530
RICHARD POIRIER
fiercely imperialistic, and the imperialism has taken the form of an
inveterate trendiness. I am aware that the term "trendy" has an espe–
cially pejorative force for certain traditionalists who are usually inno–
cent of the tradition they represent. Trendiness can be said to have
created the positions now occupied by many of them. The illusion that
English Studies belongs to nature, that there is ever or has ever been
such a thing as an approved body of delimited material for which
English Studies was solely responsible, and that certain people called
scholars knew just what to do with this material-these illusions are
sustained by people who are the benefactors in their positions of
academic preferment of a profession which has been so much the
"swinger" of the academy as
to
have been, over the decades, often the
largest, most powerful and most popular in any given university or
college. Until the early part of this century, especially in England, the
mere idea of teaching literature written in one's native tongue
-presumably one learned all about that at home-was thought, ex–
cept in a few instances like University College London, quite "trendy"
indeed. One studied the language and literature of the mother coun–
try, culturally speaking. That meant Greek and Latin for the English
and consistent with that principle it was for the Americans that the
study of English literature first became a widely based accredited
activity. Even then it was for some time thought "trendy" in most
places to offer courses in fiction, and until the thirties contemporary
literature was considered unusually innovative.
But the exceptions came to prove the rule as English Studies
picked up the momentum which brought it roughly to the form in
which it has been recognized since 1945, the expansion since that date
being implicit and predictable from the kind that preceded it. Of late,
English professors have been adding to their responsibilities at a rate
exorbitant when compared even with so exorbitant a past. On one
side, the so-called radical faction can claim that the domain of English
Studies isn't even now inclusive enough and that the literature of the
past needs to be reassessed, some of it relegated to a deserved obscur–
ity, in the light of political, psychological, and other disciplines. On
the other; the traditional faction claims dominion over the culture of
the past, the present, and because it claims to have found the essential
continuities of culture-its potential future. They would claim, with
Northrop Frye, that academic criticism has at last become a "structure
