From English Studies to Studies in English and back

1. The 5fth Deans’ Forum on Teaching English Majors, Chongqing, April 21-24, 2011 From English Studies to Studies in English and back Teaching English Majors in an Age of Curriculum Reform Otto Heim School of English University of Hong Kong

2. Overview • Is English Studies still a distinct (or meaningful) subject? If yes, how should we define it? • The context for reforming English Studies at HKU: Introduction of a new undergraduate curriculum in 2012-2013 • Transformations of the discipline of English Studies: from unity to fragmentation and (possible) re-integration • Reshaping English Studies at HKU: curriculum design and implications for teaching

3. Is ‘English Studies’ still a distinct subject? Impressions from the annual conference of the American Comparative Literature Association, Vancouver, March 31 – April 3, 2011: • Large number of delegates from English Departments • Many seminars focusing on topics in ‘English Literary Studies’ • Great diversity of research interests among scholars in English Studies  Is ‘English (Literary) Studies’ ‘Comparative Literature’?  ‘English Studies’ today: Studies in world language and literature and therefore necessarily comparative

4. English Studies today: in an age of… ACLA-commissioned decennial reports on the state of the discipline: • Charles Bernheimer, ed. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. • Haun Saussy, ed. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. • Also applicable to transformation of English Studies: from ‘national’ framework to ‘multicultural’ and ‘global’ • What are the implications of this shift for the teaching of English majors today?

5. In an ‘Age of Curriculum Reform’? • Opportunity to address the implications that changes in the discipline have for teaching major programs • But curriculum reform has its own rationale and is not primarily concerned with changes in particular disciplines • Curriculum reform in Hong Kong: New Diploma of Secondary Education, shortening secondary school from 7 to 6 years, adding 1 year to tertiary education from 2012 (shift in allocation of government funding) • Introduction of 4-year curriculum at HKU in 2012-13: • First-year students one year younger (17) • First degree programs (e.g. BA) extended by one year

6. Curriculum reform at HKU HKU Educational Aims • Pursuit of academic / professional excellence, critical intellectual enquiry and life-long learning • Tackling novel situations and ill-defined problems • Critical self-reflection, greater understanding of others, and upholding personal and professional ethics • Intercultural understanding and global citizenship • Collaboration and communication • Leadership and advocacy for the improvement of the human condition  All degree curricula to apply the same parameters so as to ensure consistency and enable student mobility

7. Common features of 4-year curriculum • Common Core Curriculum: 6 courses to be taken in the first two years from four areas of inquiry: Scientific and Technological Literacy; Humanities; Global Issues; and China: Culture, State & Society • Expansion of English & Chinese Language Enhancement • International experience; experiential learning; capstone experience • Outcomes-based learning and diverse modes of assessment Great! But what about ‘English Studies’?

8. Curriculum reform in the School of English • How to strengthen our English Studies program in the 4-year curriculum? • Curriculum Reform Taskforce: review of existing curriculum and drafting blueprint for a new English Studies curriculum (components, structure, orientation) • Compliance with HKU framework and consideration of the state and direction of English Studies in the world today • First time such a comprehensive review and reform undertaken in the Department/School at HKU

9. English Studies as it used to be 30 years ago: • Literature: British and American (from 16th to 20th c.) • Linguistics: Synchronic and Historical (incl. Phonetics, Old English and Middle English) • Language courses (incl. Grammar, Translation, and aspects of British/American culture) • A coherent field, clearly delimited and rationally divided • Result of decisive exclusions and separations • Enabling development of abstract theories and methodologies, expansion by specialization

10. “Crisis in English Studies” Raymond Williams, Writing in Society (1983): • Review and critique of development of English Studies at Cambridge • Separation of literature and linguistics/language studies • Isolation of literary study from general literacy • Exclusive definition of ‘Literature’:“So you have in sequence, first, a restriction to printed texts, then a narrowing to what are called ‘imaginative’ works, and finally a circumscription to a critically established minority of ‘canonical’ texts. But also growing alongside this there is another and often more potent specialization: not just Literature, but English Literature” (194). • Similar process in definition of subject of ‘Linguistics’

11. The limits of disciplinarity D. Shumway and C. Dionne, Disciplining English (2002): • Establishment of discipline made possible an immensely productive enterprise of discovery and insight into English language & literature: reproduction & distinction • Specialization driving towards fragmentation: “Looking only at the dominant practice within English, the study of literature, one sees a field more fraught by differences of theory and method than most others” (8) • Selective and exclusive definition of object of study (in literature as in linguistics) increasingly contested: call for attention to other subjects, texts, practices, phenomena

12. English Studies  Studies in English 1990s Multiculturalism… • Proliferation of separate specializations within English Studies: apart from British and American literature, lit. theory, postcolonial studies, cultural studies, gender studies, ethnic minority literatures, etc.; in linguistics, separation of “hardcore linguistics” vs. sociological, cultural, cognitive approaches to the study of language  emergence of new academic departments, often with shared methodologies but different objects of study • HKU: Departments of Comparative Literature and Linguistics splitting from Department of English

13. Continuing trend Daniel R. Schwartz, In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty-First Century (2008): “The borders that separate the study of national literatures and cultures will continue to break down and our interest in previously neglected cultures and literatures will grow. Such changes will continue to transform the structure of literary departments—which have already undergone considerable changes—with the blurring of distinctions between film study and literary study, theory and philosophy, ethnic literature and ethnic histories, as well as literary and cultural studies in such fields as gay and women’s studies.” (173-74)  Need to reconsider the meaning of ‘English Studies’

14. Time to regroup 2000s Globalization: the world is shrinking… • Shrinking budgets => shrinking/vanishing departments • Academic staff departures may expose significant gaps in the curriculum and a need for a new coherence. • Globalization => increasing importance of mobility changes the meaning of boundaries: from separation to connection and crossing • Speakers, writers, and readers travel (often between languages) • Languages and literatures travel (not only in translation) • ‘Travel’ (and influence) is increasingly multi-directional • In a “shrinking” world, no one can lay exclusive claim to (cultural) resources, including the English language

15. English in the world Andy Kirkpatrick, World Englishes: Implications for International Communication and English Language Teaching (2007): • Distinctions between ‘native’ and ‘non-native’ speakers and varieties no longer useful: all varieties of English are ‘nativized’ • “monolingual societies are less common than multilingual societies” (9) • “many different varieties of English are spoken in ENL countries” (28) • Recognize diversity of uses of English in different places

16. The example of English in Hong Kong • Colonial history and legacy: lingering language prejudice; official policy of biliteracy and trilingualism • Importance of English in the workplace • Returned emigrants, international schools, domestic helpers • Lingua franca in a multilingual society • Creative writing in English • Reading in English • Hong Kong International Literary Festival • Man Asian Literary Prize (Su Tong in 2009, Bi Feiyu in 2010) • HKU Poetry Prize • English = international, incl. ‘native’, ‘non-native’, original, translation • Hong Kong may be unique but not exceptional • Traditionally, this was not part of English Studies. But today?

17. An opportunity for curriculum reform How to teach the diversity of English in the world today? • Re-integrate: English = where things come together • Attentive comparison rather than (impossible) coverage • Make connections across disciplinary boundaries James E. Seitz, “Toward a Metaphoric Curriculum” (1999): “While literalism responds to difference by putting things in their ‘proper’ places, metaphor responds to difference by putting things together, not by merely juxtaposing them but by equating them despite, or even because of, their disparities” (194) “the literal is as inescapable as the metaphorical” (195)

18. Reshaping English Studies at HKU • Re-integrating ‘Cross-Cultural Studies in English’ into ‘English Studies’ (‘English Studies’ is cross-cultural) • Expanding introduction from one course to five courses (from “prerequisite” to exposure to disciplinary thinking and problems): • Critical reading, analysis, and writing • Historical and theoretical foundations • Senior courses organized in three concentrations: each concentration including both literature and linguistics • Culture and society • Language, discourse, rhetoric • Postcolonial and Asia Pacific studies

19. Culture and society Focus on English language and literature as representations of historical periods, places and regions, cultural and social formations Possible courses (currently on the syllabus):

20. Language, discourse, rhetoric Focus on how English language and literature work to produce meaning in different contexts, situations, and media Possible courses (currently on the syllabus):

21. Postcolonial and Asia Pacific studies Focus on English language and literature in relation to histories of globalization with special reference to our particular location in the region and in the world Possible courses (currently on the syllabus):

22. Challenges for teaching • Importance of academic advising to develop students’ interests and goals in the major: dialog about course combinations, clusters and connections • Introduction to disciplinary divisions and methods as preparation for the difficult work of testing their value and limitations in critical inquiry • Focus on particular acts of writing and reading: connect object of study with practice of study (assessment) • Opportunities of dialog and collaboration between students of different levels: e.g. capstone seminar for final-year undergraduates and early postgraduates

23. The relevance of English Studies • Achievement of university educational aims through historical and comparative study of diverse practices of speaking, writing and reading in English in the world • Engaging critically and creatively with the boundaries that organize the practice of writing, reading and speaking in society, and especially the unevenness of their distribution • Explore and assess the connection between English (language & literature) and mobility in shaping the world • The influence of mobility on the development of English • The mobilizing (and motivating) function of practices of writing, reading, speaking in given contexts

24. English Studies in China Andy Kirkpatrick, World Englishes (2007): “The number of English teachers has increased from an estimated 850 in 1957 to well over half a million today and the number of Chinese learning English probably outnumbers the total population of the United States and Britain combined. It seems inevitable that this number of people learning and speaking English will lead to a distinctive Chinese variety of English” (146).  How will the teaching of English Majors relate to this development?

25. References • Bernheimer, Charles, ed. Comparative Literature in the Age of Multiculturalism. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1995. • Kirkpatrick, Andy. World Englishes: Implications for International Communication and English Language Teaching. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 2007. • Saussy, Haun, ed. Comparative Literature in an Age of Globalization. Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 2006. • Schwartz, Daniel. In Defense of Reading: Teaching Literature in the Twenty-First Century. Chichester: Wiley-Blackwell, 2008. • Seitz, James E. Motives for Metaphor: Literacy, Curriculum Reform, and the Teaching of English. Pittsburgh: U of Pittsburgh P, 1999. • Shumway, David R., and Craig Dionne, eds. Disciplining English: Alternative Histories, Critical Perspectives. Albany: SUNY P, 2002. • Williams, Raymond. Writing in Society. London: Verso, 1983.