, sex, friendship, family relationships, ageing, death, social and historical change, religious faith, intellectual ideas, and so on. In short, it is about life in all its diversity, and this is hard to accommodate within the narrow parameters of a discipline. As Leslie Fiedler says, ‘literary criticism is always becoming “something else,” for the simple reason that literature is always “something else”’ (Klein 1996: 137). Unless we are solely concerned with the mechanical and formal properties of language, sooner or later we have to start dealing with the relationship between words and their referents, or between literature and ‘the outside world’. Mark Schoenfield and Valerie Traub thus suggest that the study of literature necessarily contains a contextual element: ‘To the extent that literary criticism has concerned itself with reference, it has had an interdisciplinary object … The assumption that words mean is itself interdisciplinary’ (‘Forum: Defining Interdisciplinarity’ 1996: 280). The theory and practice of interpreting texts – hermeneutics –
which has formed the main activity of literary studies since at least the end of the First World War, also derives from two much older disciplines, theology and law. Holy scripture was the primary object of early textual study and interpretation. Medieval bibles were often extensively annotated, for example, so that the textual commentaries merged with and sometimes overwhelmed the words of the Bible itself. The Protestant Reformation of the sixteenth century greatly increased the opportunities for such interpretation by taking the responsibility for biblical exegesis away from the Catholic Church in Rome and dispersing it
amongst individual theological scholars. Martin Luther’s dictum was sola Scriptura (‘scripture alone’): only by interpreting the Bible itself, rather than by accepting the authority of the established Church, could the will of God be known. Biblical scholars today practise skills of close textual analysis and background research which are also employed by literary critics, and they ask many of the same questions: about authorship, the status of supporting sources, translation and even canonicity, since the term ‘canon’ derives from attempts within the Christian Church to separate authoritative from apocryphal biblical texts. In the field of law, the interpretation of a relatively fixed canon of legal texts, which is subtly modified by new statutes and judicial rulings, has always required a large element of textual study; it involves deciphering the ambiguities and nuances of written language in relation to specific, real-life situations and an abstract notion of ‘justice’. In fact, the awareness of this relationship has given rise in recent years to the burgeoning area of critical legal studies, which treats the law as a text to be deconstructed by the critic. Although literary critics have often sought to claim textual interpretation as an activity that marks out the discrete disciplinarity of their subject, this claim is clearly questionable.
