The Discipline of English: A Guide to Critical Theory and Practice PDF
Preview The Discipline of English: A Guide to Critical Theory and Practice
THE DISCIPLINE OF ENGLISH Also by George Watson Politics and Literature in Modern Britain THE DISCIPLINE OF ENGLISH A Guide to Critical Theory and Practice GEORGE WATSON M c George Watson 1978 Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1978 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without permission. First published 1978 by THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD London and Basingstoke Associated companies in Delhi Dublin Hong Kong Johannesburg Lagos Melbourne New York Singapore and Tokyo British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Watson, George, b. 1927 The discipline of English. L Criticism 2. English literature-History and criticism L Title 820'.9 PN81 ISBN 978-0-333-23354-2 ISBN 978-1-349-15939-0 (eBook) DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15939-0 This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement. The paperback edition of this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on the subsequent purchaser. Contents Acknowledgements 7 Introduction 9 Part One: The Critical Debate Preliminary enquiries 15 2 Critics since 1920 25 3 Why literary judgements are objective 35 4 What history does 55 5 Language or linguistics 66 Part Two: The Tools of the Trade 6 How to read: or practical criticism 81 7 How to work: or using a library 95 8 How to write: or the use of English 106 Notes for Further Reading 119 Index 123 FoR joNATHAN SMITH Acknowledgements This book arose out of a need to know more: twenty years of university teaching have kept me in a constant state of curiosity to learn how freshmen come to be as they are. A number of friends who teach English in schools, some of whom I first knew as undergraduates at Cambridge, have encouraged me over the years to visit them where they teach and to see for myself, and my first and most massive debt is to them. Some of the issues I raise here are wider than classroom teaching, and occasionally even wider than literature. But I could not have contemplated this task without the advice and example of those who, like my dedicatee, bear the burden and heat ofthe day. My second debt is to Stjohn's College, Cambridge which, among other indulgences, was a generous host to a teachers' conference on English in Schools in August 197 5. And my third is to Derick Mirfin of Macmillan, who encouraged. Stjohn's College, Cambridge G.W. Introduction This book is for those who teach and study English in upper schools with 'tertiary-level' studies in view, as well as in colleges and univer sities. Its main business is with what literary criticism does in the present age, and with what it can one day hope to do. It appears at a highly delicate moment in education. In the 1960s, which some already call 'The Generation That Was Lied To', the young were told three tall stories: that you can command your native language, and even write it, with little or no systematic training; that literature is less a body of knowledge than a free-play area for personal judgement; and that there is a formula called the New Something which is about to solve the riddle of everything. An age of intellectual patent medicines, it was often more interested in the label on the bottle than in what came out of it. Above all, it was gullible of any thing called new, even when its substance was old. But much of what was then thought new, it is now clear, was nothing of the kind; and the educational spirit of the 1960s, though radical in rhetoric, now looks highly conservative in its effects. It entrenched comfortable prejudices. It is now reasonable to hope that the last quarter of the twentieth century will prove at once more rad ical in substance and more cautious in rhetoric. It is already marked by a spirit of critical rejection. There are parents who reject the pros pect that their children should face the world without having been taught to read or write. There are the young themselves, resentful of the deceit that has been practised on them, who see permissive teach ing as an easy excuse for teaching little or nothing. And there are tax payers who reject the notion that they should sustain elaborate and expensive acts of intellectual self-indulgence. The crisis has meant an awakening, and this book could hardly hope for attentive readers if many were not already alive to a sense of 10 The Discipline of English what teaching in a sympathetic atmosphere can achieve. I judge the present academic temper, like my own, to be sceptical of brand names. The New Criticism that dominated much of Anglo-American criticism in the 1940s and 1950s, and likewise the Nouvelle Critique fashionable in France and elsewhere since the 1960s, can now be seen to have been highly conservative in the assumptions that sustained them. Though they proudly called themselves schools of criticism, they were schools for learning easy answers and parroting them back, and they were ill equipped to sustain any critical analysis brought to bear on themselves. Now that the vogue for easy answers is passing, it is becoming commoner to see literature as complex and of many kinds -and to respect it the more for refusing to yield its secrets all at once. This book is for those in English studies who want to work harder and look harder. The first part of the book includes a review of the present state of things in critical theory: a task that strikes me as inescapable. But it leads to what must look like an imbalance between the first part and the second. I hope that the reader will excuse the contrast between arguments about advanced theoretical questions in the first part, and elementary information about reading and writing in the second. It reflects, after all, the needs of the time. Remote as the Age of Criticism (c. 1945--65) now seems to many young minds, it is not really possible to understand where academic English stands today without con sidering its period of gestation between the wars. It is what it now is because of the pioneers of the early and mid-twentieth century; and though we need not be grateful to them, and may even choose to re sent them a little, we cannot simply be content to remain ignorant of how the subject was made. I remain unrepentantly convinced - as much as when I wrote The Literary Critics (1962) - that no one can know a subject if he knows nothing of its history, or misunderstands that history. And this book is explicitly designed for those who accept that English is a subject or 'discipline', and in the fullest academic sense of those words. For those who see it as a leisure activity-who are, I hope, many-it will seem oddly obsessed with questions about how literature has been taught and studied in this century. But that concern, after all, is proclaimed in its title. My readers are those who teach and study English in schools and universities, or who hope to do so, and I need no convincing that English has many other purposes than that. Since literary criticism is a kind ofliterature, at its best, many of my
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