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Mapping Fields of Study The Cultural and
Institutional Space of English Studies
Edited by Richard Somerset and Matthew Smith
Regards
croisés sur le monde anglophone Nancy
: Éditions Universitaires de Lorraine, 2019 Broché. 353 p. ISBN 978-2814305328. 18 €
Reviewed by Alain Morvan Université
de la Sorbonne Nouvelle (Paris 3)
Five decades ago, in an article published in The Times Educational Supplement and later reprinted in his Essays in Critical Dissent, the Oxford scholar and
co-founder of Essays in Criticism F.W. Bateson recalled
how the Oxford Honours School of English Literature had been founded in 1896
amid widespread disbelief – witness a Regius Professor [of Greek] deriding
English Studies as hopelessly frivolous – a mere “chatter about Shelley”. Bateson
nonetheless praised the Victorians for “recognizing that English Literature is
different in kind from all other university subjects”. Bateson’s comment would
be a fitting epigraph to Mapping Fields of Study. After Richard Somerset’s excellent Introduction, which
provides a reliable guide to the book and a relatively fitting substitute for an
index, Philip Riley’s prolegomenal chapter, ‘Splitting and Lumping :
Perspectives on the Study of Disciplinary Formation’, examines the nature of disciplinary
taxonomy from a theoretical viewpoint and draws the necessary distinctions
between Social Sciences and the Humanities, to which literary studies belong. The rest of the book, made of nine chapters, eight of
which are in English and one in French, is divided into three parts. The first
part (‘Disciplinary Origins : Networks of Meaning and Influence’) offers a
well-documented survey of the institutional emergence of English Studies. In ‘Culture,
Knowledge and Liberality : The Demise of a Unified Educational Ideal’,
Richard Somerset deftly demonstrates how universities in the nineteenth century,
despite significant changes in the conception of culture and the widening gap
between science and literature, managed to preserve their positions as
strongholds of gentlemanly knowledge and debate. He nevertheless acknowledges
that “the opinion-forming public changed from a social to an intellectual
elite” [87]. Somerset also scrutinises the impact of the organicism and historicism
of the period on palaeontology, history and literature alike. If he duly
mentions the Matthew Arnold-Thomas Huxley controversy, one wishes he had even
cursorily alluded to Bishop Wilberforce’s onslaught on Darwinian theory, which so strongly anticipates today’s debate about creationism. With ‘ “Beaming
« English » at the Oppressed Layers”? Henry Morley and his Role in
Establishing English as a Discipline’, Matthew Smith, while paying lip service
to Terry Eagleton’s tediously doctrinaire pronouncements on literature as a tool
of oppression, sensibly qualifies them by means of an informative monograph on Henry
Morley (1822-1894), who held the professorship of English Literature at
University College, London and did much to make the study of English socially
inclusive and politically democratic. A convert to Unitarianism and a former
doctor, Morley is a far cry from Oxbridge elitist conceptions and shows “an
openness to or leaning forward towards a certain form of egalitarianism” [123].
Angela Dunstan’s contribution, ‘Victorians Experiments in Reading
Scientifically’, goes much along the same line. Her chapter amply demonstrates
that Literary Societies of the Victorian era were instrumental in shaping
public interest in literature, while paving the way for new methods of
criticism. The second section addresses ‘Disciplinary Alternatives :
English Studies in Multicultural National Contexts’. Riaan Oppelt focuses on ‘English Studies in
South Africa : Growth and Challenges’, an account which is both precise
and up-to-date. Thanks to three case-studies respectively concerned with the
University of the Western Cape, the
University of Cape Town, and Stellenbosch University, Oppelt shows how these
institutions have come to terms with post-apartheid tensions and desires – a
bit of a challenge, he argues, as “the vocational priority still trumps the
decolonisation imperative among students
in 2018” [191]. Martina Ghosh-Schellhorn’s reflexions in ‘ “Their Nights
and Days were Eloquent. . . ” : English Studies in India’ are
understandably similar : she deplores that, for those in charge, “Eng.
Lit. forms the exclusive conduit to a humanism that transcends not only the
local and the contextual, but Indianness itself” [225]. One sympathises with
her preoccupation, yet one wonders how things could be different, considering
the complexity of India’s cultural and linguistic structure. Lee Flamand’s fascinating
chapter on the United States, ‘Screening Campus Identity Politics : Cultural
Studies, Dear White People, and the American
University’, shows how difficult it is
to try and transcend the unity vs. group
identities dialectics. Flamand expatiates on Dear White
People, a TV series on Netflix which tells much about race relations
in campus life – and takes the reader far beyond the issue of English Studies.
All things considered, Flamand’s insistence on the necessity of opening the
classroom door to identity politics and what he calls “the enduring social
realities of marginalization and oppression” [261] seems consistent with the
doxa of ethnic communitarianism but loses sight of the unicity of human nature
which literary pursuits would be well inspired to postulate. If a
diversification of the canon is more than legitimate, it nevertheless remains
that literary culture should keep particularist temptations in check rather
than give them free rein. The third section of the volume is devoted to ‘Disciplinary
Identity : The Challenges of the “Cultural Studies” Paradigm’. In ‘Les
Origines du courant postmoderne dans les sciences humaines’, a chapter
agreeably free from jargon, Simon Tabet offers a well-balanced and soundly
diachronic clarification of what postmodernism is about. Among others, he
quotes Leslie Fiedler, for whom the forms of literary expression cognate with
postmodernism are fundamentally disruptive, anti-hierarchical, and emancipating
– an estimation which other commentators like Gerald Graff disagree with,
detecting the ideological ambiguities the new sensibility involves. For such
critics, the anti-rationalism inherent in postmodernism leaves the door open to
new forms of oppression. Focusing on the case of postmodern architecture, Tabet
himself suggests that it gives evidence of "une plus grande adaptation au monde
consumériste et capitaliste contemporain" [287]. In his carefully argued
contribution entitled ‘The Ghost of Literature : The Return of the Text in
American Literary Studies’, Thomas Constantinesco scrutinises a new approach to
literary studies which might well challenge the inquisitorial rule of New
Historicism : readers wary of what Paul Ricœur called “l’herméneutique du
soupçon” try to reinstate the text in its creative originality and turn their
backs on the old trick of systematically referring it to its context, as if the
critic’s mission were “to expose the ideological forces that produced it” [301].
Constantinesco does not put it that way, but it all seems as if New Historicism
looked a little antiquated in his eyes – a useful reminder of the
precariousness of critical approaches. In a thought-provoking (and refreshingly
courageous) footnote, he traces back the misuse of such forms of suspicion to
institutional pressure on junior academics, since “the necessities of
publication have made it easier to rely on ready-made formulas than to invest
in critical innovation” [302n.] – a pronouncement which might look like a red
flag to the bull of political correctness. Constantinesco, however, takes care
not to lapse into polemics; his conclusion remains balanced and irenic, as he
explicitly favours “a renewed conjunction between the aesthetic and the
historical” [313]. This chapter, which displays an impressive control of the
history of critical approaches, emerges as the most compelling contribution to
the book.
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