English After the Fall: From Literature to Textuality

For a student who needs to make a living after graduation, why waste one's time reading "literature"? In this persuasive, accessible book, Brown University professor Scholes (The Rise and Fall of English) strives to make English departments relevant again by urging teachers to replace the outdated notion of "literature" with the more flexible "textuality" as the central object of the curriculum. English departments, Scholes says, ought to study and teach the workings of language and rhetoric wherever they find them, "all the way from the Ten Commandments to advertisements." Scholes illustrates his argument with compelling readings of a diverse array of cultural texts, from a Wordsworth sonnet to the letters of St. Paul, from The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to the Declaration of Independence. Understanding how language manipulates and persuades gives us the power to judge for ourselves rather than relying upon "fundamentalist" readings. While the idea of expanding the canon isn't entirely new, Scholes's argument stands out for its emphasis on teaching over stale academic research: professors ought first and foremost to be teaching students how to write by teaching them how to read. Scholes resists the temptation toward jeremiad, offering a reasoned, pragmatic, and hopeful plan for the restoration of the academy's relevance. (Nov.)