Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley door pickup 10am - 7pm 3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
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  • Open Daily: 10am - 10pm
    Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm

    3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
    612-822-4611

Open Daily: 10am - 10pm | Alley-side Pickup: 10am - 7pm
3038 Hennepin Ave Minneapolis, MN
612-822-4611
Disciplining English: Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives

Disciplining English: Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives

Shumway, David R.
Dionne, Craig

Paperback

Literary CriticismGeneral Education

ISBN10: 0791453669
ISBN13: 9780791453667
Publisher: State University of New York Press
Published: Jul 17 2002
Pages: 237
Weight: 0.70
Height: 0.52 Width: 6.02 Depth: 8.96
Language: English

Offers historical and present-day perspectives on what English departments do, and how and why they do it.

These provocative essays explore the unwritten, often unacknowledged codes, conventions, and ideologies overseeing the evolution and current practice of English as a discipline. The first section of the book offers historical perspectives: how composition became distinguished from literature, how key intellectuals shaped the discipline, and how various specialties-Renaissance literature, American literature, theory-became subfields. The second section focuses on how certain aesthetic categories of art and universal experience persist today in the actual teaching and writing of English. While it is fashionable to say that we are living in the age of poststructuralism, or that literary theory has delivered us from idealized conceptions of authorship and inherent meaning, these essays examine how these conceptions nevertheless remain and are transmitted: in different types of classroom settings, in textbooks, and in the self-fashioning of academic careers. At a time when the role and function of English departments have become matters of both academic and public debate, this book will be a welcome resource for students, professionals, and anyone interested in the Culture Wars of the past two decades.

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