Employment of English. Michael Berube
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proposal, which, like all modest proposals, is much too radical for realization. It may be possible for English departments to foreground “literature” in the restricted belles-lettres sense in which the term has been understood in this century at the same time that literary study incorporates some of the concerns of cultural studies. It may be possible for English departments to make some claim on the interests of the professional-managerial class even as the needs of that class move further and further away from the Beowulf-to-Virginia Woolf canon of English literature. It may even be possible for English departments to expand their concern with the English language while becoming less . . . well, English in the process.
Notice if you will the odd fact that in debates over the place of cultural studies, critics rarely inquire into the place of contemporary writing in English. Even my own department’s bylaws, as I noted above, consider “literatures in English” a thing apart from “cultural studies.” All too often, when contemporary writing in English is taught (if it is taught at all) in literature departments, it comes under the heading of Postcolonial Literatures, World Lit, or (still worse) Third World Lit. In my own department, it is far and away the most underrepresented arena of writing; one of the stranger moments in our departmental deliberations, in fact, came just after some of my colleagues were finally convinced that “cultural studies” was a fair description of what some of us are doing at Illinois—when we then realized that we had advertised ourselves as offering “literatures in English” but only had two faculty members who had ever offered courses in literatures neither English nor American.
Reed Way Dasenbrock originally made this suggestion some years ago, before “cultural studies” had become a name for a fear and a desire, and I want to update his proposal and toss it onto the table just in time for the millennium. In Dasenbrock’s terms, the literature curriculum is currently organized around a “centripetal” canon centered firmly in the British Isles—the canon bequeathed us largely by F. R. Leavis and Scrutiny, “from which,” as Terry Eagleton has famously written, “criticism has never quite recovered” (28). This canon contains many of the greatest writers ever to inhabit and expand the English language, of course, but it also does double duty as an agent of Anglo-American national affiliation: just as the New Right likes to pretend that the United States has some deep genetic connection with Periclean Athens, so too do the Anglophile supporters of the centripetal canon like to pretend that you cannot understand “literatures in English” unless you have first completed the “coverage” requirements that will acquaint you with Gawain, the Miller’s Tale, and MacFlecknoe—not to mention the three nineteenth-century British novelists who will secure your employment by Milton Rosenberg at WGN in Chicago. Yet it is not entirely clear, at the very least, that the British canon before 1790 (exclusive of Shakespeare, of course, who not only is our language’s greatest writer but also cannot be challenged in the slightest without provoking a national scandal) is quite as deserving of the curricular place it now occupies in the United States; and it is not entirely clear why, if we now spend so much disciplinary time on British literature, we could not just as well (in some future incarnation) devote more of our time and energies to African, Indian, Caribbean, Australian, and Canadian writing in English.
One signal advantage of Dasenbrock’s formulation is that it reshuffles but does not entirely jettison the centripetal canon with which we now work:
In place of the centripetal canon oriented toward the England of Pope, Fielding, Richardson, and Johnson, a centrifugal canon might focus on Swift, Defoe, Smollett and Boswell. This is a slight change, perhaps, as all these figures are recognized to be important and are placed in the canon somewhere. But as one moves closer and closer to the present, a centripetal, Englandcentered canon captures fewer and fewer of the important figures, whereas a centrifugal canon focused on the totality of writing in English has no difficulty at all in representing the panorama of world writing in English. . . . Only a centrifugal conception of literature in English that embraces [George] Lamming and [J. MJ Coetzee as well as Shakespeare and Defoe can place all these works in the juxtapositions they deserve. (73–74)
Yet even as I cite these words I can hear the cries of my Augustan, Restoration, Renaissance/Early Modern, and medievalist colleagues, all of whom will insist that my modest proposal will marginalize their enterprises still further—at a time when most students are filing into their classes only because of their department’s requirement that English majors take x number of credits in courses prior to 1800 exclusive of Shakespeare. Their concerns are entirely justified. Interestingly, some years ago when I taught Dasenbrock’s essay as part of a graduate seminar on “canonicity and institutional criticism,” my students almost uniformly dismissed Dasenbrock as too timidly reformist: his centrifugal canon would shuffle the deck a little bit, they allowed, but wouldn’t alter the curriculum significantly enough to be called a strong form of canon revision. Politely but firmly, I pointed out to my students that our department contained almost no faculty qualified to teach contemporary world writers in English, and that Dasenbrock’s proposal would therefore have the truly radical effect of compelling Illinois (and not Illinois alone) to alter completely its hiring policies in the future. It’s one (relatively easy) thing to shuffle the canon, I suggested to my students; it’s quite another (much harder) thing to shuffle the professoriate. The objection that the centrifugal canon would make the English department more “presentist,” then, seems to me a valid point of concern—not least for those faculty who specialize in early periods of British literature.
To those faculty I can respond only by appealing to history, by way of John Guillory, who notes correctly that canon revision is—and has been for some time—a form of disciplinary “modernization”:
The objective of canonical revision entails in practice shifting the weight of the syllabus from older works to modern works, since what is in question for us are new social identities and new writers. In fact, the history of the literary curriculum has always been characterized by a tendency to modernize the syllabus at the expense of older works. (15)
And if the history of the literary curriculum is in part a history of the relation between literary study and the distribution of cultural capital, well, then, if Buchi Emecheta, Salman Rushdie, Nadine Gordimer, and Michael Ondaatje will soon be displacing Pope and Dryden the way Faulkner and Fitzgerald did fifty years ago, perhaps our discipline will be all the healthier for it.
There is another plausible objection to this modest proposal; this one comes not from faculty in British literature before 1800 but from faculty who now teach world literature. A “literatures in English” paradigm, some might claim, represents one more attempt on the part of the so-called First World to shore up its economy by drawing on the resources of the so-called Third. In the case of literatures in English, the situation might arise that U.S. universities would be training American citizens to teach African literature, thereby maintaining one branch of the professional-managerial class (the professoriate) by providing them with raw material imported from “developing” nations. Certainly, a curriculum with expanded offerings in Canadian, Irish, Caribbean, African, or Australian literature would necessarily raise the question of whether U.S. colleges would hire a given number of Canadian, Irish, Caribbean, African, or Australian scholars as teachers. At the very least, such a curriculum would provoke the question of how and why literatures can travel across national boundaries more easily than can some literary critics. But this potential problem for the curriculum can also be a potential source of strength: whereas the original institutionalization of the literature curriculum, in the United Kingdom and the United States, had clearly served the purposes of nationalism and particularism, a “literatures in English” curriculum explicitly presents nationalism not as an assumption but as an object of interrogation—whether Joan Didion and Ngugi wa Thiong’o are meditating on the fate of national identity or James Joyce and George Lamming are exploring the politics of exile. It is all but impossible, I suggest, to make “literatures in English” into an instrument of national solidarity and self-definition, and the cosmopolitanism of such a curriculum, like its presentism, may be more of a benefit than it now appears.5
Yet the relation between “world literature in English” and “transnational cultural studies” is not straightforward,