Sunday, April 29, 2007

English Studies' Anchorage, Flotilla

Bruce McComiskey begins his introduction to English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s) with a striking anecdote about the annual Raft debate among scholars from various disciplines at Alabama-Birmingham. The Raft debates start with a sinking-boat scenario. The main ship is in crisis, and all of the passengers have hurried into lifeboats, saving just one spot for a final survivor. The quandary, however, is that three passengers remain on the sinking ship, and all of them are professors at UAB who must vie with the others for the final seat on the life raft by making the most persuasive arguments for their discipline. The arguments--a braid of humor, deliberate provocation, and refutation, frame the event, which unfolds in front of colleagues and students. Audience applause determines the winner. The scenario, in effect, contributes a sense of urgency to an otherwise playful (if viciously candid) cross-disciplinary interchange. A professor of public health defeated McComiskey (who was representing English Studies) in 1999, but the outcome was inevitably the result of disciplinary incoherence, a problem the book sets out, following the early pages, to resolve: "What exactly is English studies?" (2).

The bulk of the introduction is divided into three sections: English Studies in Historical Context, The Problem of Specialization, and The New English Studies. For my own purposes, I'm attending primarily to "The Problem of Specialization," as I intend in one chunk of the dissertation to address specialization and its forms of relief (if they're not bona fide remedies). The rest of the collection is organized according to fields and subfields more or less belonging to the super-category of English Studies: Linguistics and Discourse Analysis, Rhetoric and Composition, Creative Writing, Literature and Literary Analysis, Critical Theory and Cultural Studies, and English Education.

I find the sinking-ship scenario striking because there's a certain shock in considering how my own defense of English Studies above any other discipline would take shape. I'm not alarmed at the thought of defending or explaining the work I do, but it would be especially difficult to do so while at the same time disparaging the work of another field. I mean that I know little enough about surrounding disciplines (a problem of specialization) that the spontaneous assertions I could make about the work of most others in the academy would be based at best on myths, stereotypes, and rumors. Perhaps in direct proportion to specialization, all disciplines suffer from obfuscation and misunderstanding. Meanwhile, the ship bobbed in the on-rushing waters....

I have another reason for taking note of the sinking-boat scenario, a reason I will say a few things about tomorrow (or later in the week).

Posted by Derek Mueller at April 29, 2007 10:45 PM to Reading Notes