Raymond Williams and English Studies  

Oleh:

Baldick, Chris

Jenis: Article from Journal - ilmiah internasional
Dalam koleksi: Changing English: Studies in Culture and Education (Full Text) vol. 2 no. 1 (1995), page 16-23.
Fulltext: Changing English 2, 1,16 — 23.pdf (485.16KB)

Isi artikel

It is tempting, in what are evidently anxious times for teachers of English, to imagine that we have become the victims of a sudden ambush or hi-jacking from philistine political forces dedicated to subduing the values of English studies to external, alien principles. This is by no means an illusion: there is indeed, as Patrick Parrinder will be showing in a later contribution to this forum, a new authoritarian and paranoid destructiveness in the government's creation of curricula by diktat. But an important part of the 'Back to Basics' campaign as it affects our subject lies in its exploitation of long-standing confusions and contradictions which are internal to English Studies themselves. I am thinking in particular of the potent ambiguity in the name of our subject itself: 'English' of course denotes both a language (spoken by many non- English peoples both in England and beyond it) and a more specific ethnic group. Attempts to enforce a tight identification between the two senses are by no means new, and they have not always presented themselves as interferences from outside. In fact I would argue that the prosperity and high standing of English as an educational discipline in the last seventy years in Britain have depended in part upon just this kind of identification, initially encouraged by the partisans of English Studies, which is now recoiling upon us in a hostile form.

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