ABSTRACT
Redrawing the Boundaries is slightly dated because it was so long in the making that it includes few references to work more recent than 1990. Hardly surprising, then, that its editors think their job will have to be done again ‘in another decade or so’ (p. 10). The book’s projected readership is neither the trend-setters of literary studies nor their shadows, the trend-spotters. Instead, it addresses ‘those burdened with heavy teaching loads who work at some distance from major centers of research activity’ (2-3), and have observed their subject turn into something quite different from the one they originally graduated in. Such people need an alternative to those reactionary accounts of changes in the humanities inaugurated by Allan Bloom’s best-selling jeremiad, The Closing of the American Mind (1987). That book not only encouraged the globalization of theory-bashing as a media spectacle but was almost certainly the adversarial stimulus for Redrawing the Boundaries, in which the Modern Language Association of America gives its institutional imprimatur to some mainly favourable but never uncritical accounts of recent goings-on in English studies. Here the principal logomachies of the last two decades are recapitulated. After an introduction by Stephen Greenblatt and Giles Gunn, whose business is among other things to trouble-shoot problems with what we are about to encounter, different narrators assess upheavals in eight provinces in the domain of English studies. And because the book is designed for North American teachers of English, Cecilia Tichi reports on American literary studies ‘to’—and Philip Fisher on American literary and cultural studies ‘since’—the American Civil War. After that, attention switches from the battlegrounds to the tactics and strategies used there, with analyses of feminist criticism by Catharine R.Stimpson, gender criticism (Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick), African American criticism (Henry Louis Gates), Marxist criticism (Walter Cohen), psychoanalytic criticism (Meredith Skura), deconstruction (Deborah Esch), new historicisms (Louis Montrose), cultural criticism (Gerald Graff and Bruce Robbins), and postcolonial criticism (Homi K.Bhabha). A couple of concluding items again signal this book’s predominantly North American orientation: Richard Marius on composition studies, and Donald McQuade on their relation to literary studies. Each essay concludes with a selected bibliography, whose items reappear in a cumulative list of ‘works cited’ that runs to fifty-six pages and creates the impression that no usable
development in the humanities or social sciences is likely to avoid being annexed to those redrawn boundaries which guarantee the new English studies its Lebensraum.
