The Two Cultures of English by Maxwell Jason;

Author:Maxwell, Jason; [Maxwell, Jason]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 2)
Published: 2018-03-06T16:00:00+00:00

CHAPTER 4

Toward an Aesthetics without Literature

The previous chapter documented Rhetoric and Composition’s antagonistic attitude toward literary studies that, while justified in certain respects, blinded its practitioners from fully grasping their field’s current role within the university. The field’s commitment to an “archival politics” has prevented it from seeing the full range of forces both inside and outside of the discipline that have configured it over half a century. The chapter concluded with the problematic convergence of Rhetoric and Composition and the discourse of university administrators, a convergence that Donna Strickland’s The Managerial Unconscious intimates has long existed. In this chapter, I want to extend the previous analysis by examining the kinds of pedagogical reforms that correspond to the complicated dynamics among literary studies, literary theory, Rhetoric and Composition, and the increasingly corporate university.

As a way of doing so, I examine two important critical works published in the early 1990s that have become touchstones within English studies: Susan Miller’s 1991 Textual Carnivals and John Guillory’s 1993 Cultural Capital. Textual Carnivals won three prominent book awards (the Modern Language Association’s Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize, the Conference on College Composition and Communication’s Outstanding Book Award, and the Association of Teachers of Advanced Composition’s W. Ross Winterowd Award), while Cultural Capital won the René Wellek Prize from the American Comparative Literature Association. Over the last two decades, both books have received hundreds of citations and have solidified the reputations of their authors. Beyond being published at roughly the same moment and subsequently showered with accolades, both books attempt to theorize the entirety of English studies in the contemporary university and its future direction. Textual Carnivals presents a sustained analysis of the history between literary studies and composition studies, and while Cultural Capital does not invest much of its energy exploring the specifics of composition studies, this discourse nevertheless makes a significant appearance at crucial moments in his argument. In many ways, Textual Carnivals and Cultural Capital might also be conceived of as fairly early texts addressing what is now commonly known as “the crisis in the humanities.”

Given all these similarities, it is striking how differently Miller and Guillory assess the state of English at the end of the twentieth century. Whereas Miller’s Textual Carnivals conceives of composition’s low status as an unavoidable effect of its relationship to literary studies, Guillory’s Cultural Capital regards composition as the new center of English studies, replacing an obsolete literary studies. I argue that Miller’s account differs so drastically from Guillory’s because she understands composition’s status within the university as wholly determined by its connection with literary studies rather than a host of additional forces. Her subsequent rejection of literary studies leads her to embrace an ideology of immediate practicality that may actually work against her explicitly articulated progressive agenda. Not only does this ideology dovetail with the short-term logics of contemporary capitalism that underwrite the university but it also threatens the long-term viability of English studies by reducing its curriculum to a set of fairly mechanical service courses.

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