This is the web site and blog for ENG 502 Introduction to English Studies: Traditions, Boundaries, Change. ENG 502 is one of the required courses for all new English MA students at Kutztown University. In addition to a course blog, this web site contains links to course materials and relevant web sites and articles. This site was created and is maintained by, Dr. Kevin Mahoney.
Course Description and Rationale
This course provides beginning graduate students with an introduction to the history, traditions, issues, problems, and debates of English Studies. From the perspective of the outsider or newly initiated, the proliferation of areas of interest within English Studies can be confusing if not daunting. It is the goal of this course to familiarize new graduate students with the historical development of English Studies and the shape of English Studies today. Designed as one of the core courses for all English MA students, this course will include studies of the profession, experience in writing professional documents (such as conference proposals, abstracts, book reviews, thesis proposal), practical guidance in relevant research methods, and inquiry into the major theoretical and disciplinary issues and challenges of English Studies. This is a required course of all English MA students.
While there was a time when “English Studies” referred almost exclusively to the study of British and American literature, during the waning decades of the 20th century and the beginning of the 21st century, English Studies has grown to encompass a range of additional “fields” or areas of interest including Composition and Rhetoric, Creative Writing, Cultural Studies, Film Studies, Textual Studies, Postcolonial Studies, Multicultural Studies, Professional Writing, Literacy Studies, Discourse Analysis, and Multimedia Literacy. However, many if not most students beginning graduate study in English are not aware of these diverse tendencies and fields that characterize “English Studies.” This course, then, begins English graduate students’ initiation into the profession. Over the course of a semester students will be invited to confront and attempt to answer questions such as: How have various theorists and scholars defined “English Studies?” How do we account for disciplinary change over time? What are the relationships among the various theoretical approaches and fields within “English Studies?” What counts as scholarship in these new and complex fields?
This course will approach “English Studies” as an on-going conversation, not as an object of study that is static and unchanging. In the spirit of Kenneth Burke’s metaphor of a “parlor” this class will be an attempt to catch the “tenor of the argument” for/over/with “English Studies.” It will be useful to keep in mind the following passage from Burke’s The Philosophy of Literary Form: Studies in Symbolic Action as we begin our inquiry:
Imagine that you enter a parlor. You come late. When you arrive, others have long preceded you, and they are engaged in a heated discussion, a discussion too heated for them to pause and tell you exactly what it is about. In fact, the discussion had already begun long before any of them got there, so that no one present is qualified to retrace for you all the steps that had gone before. You listen for a while, until you decide that you have caught the tenor of the argument, then you put in your oar. Someone answers; you answer him [or her]; another comes to your defense; another aligns himself [or herself] against you, to either the embarrassment of gratification of your opponent, depending upon the quality of your ally’s assistance. However, the discussion is interminable. The hour grows late, you must depart. And you do depart, with the discussion still vigorously in progress (110-111, brackets mine).
In fact, our course will begin with several stories or narratives about English Studies told from several different vantage points. You will not be asked to judge which story is “correct” or which story has the most “credibility.” Rather, you will be asked to consider the differences among the stories as well as places where there are repetitions, similarities, and synergies. We will be inquiring into how these stories differ and what may account for these differences. Put another way, we will not be trying to put English Studies in a box. Rather, we will be mapping its coastlines, mountains, and valleys. Along our journey we will be paying attention to seminal texts, key figures, significant institutions, defining moments, and influential concepts. In short, we will be studying “English Studies” like we study other texts.
