Table Of ContentTHE DISCIPLINE OF
ENGLISH
Also by George Watson
Politics and Literature in Modern Britain
THE DISCIPLINE OF
ENGLISH
A Guide to Critical Theory and Practice
GEORGE WATSON
M
c George Watson 1978
Softcover reprint of the hardcover 1st edition 1978
All rights reserved. No part of this publication
may be reproduced or transmitted, in any form
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First published 1978 by
THE MACMILLAN PRESS LTD
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British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data
Watson, George, b. 1927
The discipline of English.
L Criticism 2. English literature-History
and criticism
L Title
820'.9 PN81
ISBN 978-0-333-23354-2 ISBN 978-1-349-15939-0 (eBook)
DOI 10.1007/978-1-349-15939-0
This book is sold subject to the standard conditions of the Net Book Agreement.
The paperback edition of this book is sold subject to the condition that it shall not, by
way of trade or otherwise, be lent, resold, hired out, or otherwise circulated without the
publisher's prior consent in any form of binding or cover other than that in which it is
published and without a similar condition including this condition being imposed on
the subsequent purchaser.
Contents
Acknowledgements 7
Introduction 9
Part One: The Critical Debate
Preliminary enquiries 15
2 Critics since 1920 25
3 Why literary judgements are objective 35
4 What history does 55
5 Language or linguistics 66
Part Two: The Tools of the Trade
6 How to read: or practical criticism 81
7 How to work: or using a library 95
8 How to write: or the use of English 106
Notes for Further Reading 119
Index 123
FoR
joNATHAN SMITH
Acknowledgements
This book arose out of a need to know more: twenty years of university
teaching have kept me in a constant state of curiosity to learn how
freshmen come to be as they are. A number of friends who teach
English in schools, some of whom I first knew as undergraduates at
Cambridge, have encouraged me over the years to visit them where
they teach and to see for myself, and my first and most massive debt is
to them. Some of the issues I raise here are wider than classroom
teaching, and occasionally even wider than literature. But I could not
have contemplated this task without the advice and example of those
who, like my dedicatee, bear the burden and heat ofthe day.
My second debt is to Stjohn's College, Cambridge which, among
other indulgences, was a generous host to a teachers' conference on
English in Schools in August 197 5. And my third is to Derick Mirfin of
Macmillan, who encouraged.
Stjohn's College, Cambridge G.W.
Introduction
This book is for those who teach and study English in upper schools
with 'tertiary-level' studies in view, as well as in colleges and univer
sities. Its main business is with what literary criticism does in the
present age, and with what it can one day hope to do.
It appears at a highly delicate moment in education. In the 1960s,
which some already call 'The Generation That Was Lied To', the
young were told three tall stories: that you can command your native
language, and even write it, with little or no systematic training; that
literature is less a body of knowledge than a free-play area for personal
judgement; and that there is a formula called the New Something
which is about to solve the riddle of everything. An age of intellectual
patent medicines, it was often more interested in the label on the
bottle than in what came out of it. Above all, it was gullible of any
thing called new, even when its substance was old.
But much of what was then thought new, it is now clear, was
nothing of the kind; and the educational spirit of the 1960s, though
radical in rhetoric, now looks highly conservative in its effects. It
entrenched comfortable prejudices. It is now reasonable to hope that
the last quarter of the twentieth century will prove at once more rad
ical in substance and more cautious in rhetoric. It is already marked
by a spirit of critical rejection. There are parents who reject the pros
pect that their children should face the world without having been
taught to read or write. There are the young themselves, resentful of
the deceit that has been practised on them, who see permissive teach
ing as an easy excuse for teaching little or nothing. And there are tax
payers who reject the notion that they should sustain elaborate and
expensive acts of intellectual self-indulgence.
The crisis has meant an awakening, and this book could hardly
hope for attentive readers if many were not already alive to a sense of
10 The Discipline of English
what teaching in a sympathetic atmosphere can achieve. I judge the
present academic temper, like my own, to be sceptical of brand
names. The New Criticism that dominated much of Anglo-American
criticism in the 1940s and 1950s, and likewise the Nouvelle Critique
fashionable in France and elsewhere since the 1960s, can now be seen
to have been highly conservative in the assumptions that sustained
them. Though they proudly called themselves schools of criticism,
they were schools for learning easy answers and parroting them back,
and they were ill equipped to sustain any critical analysis brought to
bear on themselves. Now that the vogue for easy answers is passing, it
is becoming commoner to see literature as complex and of many kinds
-and to respect it the more for refusing to yield its secrets all at once.
This book is for those in English studies who want to work harder and
look harder.
The first part of the book includes a review of the present state of
things in critical theory: a task that strikes me as inescapable. But it
leads to what must look like an imbalance between the first part and
the second. I hope that the reader will excuse the contrast between
arguments about advanced theoretical questions in the first part, and
elementary information about reading and writing in the second. It
reflects, after all, the needs of the time. Remote as the Age of Criticism
(c. 1945--65) now seems to many young minds, it is not really possible
to understand where academic English stands today without con
sidering its period of gestation between the wars. It is what it now is
because of the pioneers of the early and mid-twentieth century; and
though we need not be grateful to them, and may even choose to re
sent them a little, we cannot simply be content to remain ignorant of
how the subject was made. I remain unrepentantly convinced - as
much as when I wrote The Literary Critics (1962) - that no one can
know a subject if he knows nothing of its history, or misunderstands
that history. And this book is explicitly designed for those who accept
that English is a subject or 'discipline', and in the fullest academic
sense of those words. For those who see it as a leisure activity-who
are, I hope, many-it will seem oddly obsessed with questions about
how literature has been taught and studied in this century. But that
concern, after all, is proclaimed in its title. My readers are those who
teach and study English in schools and universities, or who hope to do
so, and I need no convincing that English has many other purposes
than that.
Since literary criticism is a kind ofliterature, at its best, many of my
