ABSTRACT
This chapter explores some possible models for an English curriculum more directly engaged in a contestatory dialogue with the technical-vocational mission of the academy in a postmodern, postindustrial society. The Syracuse curriculum can be schematized as a triangle with groups of courses clustered under three particular modes of inquiry: historical, political, and theoretical. What is particularly valuable about the Syracuse curriculum is that it self-consciously attempts to place different intellectual positions in contestatory relation to each other. Since the early 1980s, in the wake of the paradigm shift from New Criticism to the politically self-conscious postmodernism and poststructuralism dominant in English studies, teachers of literature have been under attack from conservative academics and journalists. Departmental and disciplinary boundaries are not easily crossed, but the multidisciplinary structures of many English departments offer viable starting points for transdisciplinary work. Some English departments have consciously restructured their curricula in attempts to limit the trivializing effects of pluralism.
