Description: Offers historical and present-day perspectives on what English departments do, and how and why they do it.
Review Quotes:
"The collection successfully exposes the constructedness of the discipline in interesting historical specificity, and makes worthwhile reading for anyone engaged in reflection about what we do as professors of English." -- symploke
"Highly informed, fascinating, and enlightening--taken together, these essays tell an absorbing story of the shifts in the functioning of the discipline and of the changing roles of teachers, researchers, and intellectuals associated with the field over the past two centuries." -- Karlis Racevskis, author of Modernity's Pretenses: Making Reality Fit Reason from Candide to the Gulag
"Though English departments have recently been critiqued and deconstructed, there still seems something inevitable and eternal about many of their habits. These well-informed essays offer an eye-opening picture of how virtually everything we take for granted about 'English, ' from the conventions of research to the marginality of composition to the idea of 'literature' itself, was once conceived very differently and thus might be again." -- Gerald Graff, University of Illinois at Chicago
"A number of Ph.D.-granting departments in the country are doing a significantly better job of educating graduate students about the daily realities of university work, but students need to know much more about why these so-called pragmatic concerns have become pragmatic, about what conditions of change are driving the reorganization of the university, and about what interventions might be possible. This book is a step toward providing that knowledge, in eminently readable form." -- Evan Watkins, author of Work Time: English Departments and the Circulation of Cultural Value