The inexorable sadness of pencils: English language education and class in the American century.

摘要

This dissertation uses my father's undergraduate degree at Louisiana State University in the late 1940s as a focal point in an exploration of the purposes, methods and impact of college level English language education in the United States at mid-century. English language education, I argue, is best understood in terms of what Pierre Bourdieu calls the inculcation of class values and aesthetics; class is defined as at once financial status and an internalized way of understanding the self, society, and the world. As in all studies of this type, biographical and autobiographical material will provide specific detail and context to the historical and theoretical materials. In order to better comprehend how class inculcation may be said to be accomplished in the college classroom, Bourdieu's conceptual framework is complemented with recent work in theories of cognition by Philip Agre and by the historical work of sociologist Clyde W. Barrow, among others. This theoretical framework is supplemented with an historical account of the English language components of my father's curriculum, combining sources from histories of rhetoric, of literary criticism, technical writing, speech and of American English as a national language. Subsequent chapters include a critique of the anthologies of Cleanth Brooks, a critical reading of the Unified English Composition, a widely used textbook of the period, and an examination of the influential journal College English from the period 1939--49.