Anti-professionalism, pluralism and the problem of critical authority: An inquiry into the disciplinary structure and logic of English.

摘要

Cultural Studies has traditionally posed the form and organization of disciplines within modern research universities as itself a problem for critical practice, particularly the manner in which individual disciplines define fields and objects of research in conformity to a larger, unexamined logic of institutional organization whose knowledge production is also the reproduction of a specific national culture. In this dissertation, however, I argue that current accounts of disciplinarity which emphasize the hierarchical and exclusionary character of disciplinary knowledge are inadequate to explain the expansive and inclusive tendencies of humanities disciplines such English, which require more the constant incorporation of new methodologies and subject areas in search of fresh perspectives than a steady accumulation of bounded, retrievable knowledge. My inquiry first reviews recent debates over the nature of professionalism in English which have attended its assimilation of deconstruction, feminism, and Cultural Studies, to foreground a structural contradiction arising from the accommodation of literary texts valued as the expression of uniquely individual and privatized experience to the requirements of disciplinary knowledge production. The remainder then examines the genesis of this contradiction by turning to the historical development of English, especially its emergence in nineteenth-century U.S. universities, where displacement of the traditional classical curriculum by an elective, and the evolution of a pluralist system of formally equal, departmentalized disciplines, radically altered the conditions under which cultural artifacts, especially texts, could circulate with authority. As English professionals negotiated the boundaries of their field with neighboring disciplines, the pre-disciplinary construction of English as object of rhetoric grounded in common sense epistemology and ideals of stylistic perspicuity was recast in a form amenable to routine research, in part by an adaptation of positivist methodology to literary criticism emphasizing literary form to stabilize critical authority. By the mid-twentieth century, in the context of a now thoroughly monolinguistic criticism, this formalist emphasis enabled a methodological pluralism adaptable to other fields and subject matters, becoming one condition for emergence of U.S. Cultural Studies. I close with speculation as to how the structural contradictions and monocultural tendencies of disciplinary English may carry into Cultural Studies as well.