Abstract
What follows here offers a personal response to some general features of the landscape for ‘Futures for English’, outlining some wide-ranging thoughts on issues that chapters in the rest of the book then focus on in more specific detail. The discussion centres mainly on the implications for English futures of the fragmented and to some degree contested nature of ‘English’, something that always seems to mean that we impress inverted commas on the word whenever it is employed in this kind of context.
… the way in which education is organised can be seen to express, consciously and unconsciously, the wider organisation of a society, so that what has been thought of as a simple distribution is in fact an active shaping to social ends. (Raymond Williams, The Long Revolution, 1965)
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References
Bakhtin, M. (1981) The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. Edited by Michael Holquist. Trans. Caryl Emerson and Michael Holquist (Austin, TX: Texas UP).
Williams, R. (1965) The Long Revolution (Harmondsworth: Penguin).
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© 2016 Ronald Carter
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Carter, R. (2016). English Pasts, English Futures. In: Hewings, A., Prescott, L., Seargeant, P. (eds) Futures for English Studies. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-43180-6_2
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-137-43180-6_2
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-1-349-68286-7
Online ISBN: 978-1-137-43180-6
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