Richard Poirier
WHAT IS ENGLISH STUDIES,
AND IF YOU KNOW WHAT THAT IS,
WHAT IS ENGLISH LITERATURE?
Some measure of distortion is probably inescapable in any
effort to "teach" literature in a classroom, a relatively new and strange
thing to do anyway. Still, it's possible to be discriminating even about
necessary distortions, and those occurring in the classroom study of
literature increase in direct proportion, I suspect, to the claims made
for it's transforming the lives of teachers, students, communities and
even, such is the ambition, the shape of history. What I'm referring
to, in part, ,are current demands, not new for being current, that
the enterprise of English studies be made more "relevant." The term
is in itself a cause of confusion. For if English studies is to become
more "relevant" to anything, shouldn't it
be
first of all made more
"relevant" to English literature? And yet before that can happen,
isn't it necessary to decide what English literature is (if you believe,
as
I don't, that it's a "thing") or what you want it to
be
(if you're
convinced, as I am, that it's an invention and can be reinvented at
convenience) .
Questions about "relevance" presume some agreement about the
shape of that invention and therefore about the resources in it now
to
be
committed in some new way. Yet prior to any plans for
investment in "relevance" is the persistent problem of none of us
knowing-I'm including myself as a teacher in these strictures-–
what there is to
be
invested. There's no agreement, as there is in
most other academic disciplines, even about the possible sources of
revenue-Smollett as well as Cleaver?-because there's no agree–
ment about
how
Wf'
are to look at the terrain, much less how any
resources are to
be
gotten from it. English literature doesn't exist
