The Many-Headed Hydra of Theory vs. the Unifying Mission of Teaching

Abstract

English professors humanized world with thrice-weekly doses of literary instruction, exchanged witty conversation and recondite literary allusions at Friday afternoon sherry hour, and generally agreed with each other about which books to teach, how to teach them, and importance of teaching them. This golden age must have ended right before I entered field. My whole history within suggests that getting English professionals to agree in large numbers about almost anything is nearly as difficult as herding cats or training king cobras to hiss Hallelujah Chorus in four-part harmony. I do not intend to rehearse causes of our winter's discontent-Gerald Graff and others have amply analyzed our disciplinary doings and undoings-but it is useful to observe that even when we are merely describing the condition of our discipline (rather than analyzing it), our constant themes are loss and gain, change and resistance to change, and nature of professional and intellectual anxieties produced by all of above. John Bassett in a College English essay thoughtfully identifies what he takes to be major changes [that] have discipline, most significant of which is surely our redirection toward becoming another kind of altogether: the explosion of interest in theory.., .has been key to movement of literary study toward social sciences (321; emphasis added). Bassett shows steelier nerves than most of us in his willingness to understate our disciplinary disunity. He sees us as being merely redirected