Anglo-American Literature
2nd Semester 2013-2014 School of Arts and Sciences Literature 324
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The Transformation of English and American Literary Studies Literary studies in English are a period of rapid and sometimes disorienting change. English and American literary studies were held together by an uneasy alliance of older historicists and new critics who were willing to suspend some of their disagreements for the sake of creating graduate programs that combined historical “coverage with training in close reading.
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Redrawing the Boundaries
now, however, even in those graduate and undergraduate programs where this consensus is still honored, there is an uneasy feeling that these requirements and the assumptions on which they are premised, belong to a vanishing order of things.
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Edited by: Greenbalt and Gunn
Redrawing the boundaries attempts to remedy this situation without pretending that the field can be comprehended within a single, cohesive frame. Questions: Why are such maps made? On what principles are they based? Who makes and maintains them? What institutions and practices do they serve?
How does one go about examining, challenging or replacing them?
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boundaries
The boundaries to be reckoned within literary studies ranges from national, linguistic, historical, generational and geographical to racial, ethnic, social, sexual, political, ethical and religious.
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demarcation lines Moreover, literary studies have many demarcation lines that differentiate reading from writing, print cultures from oral, canonical traditions from heretical, elite cultures from vernacular, high art from popular.
These boundaries can be crossed, confused, consolidated and collapsed: they can be revised, reconceived, redesigned or replaced. The one thing they cannot be in literary studies is entirely abolished.
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The frontier
“The frontier was that which, etymologically and politically, 'stood [to face] an enemy. This military frontier, implying bellicose expansion and zonal defence, stood opposed to the linear boundary or line of demarcation – the limits of two jurisdictions or territories – p. sahlins.”
jurisditional boundaries are generally settled by treaty. Criticism, for example possesses written and unwritten treatise
subject, as all treaties are, to challenge, rapture and abrogation but for a while at least undesrtood by all parties as binding.
The sense of solidarity that builds up around something linked deconstruction, the new historicism, or cultural criticism or around early modern, 18th century or modernist studies, is largely an illusion.