Series Editor’s Foreword
Preface and Acknowledgements
The Critical Inventions Series
Part I Looking Back
1 The English Question
Part II The Comfort of Strangers
2 The Fate of Culture: Die Welt ist Alles
3 On Reading
4 The Question concerning Literature
5 For a Literature that is Without and Beyond Compare
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Part III Foreign Friends
6 Newman: The University and Universalism
7 The Existence of Scotland
Part IV Looking Forward
8 On Critical Humility
9 Clandestine English
Notes
Index
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“Thomas Docherty has taken on an enormous task. If his passionately
argued and polemical study were entitled simply Academic Freedoms,
it would be a book broadly about the ways in which a new managerialism
is threatening the integrity of one of our oldest institutions,
but it’s called The English Question and thus becomes a much
more pointed discussion of the ways in which English – meaning
‘English Literature’ – is a distinctive discipline
especially unsuited to new ways of accounting, auditing and marketing
courses. If this sounds like special pleading, it is. Docherty,
a Scottish Professor of English at an English University –
Warwick – and leading theorist of postmodernism, is well placed
to map out the relationship between liberty and the liberal arts,
humanity and the humanities. If his title recalls ‘the Irish
Question’, with its politics of partition and policing of
borders, that’s fitting too, for Docherty’s work, in
the tradition of Tom Paulin’s Ireland and the English
Crisis (1984) and Robert Crawford’s Devolving English
Literature (1992), crosses borders as well as disciplinary
boundaries. A deceptively slim volume, The English Question
is a busy, bustling book, bristling with an angry intelligence,
and with a range of reference, from Augustine to Adorno, that can’t
fail to impress. And yet it’s an intensely personal take on
an ongoing debate. In this sense, and despite the title of the series
in which it appears – Critical Inventions – it’s
an intervention, frequently anecdotal and autobiographical, rather
than a founding statement. Certain acronyms are a source of acrimony
for academics. QAA (Quality Assurance Agency) and RAE (Research
Assessment Exercise) are bound up in their minds with intrusive
systems of monitoring, policing and scrutinising that interfere
with the pure work of thought, or at least with the daily grind
of reading, teaching and marking, adding another layer of bureaucracy
to an already overburdened profession. According to Docherty, QAA
is ‘a cancer that gnaws at the core of knowledge, value and
freedom in education; its carcinogenic growth is now perhaps the
greatest pervasive danger to the function of a university as a surviving
institution’. Docherty sees the origins of QAA in the ‘culture
of distrust of the public sector’ under Thatcherism. The stakes
are high – the future of the public sphere and intellectual
freedoms in an increasingly autocratic society – and so is
the rhetoric, though riddled with moments of intimacy and insight.
One or two instances give the flavour. Arguing against critics like
Kate Belsey, who attack a monolith called ‘the Canon’,
Docherty defends his own undergraduate education at Glasgow University
as affording a rich diet of texts across historical periods, examined
at the end of a four-year degree. This Docherty compares unfavourably
with the current fashion for ‘modular’ courses assessed
a month after completion, resulting in short-termism and strict
adherence to course prescriptions, ‘usually anthologised’.
In other words, new modes of teaching and examining mean students
read less. (I would cite student poverty and quality of coverage
as key factors behind the decision of many academics to teach by
anthology.) Docherty warns we are losing the quality of literature
to ‘quality assessment/control’, just as we’re
sacrificing the quality of criticism to the requirements of the
RAE. Behind The English Question lies the Scottish Question, the
question of the Democratic Intellect, and whether a British Government
will impose a three- year degree on Scottish Universities, just
as a devolved parliament pushes for independence. Interesting times.
Docherty offers a revealing anecdote. At a conference in Cambridge
in 1998, Docherty invoked his mother, an early school-leaver with
no qualifications, and enthusiastic consumer of popular writing
(crime and romance), to make the point that those who incorporate
genre fiction into their syllabuses in the name of democratising
the canon were effectively affirming his mother’s exclusion
from the privileged system that would allow her access to the cultural
capital of high literature. Another participant, to general applause,
accused Docherty of undervaluing, in a typical male move, women’s
reading habits. A decade on, Docherty restates his case that new
methods of assessment lead to dumbing down. Kelman shares Docherty’s
disparaging attitude to genre fiction. It’s ironic to find
working-class academics and writers on the side of literature in
its classic form, against the teaching of popular fiction.
Muriel Spark once remarked: ‘I
think of the artist as a minor public servant. If he starts thinking
of himself as a public master, he’s in trouble.’ Perhaps
the same goes for academics? Spark, who admired managerial-speak
while discarding dialect, would have had less difficulty with the
theological foundation of universities, or with the daily drudgery
of academics (as opposed to intellectuals). The English Question
is a book that demands to be read, and deserves a wide readership,
a book that, in these days of rising student numbers and plummeting
staff morale, would start a fight in an empty classroom.”
Edinburgh Review
“Is the study of English literature
passé, an archaic and irrelevant relic of an oppressive colonial
society? As a professor of English at the University of Warwick,
the author might be expected to argue for preserving English departments;
but this work is more complex than that. Docherty is alarmed by
the trend for universities to be governed by political and economic
forces, and he wants them to evolve into places where controversy
can thrive. He uses the study of English as an example but is really
speaking about all departments, including the sciences. Many of
his comments apply to the educational system of Great Britain, but
the same struggle between teachers and administrators exists in
the United States. After a look at the university over the past
300 years, he moves on to point out recent changes and the outside
forces causing them, and lastly suggests improvements, both in the
way English literature is taught and in the university as a whole.
He quotes liberally from poets, novelists, statesmen and theorists
to substantiate his proposal.” Reference & Research
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