The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline.(Review)

The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline, by Robert Scholes. New Haven: Yale University Press, 1998, 203 pp., $20.00 hardbound.

Should English professors stop teaching literature and start teaching bumper stickers and "television texts"? Absolutely, according to Robert Scholes, who is Andrew W. Mellon Professor of Humanities at Brown University. The rise of English as a literature-based field of academic study at American colleges and universities is, in his view, a suspect success-story "that contains within it the seeds" of an imminent, and potentially fortunate, fall.

A collection of "separate but interrelated essays" (five chapters and five "assignments" designed to link them), The Rise and Fall of English describes the rise of English as "closely linked to the fall of classical studies ... and to the near obliteration of rhetoric as a college subject." "In the beginning there were no English professors," writes Scholes, but later the study of English began to replace classical studies. In 1817, at Yale, the study of English meant a professorship of Rhetoric and Oratory. But by 1839 "its title was changed to Rhetoric and the English Language, and in 1863 to Rhetoric and English Literature." And, "in the evolution of this chair," Scholes argues, "can be read the fortune of English as a field of study." As the rise of English sealed the death of Greek and Latin studies, "literature achieve[d] equal status with rhetoric." Eventually, the study of literature replaced rhetoric as the main purpose of English departments. According to Scholes, the study of literature (which he considers passive "consumption") is not only far less valuable than the study of rhetoric (the "production" of "texts"), but the root cause of the decline of English.

The context of The Rise and Fall of English is the culture war raging in America's English departments: liberal arts traditionalists who understand why majors should read Chaucer, Shakespeare, and the Romantics versus postmodernists, multiculturalists, and theorists who argue, variously, that the traditional curriculum is arbitrary, oppressive, and irrelevant. Scholes takes what he touts as a "militant middle position," offering a proposal not for saving the "field" of English literature as we have known it, but for "reconstructing" English as a "discipline." This means replacing "the canon of texts with a canon of methods," reconstructing English as the rhetorical study of "textual production."

Without change, Scholes warns, English is likely to go the way of classical studies. Abiding cultural shifts, ridding English departments of the "coverage" of literature is Scholes's plan for making the fall of English "a fortunate one." We must, he argues, "let go of the Story of English," ending the requirement that English majors study Beowulf to Virginia Woolf.