Charting Developments in English Studies by

Broader Changes in Literacy, Literature and the Literate

Thomas P. Miller

We face changes in literate technologies, economies, and epistemologies that can seem overpowering. The changes in the political economy of higher education are all too familiar. Over the last decade cuts in state funding have led to dramatic increases in tuition that have deepened student debt. This debt has intensified the vocational turn that is part of the broader privatization of higher education. These trends have been fed by the rising costs of IT, administrative overhead, and nonacademic expenditures and by the reluctance of faculty to retire, resulting in increasing numbers of nontenure-track faculty. These cascading changes have led to a forty-percent drop in the MLA’s job listings in English in the last decade and stark declines in undergraduate majors (see MLA). At the same time, these trends have worked to raise attention to teaching, community engagement, and interdisciplinary research on global challenges. To address these challenges and opportunities, English departments need to make better use of their vital engagements in access, outreach, and undergraduate education.

To help us reflect upon these changes, I will briefly examine three junctures where developments in literacy, literature and the literate had a formative impact on college English studies. The first English professorships in America were founded in the 1750s in emerging colleges that expanded the curriculum beyond the classics. Benjamin Franklin and the other founders of those colleges sought to enlist the rising numbers of students seeking careers in law, teaching and business. In response to the changing aspirations of the literate classes, English professors introduced modern conceptions of literature. The first surveys of English and American literature were published in the second quarter of the nineteenth century as the penny press and common school helped create a “revolution in reading” (see Davidson; Kaestle, et al. 53; Warren). Like our first professorships, these surveys did not come from the centers of the learned tradition but from institutions and venues attuned to broader changes in literacy and the literate. My third case in point is our first professional organizations—the MLA and NCTE. From its origin in 1883, MLA worked to exclude teachers, journalists, and other writers, creating an organization that was more limited to academics than other disciplinary associations (Veysey 70). Teachers and professors articulated their shared concerns quite differently in the National Council of Teachers of English in 1911. NCTE was more broadly based and got actively involved in organizing teachers to address workload and other issues.

Articulation provides a useful frame for exploring how the discipline has engaged with the conjunctions among broader changes in literacy, literature and the literate. “A theory of articulation is,” according to Stuart Hall, both “a way of understanding how ideological elements . . . cohere together within a discourse, and a way of asking how they do or do not become articulated at specific conjunctures, to certain political subjects” (53). A conjunctural history of our work focuses on the points where ideological, institutional, and social trends converge. In English departments articulation has particular significance because articulation programs are identified with outreach to schools, community colleges and public audiences. Articulation provides an especially relevant frame to consider today because your department has an expansive articulation apparatus that includes your Aetna Chair in Writing as well as your teacher-preparation programs, your early college experience and bridge programs, your creative writing and community lecture series, and the writing centers and affiliate writing programs that have broad involvements with collaborative learning, teaching with technology and other initiatives that reach across your curriculum and across your state. The potential impact of these collaborations becomes apparent when we consider the history of broadly engaged institutions, genres, and coalitions.

Evolving definitions of literature(from OED)

1. Familiarity with letters or books; knowledge acquired from reading or studying books, esp. the principal classical texts associated with humane learning. c1450—2005

 2. The action or process of writing a book or literary work; literary ability or output; the activity or profession of an author or scholar; the realm of letters or books. 1663—2002

 3.a. The result or product of literary activity; written works considered collectively; a body of literary works produced in a particular country or period, or of a particular genre. 1711—1995

3.b. Without defining word: written work valued for superior or lasting artistic merit. 1852—2001

 4. (A body of) non-fictional books and writings published on a particular subject. 1797—2004

5. Printed matter of any kind. 1859—2006

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The First Professors of English

The first professors of English helped expand the curriculum in response to shifts in the career aspirations of the literate classes. Those shifts were shaped by broader changes in literate technologies, economies, and epistemologies. Into the middle of the eighteenth century, the scholastic curriculum had functioned as a scribal information economy to instill a deductive epistemology dedicated to preparing students to preach received truths in isolated communities (see Brown and David Hall). As I discussed in the Evolution of College English, colonial professors read from redactions of timeworn texts, and students recited from their copybooks and memorized syllogistic disputations. In the eighteenth century, student compositions shifted from deductive syllogisms to forensic disputations that helped institute the inductive modes of reasoning identified with the “new learning.” Early professors of English lectured on a range of sources and assigned compositions based on students’ individual reading. This student-centered mode of inquiry depended upon increased access to print, and it had particular appeal for less classically prepared students. The newly established colleges of the time admitted students who according to their professors could only “recite the classics by rote” because they had not studied in classical grammar schools (Alison to Stiles, May 27, 1759). From the perspective of the learned culture, the introduction of English to accommodate the needs of less classically versed students would have looked like a literacy crisis.

The first American English professorship was founded in one of the institutions that catered to nontraditional students—“the Publick Academy of Philadelphia,” which was chartered in 1755 as the Academy and College of Philadelphia, and later became the University of Pennsylvania. Well-endowed colleges could ignore changes in literacy and the literate, but emerging colleges relied on students looking to go into the law and business rather than the clergy (Botein; Longaker). Franklin articulated the mission of the college in a series of essays beginning with “Proposals Related to the Education of Youth in Pennsylvania” in 1749. His proposals drew on his own studies in the self-instruction society that he had founded in imitation of the club described in Addison’s Spectator. For the Academy, Franklin proposed redefining the "classicks" to include the literature of self-improvement—“Tillotson, Addison, Pope, Algernon, Sidney, Cato's Letters” (497). This literature was to be taught historically to demonstrate "the wonderful Effects of ORATORY." To deliver this belletristic program of study, Ebenezer Kinnersley was hired as Professor of English Tongue and of Oratory at the chartering of the College in 1755. Kinnersley was "our first college professor of English" (Parker 7). However, the first American English professor actually spent most of his time teaching basic writing. A broader program of study was taught by the provost whom Franklin recruited to head the college, William Smith. Before emigrating from Scotland, Smith had studied rhetoric, belles lettres and moral philosophy with some of the leaders of the Scottish Enlightenment. Smith taught Scottish theories to American students in English classes centered on studies of orations and essays of taste. Smith was but one of Scottish expatriates who taught such courses in the expanding numbers of colleges founded at the end of the eighteenth century. The most noted was John Witherspoon, as discussed in my edition of his works.

From their origins, college English studies have helped expand access and articulate broader social reforms. In 1792 Smith and several of his collaborators at Philadelphia served as trustees for the first academy to offer literature, rhetoric and composition courses to women. The Young Ladies’ Academy has been characterized by Savin and Abrahams as the first chartered institution of higher education for women in the U.S. In the early nineteenth century such academies and colleges helped expand opportunities for women and others to learn how to write for the public, as discussed by Kelly and Robbins. By 1798 Judith Sargent Murray could write that "female academies are every where establishing" and thereby contributing to "the establishment of the female intellect" (Kerber 221). Many of these academies offered an “English education” based in studies of literature and composition. As we have expanded our perspective beyond elite institutions, we have come to appreciate how antebellum normal schools and teacher academies enabled minorities, women and working people to earn an independent living by working with their minds rather than their hands. In doing so, these academies and colleges articulated the expansive role that would become identified with the land-grant mission of English departments in institutions of public learning.

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The First Surveys of English & American Literature

As with our first professorships, early surveys of English literature responded to the growth and diversification of public education and the reading public by articulating literature in terms of its general education mission. The textbook market accounted for one third of the $2.5 million sales in US books in 1820. A 500% increase in textbook sales in the second quarter of the nineteenth century fueled the development of the national reading public (Kaestle et al). As Vanderbilt has discussed, rhetoric handbooks and elocutionary readers gave rise to the growing numbers of surveys of English and American literature at midcentury. The most popular was Thomas Shaw’s Outlines of English Literature (1846). In 1852 Shaw’s text was combined with Tuckerman’s “A Sketch of American Literature” to create a textbook that would “dominate the college trade for thirty years” (Vanderbilt 330). Tuckerman observed that the “germ of American literature” was antebellum “reviews, lectures, and essays,” “that delightful species of literature which is neither criticism nor fiction—neither oratory nor history—but partakes somewhat of all these, and owes its claim to a felicitous blending of fact and fancy, of sentiment and thought—the belles lettres” (439). This belletristic articulation of literature arose out of the conjunctions among the magazine literature of the time and its role in colleges and self-improvement societies. As Tuckerman noted, “the two most prolific branches of literature in America are journalism and educational works. . . . Newspapers and school-books are, therefore, the characteristic form of literature in the United States” (Shaw 439).

This belletristic articulation of literature arose at the conjunctions among the lyceum networks, teachers’ institutes, and literary societies that functioned as “agencies of intellect,” as discussed by Anne Gere, who looks to them as an historical alternative to the self-contained professional frameworks that our discipline adopted (see also Kelley; McHenry and Heath). These civic networks have taken on new significance as we have become more concerned with how women, minorities and working people acquired and exercised the literary and political powers of self-representation (see, for example, Miheusuah). The antebellum period saw the highest rate of college founding in American history. Antebellum colleges beyond the Eastern Seaboard educated more diverse students than the public universities of the late nineteenth century (Burke). Many students attended for short periods in order to teach, at least until they could find a better job. As Burke discusses, antebellum colleges tended to be "multi-level, multi-purpose institutions that compensated for the absence of a democratic and efficient primary and secondary education system in the rural and less economically affluent areas of the country" (5). Antebellum faculty and students were involved in literary societies, voluntary associations and lecture circuits that provided figures such as Emerson, Douglass and Fuller with opportunities to articulate their experiences in the burgeoning periodical press. The growth of the press opened up opportunities for diverse groups to claim their rights to self-representation. For example, in 1827 the Freedom's Journal was cofounded by the first African American college graduate, John B. Ruswurm (Bowdoin College, 1826). While only twelve magazines existed in 1780, forty were being published in 1810, one hundred in 1825, and almost six hundred in 1850.

As more people began to read more books, more attention came to be paid to teaching the literate how to distinguish themselves by their literary tastes. Vernacular literatures were not very hierarchically delineated until the latter half of the nineteenth century, when English literature first became “sacralized” according to Levine. The borders of the literate culture became more clearly articulated as part of a "literacy campaign. . . that permeated virtually every dimension of American culture" (Stevens 99). As Carr, Carr, and Schultz have detailed, textbooks helped make English studies “more inclusive, stratified, and systematic” (4). Almost a quarter of the rhetoric textbooks published before 1830 gave little attention to composition, while books published after that date devoted up to fifty percent of their pages to the topic (Nietz). Composition became subordinated to the profession of literature, which began to be articulated as something removed from the didactic work of serving as models for writing and reading. Discussions of belles lettres began dropping out of textbooks in the 1830s, and the term was replaced by literature in a rising number of English departments after the 1850s (Wozniak). This restructuring of English departments tended to marginalize teacher education. Teacher “training” was generally looked down upon by "liberal arts purists," as discussed by Borrowman and Herbst. These attitudes intensified as faculty in normal schools and teachers colleges worked to professionalize themselves as disciplinary specialists.

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Our First Professional Organizations

A century ago, English professors and other academics gained professional standing by defining themselves as researchers and distancing themselves from teachers and popular practitioners . As Bender has discussed, the specialized expertise of modern professionals can be distinguished from the more broadly based “civic professionalism” that was exemplified by “the activist, pragmatic, institution-founding character” of the previous century (“Erosion” 86). According to Bender, "the great story of nineteenth-century science is the shift from community-based amateur science to . . . professional disciplines" (Intellect 21). While noting that such community educators lacked specialized expertise, Bender has presented their civic professionalism as an historical alternative to the limited public engagements of modern academics. Bender’s research provides a framework for considering how professors articulated their positions as specialists within enclaves of expertise that are now being breached by market forces that are undermining the institutional bases of academic disciplines (see also Radway).

At its founding in 1883, the Modern Language Association included a range of voices, but it soon came to concentrate on research within the field. A sense of the formative impact of general education on literary and literacy studies is provided by the first article on American literature published in PMLA. “American Literature in the Class-room” was published by a high-school "Professor of English Literature," Albert Smyth. Despite the involvement of such teachers, MLA had a more restricted membership than other disciplinary associations such as the American Historical Association. Only one quarter of the AHA's original membership were academics, while over three quarters of MLA members were, and that percentage grew as the group came to concentrate on research and ignore broader audiences and concerns, unlike the AHA (Veysey 70). While most of the first issues of PMLA were devoted to teaching, it ceased publishing on pedagogy by 1903, when the MLA’s Pedagogical Section closed.

A more broadly based approach was taken by the National Council of Teachers of English in 1911. NCTE was organized to address the shared challenges of college and high school teachers. Workloads were the lead topic at the conventions organized to provide a "progressive" forum for teachers to articulate their “class-consciousness” (“NCTE” 38). The first issue of English Journal opened with the report of the committee chaired by Edwin Hopkins: "Can Good Composition Teaching Be Done under Present Conditions?" To answer that question, the committee reported on the workloads facing college and high school teachers. This collaboration was aimed at establishing English as a research-based “laboratory subject” (3). While such models had limitations, we cannot know what might have been achieved if our discipline had invested more of its intellectual capacities in organizing its institutional base. Instead, articulation became consigned to colleges of education, who were pressed by their marginal standing and expansive obligations to be as practical as possible, which in practice meant concentrating on "methods" courses that were as isolated from “content” disciplines as mechanics-driven composition courses.

The professional hierarchies instituted a century ago left even less room for writers than for teachers. Like teaching, writing has tended to be viewed as a trade. In the decade when MLA was formed, journalists left English departments to advance their professional aspirations elsewhere, as Adams has discussed. The departure of journalists left a chasm between literary and professional writing that deepened with the professionalization of creative writing. According to Myers, "creative writing was first taught under its own name in the 1920s" in high schools as part of the Progressive educational movement. Myers argues that creative writing emerged as the counterpart to creative reading in general education efforts concerned with how literature presents "a fusion of knowledge and practice" that must be experienced to be understood (12). Such "constructivist" approaches to literary study shaped the origins of the archetypal creative writing program at the University of Iowa (see Dawson). At Iowa and elsewhere, the teaching of creative writing was intended as a counterpart to creative reading to prepare liberally educated citizens to address civic issues.

As professions have come to be seen as commercial enterprises, disciplines and other enclaves of expertise became undermined by market forces. As Brint has discussed in An Age of Experts, the late-twentieth century shift away from “social trustee professionalism” was part of an historic “splintering of the professional stratum along functional, organizational, and market lines.” This same splintering is evident in our own field in the diverging perspectives and engagements of critics, applied linguists, compositionists, creative writers, and English educators. One way to bridge these intradisciplinary divides is to rearticulate our civic engagements in ways that can help us harness the generative capacities of the changes in literacy that are transforming our discipline, for we currently face changes in literacy and the literate that have the same transformative possibilities as those that shaped our first professorships, anthologies, and professional organizations.

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Using Our Expansive Engagements to Articulate the Values of Our Work

Leveraging our impact at the conjunctions among literacy, literature, and literacy studies can help us respond to the social and institutional trends that are undermining our profession. While our discipline has devoted little attention to studying what and how people read, reading is a well-articulated emphasis of your department. The emphasis on reading at multiple levels in your department has potential connections with broader research on changes in literacy, including the surveys of reading habits conducted by the National Endowment for the Arts. Drawing upon the censuses in 1982, 1992, and 2002, the NEA’s Reading at Risk reported historic declines in book reading, particularly “literary reading” (including popular fictions as well as poetry and drama). In 1982, 56.9% of respondents had read a work of literature in the last year not assigned in school. In 2002 that number had dropped to 46.7%. The steepest decline was among readers of our students’ age: 59.8% of 18-24 year olds were doing “literary reading” in 1982, but only 42.8% in 2002. On the other hand, literary writing was quite popular: 7% of the respondents in the 2002 reported that they did creative writing, and 13% said that they had taken a creative writing course. That would add up to some twenty-seven million Americans. While Reading at Risk confirmed anxieties about our declining public standing, the most recent NEA survey suggests ways of responding to those anxieties. The 2009 NEA study Reading on the Rise found that more people are reading more literature than in the previous decade. The increases were found to be related to the changes in literacy documented by the Pew Internet & American Life’s 2012 survey, “The Rise of E-reading,” which found that more people are reading more books, and e-book users are reading almost 50% more books than non-users (Rainie et al.). Reading on the Rise also attributed some of the increases in literary reading to the NEA’s own Big Read national initiative, which is broader than any public works project our field has launched—other than perhaps the National Writing Project.

Research on literacy takes on broader significance when we relate it to related disciplinary trends , including the converging concerns of cultural studies and New Literacy studies, ethnic and gender studies, service learning and community literacies, new media and visual literacies, and postcolonial theories and translingual models of language use. These areas of study have converging potentials that are clearly apparent in your writing programs and your undergraduate curriculum. For example, your strengths in creative nonfiction, civic engagement, and writing across the curriculum could help you bridge the gap that opened up in English departments between creative and ‘noncreative’ genres of writing with the departure of journalism. The conjunctions among these wide-ranging trends have considerable potential for your department because you have a creative and reflective articulation apparatus that includes partnerships with public reading and writing groups, engagements with school and community literacies, collaborative learning and teacher-education programs, internships and service learning initiatives, and strengths in undergraduate studies of writing, media and popular cultures.

Your department has developed a richly reflective and humanistic approach to your practical engagements that has avoided the disabling dualisms that arise when the truly literary is distanced from the merely vocational and technical. There is much to be learned from our discipline’s practical engagements with literacy. Now, as at other points in our history, formative changes in our field have emerged at the conjunctions among broader social movements, shifting institutional priorities, and expanding disciplinary trends. Those junctures, as Pratt has discussed, can be characterized as “contact zones” that come to the fore in broadly accessible institutions, community and school partnerships, and hybrid genres such as the essay. The generative dynamics that emerge at such critical junctures have generally been contained by marginalizing teaching, dismissing popular genres, and ignoring the aspirations of working students. The disciplinary hierarchies that have demarcated literature from the world of work are being undermined by market forces and vocational pressures that are intensifying as students are forced deeper into debt. These dynamics are not new, and they have generative potentials that are powerfully apparent in the expanding significance of what Ernest Boyer characterized as the “scholarship of engagement.”

The “engaged university” provides an integrative frame that can be helpful in articulating the values of our work in the venues that have shaped the development of English studies, including popular periodicals, public lectures, reading and writing groups, teachers’ institutes and student learning centers, and community colleges and schools (Hollister). We need to strengthen our civic infrastructure to be able to address the privatization of education, the vocationalization of majors, and the commercialization of our students’ life goals. The potentials of our collaborations with schools, businesses and agencies are apparent in the impact that such collaborations have had on the development of ethnic and women's studies. Such collaborative possibilities challenge us to reflect upon the powers of our work, and those with whom we work—including those who work in positions with limited professional standing and employment benefits.

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A digital version of this presentation is available at:

http://tmiller.faculty.arizona.edu/other-projectsThis website includes related research, faculty

development projects, course materials, and my CV. The password for my copyrighted publications is rhetor