Abstract
The literature study guide is torn between its instrumental format and its participation in a humanist tradition centred on the notion of disinterest. Bjerke demonstrates the guide’s membership in that tradition through its kinship with Matthew Arnold’s A Bible Reading for Schools (1872), and argues that the genre finds further motivation in the demands of practical criticism. The study guide, as Bjerke shows, not only mirrors the clash between neoliberal and humanist values, but also reflects an analogous conflict within the discipline of English literature concerning the institutionalization of disinterested ideals. It thus provides a space for reflection upon the discipline’s implicit values and intuitions of purpose. It is argued that such a reflection leaves us better equipped to tackle ongoing challenges to the discipline.
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Notes
Chris Baldick, The Social Mission of English Criticism: 1848–1932, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983.
Neoliberalism, in its most traditional sense, here refers to an economic theory which evaluates education according to its profitability as a consumer good. On the marketization of (especially humanities) education in the UK, see Stefan Collini, What Are Universities For?, London, Penguin, 2012, and
Helen Small, The Value of the Humanities, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2013.
See Pierre Bourdieu, ‘The Forms of Capital’, trans. Richard Nice, in John G. Richardson (ed.), The Handbook of Theory and Research for the Sociology of Education, New York, Greenwood Press, 1986, pp. 241–58.
Gerald Graff, Professing Literature: An Institutional History, Chicago, Chicago University Press, 2007, pp. 51–2.
Carol Atherton, Defining Literary Criticism: Scholarship, Authority and the Possession of Literary Knowledge, 1880–2002, Basingstoke, Palgrave, 2005, p. 7.
Arnold L. Goldsmith, ‘Literary Study Guides in High School and College: Supplement or Substitute’, The English Journal, 57. 6, September 1968, pp. 803–12, p. 805.
Matthew Arnold, Culture and Anarchy, Cambridge, Cambridge University Press, 1960, p. 51.
John Willinsky, ‘Matthew Arnold’s Legacy: The Powers of Literature’, Research in the Teaching of English, 24.4, December 1990, pp. 343–61, p. 345.
Margaret Mathieson, The Preachers of Culture: The Study of English and Its Teachers, London, Allen and Unwin, 1975, p. 44, and Willinsky, ‘Arnold’s Legacy’, p. 345.
Arnold’s distrust of state machinery is rooted in the ‘self-governing rational principle’ of aesthetic experience. The principle stems from the Kantian notion of ‘subjective universality’, which is external to all forms of social organization. See Ian Hunter, Rethinking the School: Subjectivity, Bureaucracy, Criticism, New York, St Martin’s Press, 1994, p.13, and
Matthew Shum, ‘Culture and the Institution’, Scrutiny 2: Issues in English Studies in Southern Africa, 2.1, 1997, pp. 5–12, p. 7.
Matthew Arnold, A Bible Reading for Schools: The Great Prophecy of Israel’s Restoration, London, Macmillan, 1889, p. v.
Alfred E. Ikin (ed.), Milton: Paradise Lost Book I, Brodie’s Chosen English Texts, London, James Brodie, 1937, n.pag.
Matthew Arnold, Reports on Elementary Schools, 1852–1882, London, His Majesty’s Stationery Office, 1908, pp. 250–51.
John Carey, The Intellectuals and the Masses: Pride and Prejudice Among the Literary Intelligentsia, 1880–1939, London, Faber & Faber, 1992, p. vii.
See I. A. Richards, Practical Criticism: A Study of Literary Judgement, London, Kegan Paul, Trench and Trubner, 1929;
F. R. Leavis, Mass Civilisation and Minority Culture, London, Chatto & Windus, 1930;
Q. D. Leavis, Fiction and the Reading Public, Harmondsworth, Penguin, 1979, and
F. R. Leavis and Denys Thompson, Culture and Environment: The Training of Critical Awareness, London, Chatto & Windus, 1964.
Francis Mulhern, The Moment of ‘Scrutiny’, London, New Left Books, 1979, p. 328.
Christopher Hilliard, English as a Vocation: The ‘Scrutiny’ Movement, Oxford, Oxford University Press, 2012, p. 37.
Pierre Bourdieu, Alain Darbel and Dominique Schnapper, The Love of Art: European Art Museums and Their Publics, trans. Caroline Beattie and Nick Merriman, Cambridge, Polity, 1991, p. 109.
Pierre Bourdieu, Distinction: A Social Critique of the Judgement of Taste, trans. Richard Nice, Cambridge MA, Harvard University Press, 1996, p. 29.
John Guillory, Cultural Capital: The Problem of Literary Canon Formation, Chicago, University of Chicago Press, 1994, p. 336.
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Bjerke, M. (2015). The Literature Study Guide: Mastering the Art of English?. In: Gildea, N., Goodwyn, H., Kitching, M., Tyson, H. (eds) English Studies: The State of the Discipline, Past, Present, and Future. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478054_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9781137478054_3
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