Abstract
Lays out the historical contexts for the rest of the book. University English is seen as arising in formative association with the extension of adult education, and as characterised by its dynamic positioning on a number of boundaries. These include the borders between institutional and extra-institutional forms of reading, and those between philological and critical studies. The signature pedagogies of literary criticism are examined as the formation of face-to-face oral communities. Literary criticism is seen as a praxis of modernist estrangement, designed to form a new and militant caste of cultural agents in opposition to an increasingly commercialised and exploitative culture. In pursuing this goal, it developed its own strategies for seriousness as a defence lest the promotion of ambiguity should lead to the erosion of stable boundaries. The boundaries felt to be at risk were not simply linguistic but include the fragile margins of ‘mature’ gendered adult identity.
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Notes
- 1.
One way of thinking about the rise of critical literary studies would be through placing it in the context of contemporary enquiry into group psychology. During the 1920s, Wilfred Bion worked for a while with Wilfred Trotter at University College, London, and there is a debate over how far the latter influenced the subsequent development of group relations thinking. See, for example, Robert M. Lipgar and Malcolm Pines, Building on Bion – Roots: Origins and Context of Bion’s Contributions to Theory and Practice. London: Jessica Kingsley, 2003, in particular the chapter by Nuno Torres, ‘Gregariousness and the Mind: Wilfred Trotter and Wilfred Bion’. See also Francesca Bion ‘The Days of our Lives’ http://www.psychoanalysis.org.uk/days.htm, and the second volume of Wilfred Bion’s own autobiography, All My Sins Remembered: Another Part of a Life. London: Karnac, 2009. In view of the role Denys Harding plays in Chapter 4 (below), I would note that a preoccupation with social psychology is threaded through his work from The Impulse to Dominate (1941) to Social Psychology and Individual Values (Hutchinson’s University Library, 1953).
- 2.
Pierre Bourdieu, The Logic of Practice, trans. Richard Nice. Cambridge: Polity, 1990: 53–55.
- 3.
S.T. Coleridge, The Friend (1818 edition, Vol. I), The Collected Works. London: Routledge, 1969: 20–1, 24.
- 4.
Everyman. edition, edited William Greenslade, London, Dent 1997: 355. Note the parallel inauthentic form of living – the circulating library identified with the suburban limbo between city and country. See Queenie Leavis on the distinction between rural and suburban culture and idiom in (Q.D. Leavis 1932: 209–210).
- 5.
See John Sutherland’s biography, Mrs Humphry Ward: Eminent Victorian, Pre-eminent Edwardian. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990.
- 6.
- 7.
(Anon.) English Literature in Schools: A List of Authors and Works for Successive Stages of Study. English Association Pamphlet No. 21. June 1912. The pamphlet also anticipates a comparative technique: ‘Older pupils will learn a valuable lesson in the art of criticism if they are able to compare the treatment of a similar theme by two different writers’ (English Literature in Schools 1912: 1).
- 8.
Terence Hawkes’ essay ‘Telmah’ reprinted in That Shakespeherian Rag: Essays on a Critical Process. London: Routledge, 1986.
- 9.
A detailed and wonderful contemporary survey of the history and context of adult education is contained in the 1919 Final Report of the Adult Education Committee of the Ministry of Reconstruction. Considerable attention is paid within the report to the teaching of literature. ‘The primary aim of education in literature, as far as adult students are concerned, should be not the acquisition of information but the cultivation of imagination.… The indispensable qualification of the teacher of literature…is not learning, but passion, and a power to communicate it’ (1919: 89, §160).
- 10.
See Fiddian Moulton’s biographical essay on his uncle (Moulton 1926).
- 11.
The Spoils of Poynton (1897), Penguin 1963: 14–15. For talking dolls in the period, see Smithsonian images: http://www.smithsonianmag.com/smithsonian-institution/epic-failure-thomas-edisons-talking-doll-180955442/?no-ist.
- 12.
An apposite caution appears in Medway et al.’s absorbing history of English in postwar London schools: ‘Nowhere did we find a consistency of position so well defined that it might be called a “school”: the history of how English was maintained and changed has to have regard to affiliations, friendships, sympathies, and chance influences – in short conjunctures of circumstances’ (2014: 161). I am too late to do justice to an admirable recent article by Alexander Hutton, ‘An English School for the Welfare State: Literature, Politics, and the University, 1932–1965’, English, 65(248), 2016: 3–34.
- 13.
There is a very interesting commentary by Stefan Collini in ‘Richard Hoggart: Literary Criticism and Cultural Decline in Twentieth-Century Britain’, in (ed.) Sue Owen, Richard Hoggart and Cultural Studies. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan, 2008: 36–37.
- 14.
See Matthew Kibble, ‘The Betrayers of Language: Modernism and The Daily Mail’, Literature and History, 11(1), 2002: 62–80.
- 15.
For the complex relations between Scrutiny and the Criterion and other magazines, see Harding (2002).
- 16.
See Knights, ‘Reading as a Man’, in (eds) Mieszkowski et al. 2006; cf. Andreas Huyssen, After the Great Divide: Modernism, Mass Culture, Postmodernism. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1986; Kate Flint, The Woman Reader 1837–1914. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1993.
- 17.
A useful survey can be found in Joseph Bristow, Effeminate England: Homoerotic Writing After 1885. Buckingham: Open University Press, 1995.
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Knights, B. (2017). Heroic Reading. In: Pedagogic Criticism. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/978-1-137-27813-5_2
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