Today most literary criticism takes place in institutions of higher education, and most literary critics, by virtue of their academic qualifications and institutional employment, are considered (and consider themselves) to be members of a profession. Indeed the widespread use by publishers of the term ‘academic writing’ is an acknowledgement that most of what is called literary criticism is now written for professional and pedagogic purposes. It is rare for the professional critic to address a general (that is a non-academic) audience. A hundred years ago, however, matters were rather different. The professional procedures with which we are now so familiar were then being put into place for the first time, and reaction to them was mixed. In The Importance of Being Earnest Oscar Wilde has Algernon Moncrieff deflate Jack Worthing's intellectual pretensions with the comment: ‘literary criticism is not your forte my dear fellow. Don't try it. You should leave that to people who haven't been at a University.’ Wilde was referring to the newly professionalised academic literary critic, a species from which he constantly and strenuously tried to distance himself. Moreover, he was not unique in his antagonism to professionalisation. For the next thirty years or so a number of critics, located for the most part outside institutional structures, also attempted to resist the discourses of the new academic professionalism. They did so in a variety of ways: they adopted different styles and objectives, wrote on different topics, but principally they addressed their work to a different audience.

Generally speaking, text-editors have had a low profile in English, especially in the recent debates about the future of the discipline. It is not simply that the ideas of textual scholarship and the interests of text-editors have been overlooked, although doubtless this has been the case; rather the work which editors do, and more importantly, the theoretical insights which their work has generated, have not generally been seen as relevant to the status of the discipline. However, logically speaking, text-criticism should enjoy a massive authority in English studies because the issues it addresses are fundamental. Why do we edit texts at all; why do we edit the texts which we do edit; and, how do we edit those texts? All of these questions implicate, in different ways and to varying degrees, the contested concepts which we have discussed in the previous chapters, those of literary value and literary identity, authority and canonicity. In other words, as Hershel Parker has pointed out, text-editing, far from being marginal to English studies, forces us to confront the central problems in the discipline.

It is broadly agreed that we need standard editions of works. However this agreement seems to rest on an assumption that text-editing and literary criticism are two distinct activities. So while there may be objections to attempts by literary critics to establish a simple authoritative reading of a text, there is rarely any unease about the principle of establishing a single authoritative text. (There are of course many specific objections to editorial decisions about specific works.)

Put briefly, the subject of this book is what has recently been termed the ‘crisis in English’; put less polemically, it is concerned with the current state (and status) of English studies in higher education. The topic is of course not new; indeed, it has produced a veritable corpus of essays, books and lectures on both sides of the Atlantic. Although the particular forms of these debates have been different in Britain and the United States, they nevertheless have many issues in common. In our opening chapters we discuss some of the local differences between Britain and America, but our main interest lies in addressing the ground common to both countries – in short, the issue of value and politics in English studies. In most accounts of English a simple but important fact has frequently been overlooked: that within higher education the study of English constitutes a discipline of knowledge. The contribution of the present book to the controversy over English lies in its attempt to locate that controversy within the context of disciplinary knowledge in general, and this, we maintain, enables us to point out some of the limitations of recent discussions about the nature of the subject. More precisely it makes clear that some of the issues which have been so heatedly debated – particularly those concerning the ideology or politics of literary criticism – have been fundamentally mischaracterized.

This conviction that English studies should not be viewed as an isolated case has led us to devote several chapters to developing a general thesis about the nature and function of disciplines of knowledge.

The distinction made in the previous chapter between the intellectual and institutional dimensions of disciplinary knowledge might appear to be a crude one. Nevertheless it provides a useful framework for understanding the social nature of such knowledge. There are two ways in which social factors affect the production of disciplinary knowledge. The first concerns day-to- day decisions about funding, resources, and so on; these are primarily institutional decisions in the sense that they serve primarily institutional interests. For this reason, as we suggested in the previous chapter, they can indeed be understood in institutional terms. The second way in which the social impinges upon the production of disciplinary knowledge concerns the intellectual preconditions for the foundation of disciplines of knowledge in the first instance, and the mechanisms of intellectual authority which safeguard the prestige of the knowledge produced by a discipline. In other words, the social impinges upon decisions about both the status and the grounds of disciplinary knowledge; such decisions, that is, are never individual or arbitrary. In the case of the grounds (or foundations) of disciplinary knowledge, these decisions concern agreements about social utility and specialization (terms which we define later); in the case of its status (or its mechanisms of authority), they concern agreements about the implementation of a formal structure by which theories may be tested or evaluated. In both cases these decisions are distinguished by virtue of the fact that they cannot be identified in any straightforward way with the interests of institutions or of a particular institution (in the way that the first kind of social decisions can be).

Today it is virtually impossible for practising critics not to be aware of some need to ‘justify’ what they do – to ‘theorize’ their practices. Indeed theory has now become a subject in its own right in English studies, with its own undergraduate courses, postgraduate degrees, text-books and so on. The rapid growth of the ‘theory industry’, however, has not passed unnoticed or unchallenged; along with the enthusiasm for this new theoretical abundance there has in recent years been something of a countervailing movement. United by a general feeling of dissatisfaction rather than by any particular thesis, an increasing number of critics have been calling for a halt or, at the very least, a pause to take stock of the current situation. In their view the popularity and growth of the theory industry, far from reinvigorating the discipline, have led to what they see as a ‘crisis’ in which the ‘traditional’ conception of English seems on the point of disappearance.

Within this countervailing movement it is possible to identify two groups. On the one hand there are those critics who, while accepting the value and necessity of explicit theorizing, have nevertheless voiced some reservations about the ways in which theory is currently used in English studies. In particular they have pointed to the vexed relationship which now obtains between theory and pedagogy, and have suggested that there might be some important and (as yet) unresolved issues concerning the relationship between theory and practice in the discipline. On the other hand there is a lobby which may be broadly characterized as ‘anti-theory’, although a distinction needs to be made between two positions within it.

Current debates about the status or authority of English and literary studies have at their centre a controversy about the nature and function of value in literary judgements. Indeed a dissatisfaction with the value-judgements embodied in ‘traditional’ literary criticism has been the point of departure in programmes for reforming the discipline. A critique of value, that is, provides the fundamental rationale for change. We have argued that these programmes for reform in both Britain and the United States take no account of the general conditions (intellectual and social) for the establishment of disciplines of knowledge. A more fundamental question is whether or not such reforms are needed in English studies in the first place; or rather, whether the critiques of value which underwrite proposals for reform are themselves valid.

There are two main issues involved. The first concerns the correctness of the description of the values allegedly embodied in English – more specifically, the claim that all literary judgements are value-judgements, and that all value-judgements in English are ideological or political. Our suggestion will be that literary judgements are indeed value-laden, but that they also have a basis in fact, and the values which they embody are not simply ideological. The second issue is whether the presence of value-judgements in English (or literary) disciplines is a justification for reforming them. How does English compare with other disciplines of knowledge in respect of its value-judgements?

Our motivation for writing this book came from our experience as teachers of English at civic universities in Britain. In particular it was conceived as a response to a number of questions which students, with varying degrees of precision, ask about their subject: what does it mean to ‘do’ English, and to ‘do’ theory; and how does theory in English relate to their practice of reading texts? Our interest in trying to answer these questions was initially prompted by a number of essays: ‘Usefulness in Literary History’ (British Journal of Aesthetics, 31 (1991)); ‘Re-writing Re-reading English’ (English, 40 (1990)); ‘Critical Opinion: English in Crisis?’ (Essays in Criticism, 39 (1989)); ‘Critical Opinion: English in Crisis? (2)’ (Essays in Criticism, 40 (1990)); ‘The “Literary”, Aestheticism and the Founding of English’ (English Literature in Transition, 33 (1990)). These articles rehearsed in a schematic form some of our preliminary ideas. However, the present book, while it incorporates some of these earlier points, is largely new, and most of the material in it is published for the first time.

We are conscious of the fact that we write as British academics. This experience prevents us from laying claim to comprehensiveness, and it would be over-ambitious to pretend an exhaustive knowledge of pedagogy in other countries, particularly the United States. However, it is clear to us that teachers of literature in the United States and Britain encounter a large number of similar problems, particularly those concerning politics and value, and we have tried to identify and analyse these areas of common interest.

Literary history has two basic elements: a subject-matter, ‘literary’ works, which distinguishes it from other kinds of history; and a historiography, the theoretical principles and methodology which determine the kind and status of historical accounts of those works. Any attempt to rewrite traditional literary history involves contesting one or both of these elements. Arguments which question traditional literary history have frequently assumed that political decisions underlie the identification of works as ‘literature’. These arguments hold that as literary identity is a value-laden concept, so to designate works as literature necessarily involves endorsing certain values (which are generally defined as political), which in their turn become silently encoded in histories of those works. In this view it follows that the aims of any new or revised literary history should be to uncover both those values and the processes by which they are endorsed and perpetuated by historians; it would aim, that is, to make manifest the politics which underlie traditional literary history. In broad terms, this procedure has been the route of most Marxist and feminist rewritings of traditional literary history.

Another and quite different critique of the subject-matter of traditional literary history is that implicit in theories such as structuralism and deconstruction. Once again, the value-laden nature of literary identity is implicated in these critiques, but in a way which is quite distinct from Marxist and feminist rewritings of literary history.

To maintain its academic authority English (or literary) studies has to conform to a widely accepted set of criteria and conditions which distinguish disciplines of knowledge from bodies of knowledge. English has, that is, to possess a clearly defined object of study, a set of specialist practices appropriate to explaining it, a theory (or theories) of those practices, and ways of evaluating theories. Our overall argument has been that recent radical critiques of the discipline have largely ignored the existence of these criteria and conditions, and as a result have focused not on the nature of the knowledge produced by English studies, but upon its function. The problems which we have described in all the programmes to reform the discipline derive from this failure to distinguish between the general conditions for disciplinary knowledge and the functions of the knowledge produced by particular disciplines. The conflation of the institutional and the intellectual, the epistemological with the political, described in chapter I, have their origins in this failure; so too do the problems produced by both the misunderstanding of the role of theory within disciplines and the contradictory nature of multicultural reforms of the canon. Critiques of the knowledge produced in English studies invariably rest upon the perception that such knowledge is value-laden. Here once more a failure to distinguish between the nature and function of disciplinary knowledge has led to a misunderstanding of how such value-judgements operate. We maintained in chapter 3 that problems of value are überhaupt problems; they are a condition of all knowledge and therefore of all disciplines of knowledge.