Mayers, Tim. (Re)Writing Craft : Composition, Creative Writing, and the Future of English Studies. Pittsburgh: U. Pittsburgh Press, 2005.
(Re)Writing Craft focuses on the gap that exists in many English departments between creative writers and compositionists on one hand, and literary scholars on the other, in an effort to radically transform the way English studies are organized and practiced today. In proposing a new form of writing he calls "craft criticism," Mayers, himself a compositionist and creative writer, explores the connections between creative writing and composition studies programs, which currently exist as separate fields within the larger and more amorphous field of English studies. If creative writing and composition studies are brought together in productive dialogue, they can, in his view, succeed in inverting the common hierarchy in English departments that privileges interpretation of literature over the teaching of writing.
McComiskey, Bruce. English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s). Urbana, IL: NCTE Press, 2006.
Well-known scholars in the field explore the important qualities and functions of English studies' constituent disciplines--Ellen Barton on linguistics and discourse analysis, Janice Lauer on rhetoric and composition, Katharine Haake on creative writing, Richard Taylor on literature and literary criticism, Amy Elias on critical theory and cultural studies, and Robert Yagelski on English education--and the productive differences and similarities among them that define English studies' continuing importance.
Faculty and students in both undergraduate and graduate courses will find the volume an invaluable overview of an increasingly fragmented field, as will department administrators who are responsible for evaluating the contributions of diverse faculty members but whose academic training may be specific to one discipline.
Each chapter of English Studies is an argument for the value--the right to equal status--of each individual discipline among all English studies disciplines, yet the book is also an argument for disciplinary integration.
Miller, Thomas P. The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns. Pittsburgh: U. Pittsburgh Press, 2010.
Thomas P. Miller defines college English studies as literacy studies and examines how it has evolved in tandem with broader developments in literacy and the literate. He maps out “four corners” of English departments: literature, language studies, teacher education, and writing studies. Miller identifies their development with broader changes in the technologies and economies of literacy that have redefined what students write and read, which careers they enter, and how literature represents their experiences and aspirations.
Miller locates the origins of college English studies in the colonial transition from a religious to an oratorical conception of literature. A belletristic model of literature emerged in the nineteenth century in response to the spread of the “penny” press and state-mandated schooling. Since literary studies became a common school subject, professors of literature have distanced themselves from teachers of literacy. In the Progressive era, that distinction came to structure scholarly organizations such as the MLA, while NCTE was established to develop more broadly based teacher coalitions. In the twentieth century New Criticism came to provide the operating assumptions for the rise of English departments, until those assumptions became critically overloaded with the crash of majors and jobs that began in 1970s and continues today.
For models that will help the discipline respond to such challenges, Miller looks to comprehensive departments of English that value studies of teaching, writing, and language as well as literature. According to Miller, departments in more broadly based institutions have the potential to redress the historical alienation of English departments from their institutional base in work with literacy. Such departments have a potentially quite expansive articulation apparatus. Many are engaged with writing at work in public life, with schools and public agencies, with access issues, and with media, ethnic, and cultural studies. With the privatization of higher education, such pragmatic engagements become vital to sustaining a civic vision of English studies and the humanities generally.
Ostergaard, Lori, Jeff Ludwig, Jim Nugent. Transforming English Studies: New Voices in an Emerging Genre. Parlor Press, 2009.
TRANSFORMING ENGLISH STUDIES: NEW VOICES IN AN EMERGING GENRE Is a concerned response to the disciplinary crises-both real and imagined-that threaten the viability of contemporary English Studies. These crises have been variously cited as the lack of employment prospects for English Studies PhDs, the decline in English majors, the corporatization of the university, the crunch in academic publishing, widespread budget cutbacks, the varying perceptions of the value of scholarly work, and the field's inequitable labor practices. Inspired by the work of Stephen North, TRANSFORMING ENGLISH STUDIES contributes to a new and emerging genre of English Studies scholarship: the genre of self-reflexive disciplinary critique. TRANSFORMING ENGLISH STUDIES turns our attention to the field itself as an object of study and provides what Gary A. Olson calls in his forward to this book a "self-conscious, meta-level examination of the discipline qua discipline." Bringing together scholars from multiple fields, TRANSFORMING ENGLISH STUDIES offers polyvocal and transformative approaches to field-wide reform that go beyond preserving the disciplinary status quo. Instead, the contributors to this collection are distinguished by their insightful interrogation of the discipline's seemingly mundane assumptions, their respect for how local contexts influence reform, and their acknowledgement of the diversity of our (inter)discipline.
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