The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns (Composition, Literacy, and Culture)

The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns (Composition, Literacy, and Culture)

Thomas P. Miller
$77.00
Publication Date: January 9th, 2011
Publisher:
University of Pittsburgh Press
ISBN:
9780822961161
Pages:
368
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Description

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.

About the Author

Thomas P. Miller is associate provost for faculty affairs at the University of Arizona in Tucson. He is the author of The Formation of College English: Rhetoric and Belles Lettres in the British Cultural Provinces, a winner of the Mina P. Shaughnessy Prize.

Praise for The Evolution of College English: Literacy Studies from the Puritans to the Postmoderns (Composition, Literacy, and Culture)

“This is the most comprehensive history of English studies in the United States ever written. Fortunately, it is also the best. It will not only set the standard for histories of the field but also, in many ways, the agenda for the field into the post-postmodern era.”
—David Russell, Iowa State University



“Calling new work ‘ambitious’ often implies that its reach exceeded its grasp. But Miller’s new history of English studies in the United States successfully accounts for transhistorical literate practices in and around the field. His work remembers that English is a vernacular and thus remembers the constitutive force that emerged from religious, political, economic, multiple-gendered, and specifically schooled moments to become ‘English’ as a profession. Miller simultaneously expands the range and corrects the biases of previous histories of our profession, even his own, in an instantaneously sensible paradigm we need at another crucial moment, one redefining its legitimacy.”
—Susan J. Miller, University of Utah

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