More Notes on "English for Farmer’s Sons"

Can this be used for framing for the article that I’m going to write from this chapter:

The unusual success of the Department of Rhetoric (at a time when, according to most historians, rhetoric was declining in academia) was a result not only of Denney’s progressive ideals and his influence as dean of the College of Arts, Philosophy, and Science, but also of Ohio State’s commitment to land-grant values of practical and democratic education. While practical courses of instruction were eschewed at more elite institutions as remedial or unscientific, they remained integral to Ohio State’s definition of itself from its founding well into the twentieth century. (132)

Mendenhall, Annie. "Joseph V. Denney, the Land-Grant Mission, and Rhetorical Education at Ohio State: An Institutional History." College English 74.2 (Nov 2011): 131-156. Print.

MY QUESTION: The question is about philological study during the closing of the 19th century and into the early 20th. Was what happened at NHC a model to replace or an alternative approach to philological study. I need a timeline to understand the evolution of literary studies during this time.

• 1883: Modern Language Association founded
• 1903: MLA closes down its Pedagogical section
• 1911: NCTE founded
• 1914: Communications Association of America founded, speech people split off from English (for more on speech and its relation to English, see Miller, p. 147)--Speech Association of America formed
• 1916: Mission of MLA clarified to 'research' (for more on the MLA and pedagogy vs. research see Miller, p. 135)

• 1920: T.S. Elliot publishes Sacred Wood: Essays on Poetry and Criticism
• 1924: founding of Linguistic Society of America
• 1929: I.A. Richards publishes Practical Criticism
• 1937: John Crowe Ransom publishes "Criticism, Inc." ("Professors of literature are learned but not critical men . . . . Nevertheless it is from the professors of literature . . . that I should hope eventually for the erection of intelligent standards of criticism. It is their business . . . . Perhaps I use a distasteful figure, but I have the idea that what we need is Criticism, Inc., or Criticism, Ltd." qtd. in Herrnstein Smith, p. 6)
• 1938: Clench Brooks and Robert Penn Warren publish Understanding Poetry

Reading back through The Evolution of College English and puzzling over some things Miller is saying...

The profession of college English teaching has been shaped by oppositions that emerged a century ago, most notably the historical opposition of liberal and professional education. This opposition worked to undercut the professionalism of teaching... The classics had served to prepare students for the learned professions, but liberal and professional studies were set in opposition to each other as professors of classical literature and languages came to adopt a studied impracticality to distance themselves from those who looked to education to gain practical advancement, including the rising numbers of working-class and women students looking to teaching as a means to social advancement. (123)

I think that this passage provides an opportunity to push back, for framing, for clearing a space for my work on UNH at the turn of the century because its hard not to feel that while what Miller is saying is likely true of elite institutions, it is not necessarily true for all in "the profession of college English teaching" at this time. I feel as though he is painting English studies with a kind of broad brush that we have worked against in recent years with local and micro-histories of the discipline. Further, at UNH, I don't think one can say that liberal and professional studies were set in opposition to each other or that professors of classical literature and language developed a studied impracticality to distance themselves... This helps me to make the point for a different kind of model or vision of English studies at land-grant institutions. There was an attempt to integrate liberal and professional studies in the UNH curriculum. I think that's my argument. The two main architects of the major, Richards and Scudder, embodied these two terms, liberal and professional, and they built something that was an attempt at integration.

The opposition of liberal and professional education became established as a principle of stratification in higher education with the institution of land grant colleges. (123)

According to Lucas, it was not easy to convince farmers and miners of the values of higher education. Then as now, it was assumed that the best way to articulate those values to the less educated is with practical appeals to utilitarian needs. This assumption positioned and positions the liberal arts on a higher plain divorced from the menial concerns of working people. Such assumptions set up literature as an appropriate study for the most literate, and consign working people to vocational tracks that deaden their imaginative capacities with relentlessly methodical instruction. ...defining literature by its impracticality undercuts the teaching of literature and literacy by denying their pragmatic uses and political power. An alternative to the disabling dualism of professional and liberal education is provided by the community-based intellectuals who set out a practically engaged conception of literature that was response to the experience of those with less formal education, as I will discuss further when I turn to alternative perspectives on literature and learning in the Progressive era. (123)

Miller is searching for an "alternative" to "the disabling dualism of professional and liberal education" and finds it in "the community-based intellectuals who set out a practically engaged conception of literature"...

But he might have looked, instead, or in addition, the the growth of English at the land-grant institutions like UNH...

More things that don't seem true of UNH at the turn of the century (are we still making the same mistake in writing "grand narratives"--Miller?):

• Like many other fields of work, the teaching of English in college became structured by the historical tendency in professions to download onerous responsibilities onto paraprofessionals such as nurses, paralegals, and adjuncts. General education was assigned to junior faculty and teaching assistants to reduce workloads for an elite class of research faculty. In English Departments, as in other professional organizations, the process of downloading time-consuming service work onto paraprofessionals was complicated by the need to control the methods for producing and reproducing the profession's distinctive forms of expertise. (126)
• By denying that they taught for a living, professors could treat teaching as an informal process that required no professional expertise--unlike research, which was upheld as the guiding purpose of the profession. (127)
• At the beginning of the twentieth century, academics in English and other fields that encompassed domains of public discourse consolidated their professional standing by distinguishing their expertise from the services of less credentialed practitioners. High school teachers were still sometimes called professors, but that changed as academics distanced themselves from practitioners: social scientists from social workers, linguists from grammarians, and academic critics from literary journalists. (127)--at UNH an academic critic and journalist built the department together!
• ...the discipline's (English Studies) concentration on literature as its distinctive area of expertise... (127)

Like most disciplines, at the beginning of the twentieth century English studies began to elaborate its professional apparatus by establishing graduate programs and professional journals. However, the professional structure of English studies worked to undercut the broader engagements of the discipline. Journalists and other teachers of public address left departments of English as those departments came to specialize in literary studies. These departures limited the discipline's ability to articulate its values to the public. Writing for public audiences would be further incapacitated by the disabling dualism of technical and creative writing. The former became concerned with writing for work, while the latter came to exclude journalistic writing, and both were marginalized by the professional hierarchies that dismissed writing for general audiences. (129)

Other junctures where the profession articulated the values of its work are noted in a survey of twenty English departments in 1894. The concentration of undergraduate studies on a modern conception of literature was already working to exclude journalism, speech, and linguistics. The potential of a broader conception of literacy studies becomes evident when we look past the centers of the profession to the colleges that offered access to women, workers, and people of color, in large part because of the demand for teachers and writers. (130)

There is my framing quote for my chapter...

Just interesting things that are occurring to me or that I am learning from reading today:

As exams in vernacular literacy became the gateway to college, English assumed the role that Latin had played in upholding the learned culture. Given the forces at work, that role was cast in a rather surprising fashion. Then as now, most English courses were in composition, and reformers called for the teaching of writing, not literature, to alleviate the literacy crisis publicized by the Harvard reports. Another possible disciplinary configuration was provided by philology. Philology was an appealing candidate because it combined the promise of the sciences with the prestige of classical languages. Defining the discipline as "historical scientific study" was seen by some to be a way to force out amateurs and dissuade "utilitarians" from reducing the discipline to a service mission. (126)

A more teachable subject emerged from the surveys of literature

...few contributors to English in American Universities considered students' interests or needs in setting out programs of study. In fact students were often required to begin with the least accessible and most difficult area of study--medieval philology. (140)--at UNH, different?

Such accounts expand the picture provided by Payne's survey to show that as the discipline was narrowing its focus to literature, some departments were developing courses in business and technical writing, newspaper sand magazine journalism, other forms of public address, and even English as a second language. (146)

Insofar as the discipline

did not prepare graduates to teach,
did not support research on teaching, and
did not secure workloads that provided time for teachers to reflect upon their work,

college English adopted a disciplinary economy that reduced its learning capacity and public agency. A broader perspective on the field may help us to reimagine its possibilities. (151)

I will reassess those possibilities by examining the disciplinary alternatives that emerged at institutions that served students quite different from those attending a university such as Harvard. The establishment of research as the chief distinction among classes of faculty and institutions was not as inevitable as researchers tend to assume. (151)

While the discipline has tended to define its history by the professionalization of literary studies, it is the failure of teaching to achieve professional standing that has had a more pervasive impact on practitioners, and on our students... (151)

The alienation of the profession from the pedagogical processes involved in sustaining it... (154)

"alternatives that were lost to the discipline" (157)

Phrases for understanding English as literature:

"teaching the public to improve its taste" (162)
"literary works should be studied as self-contained artifacts" (161)
"how an artist's intentions are realized in the work itself" (161)
New Criticism: "the discipline's distinctive methodology and ideology" (161)
New Criticism set out a less rhetorical and more "objective" conception of literature by concentrating on "the nature of the object rather than its effects upon the subject" (163)
the configuration of literature as a self-contained object of study (167)
formalist
objectivist
a formalist methodology that brackets off authors' intentions and audiences' responses, and with them the social sources and functions of literature" (268)

Framing:

The work of contextualization proves particularly useful for rereading disciplinary history because disciplines function as normative systems impacted by a web of individuals, organizations, and governing bodies. Given their complexity, the application of a broad concept like discipline or disciplinary origin to the past always simplifies and obscures the motives of individuals and differences across fields of knowledge. (Mendenhall, "At a Hinge of History" p. 42).