The incongruity of 'English'

WITH interdiscipli-nary approaches being increasingly employed in scholarship, is it possible to speak of discrete fields of study? The inclusion of "cultural studies" in the "English" discipline suggests a collapsing of difference as well as the hybridisation and crossing over between disciplines such as linguistics, psychoanalysis, literary criticism, history, social theory, anthropology and philosophy. Recently we have seen incompatible figures like Saussure and Freud, or Marx and Heideggar come together - a theoretical linkage which is challenging and wide in scope. Violations of rigid compartmentalisation are certainly positive and must be viewed as liberating insofar as they produce theoretical advances that would become fundamental for generations to come.

Combining critical theory and cultural studies is to clearly consider the cross-section of the current "dissensus" on the shape of the postdisciplinary university, including the positive aspects of cultural studies as the new organising principle of academic work. This method offers a new understanding of the way literary studies shape and define culture, and the way that teaching and research institutions are changing in response to international movements, social forces, and the increasing importance of cultural studies and comparative literature. Investigating how "high" culture (literature, liberal education) and popular culture (fashion, film, advertisement and discourse analysis) are dealt with in the classroom, shows that the culture wars of the 1980s and 1990s are by no means over; they have simply warped into new visible struggles of educational funding, curricula, academic standards, and pedagogical authority.

In the last few years, as is the practice observed by Departments of English in important universities around the world, many departments in India have introduced courses in African, Australian, Canadian, European, Indian, Russian and American literatures backed by a study of literary criticism and theory which takes into consideration the diversity and range of cultural studies. For 50 years the model or paradigm of literary studies has relied on an opposition between the established canon and its "other" i.e. culture, especially that of the Third World. The theory wars of the 1980s changed that. Western literature has been overwhelmed by world literature and as Ajaz Ahmed argues, "there is no exclusionary pleasures of dominant taste" but only an inclusive sense of heterogenity that counters the "cultural myopia" of the Western Humanities curriculum. No unitary idea of world literature is possible.

With the advent of post-structuralism and the "death of literature" the opposition between high and popular or between the established courses on English literature and literatures from other countries became untenable, transforming the concentration of inquiry from only literary into cultural studies. When you teach "Dr. Faustus", is it possible to ignore the relevance of the age of Renaissance and the history of the attainment of self-conscious freedom by the human spirit manifested in the European races? Chinua Achebe's Arrow of God is an anthropological study of the Ibo tribe in one of the villages in southern Nigeria and not merely a work of fiction to be handled in the traditional ways of literary criticism. Jean Rhys' Wide Sargasso Sea or Saadat Hasan Monto's Toba Tek Singh cannot be approached without a Foucauldian consideration of the politics of madness with the entire cultural history that goes into the construction of the discourse of insanity.

This shows us how we might think about the humanities - and how we might act as humanists - as the world changes around, about, and under us. We have to realise that the role that literary theory and cultural studies has played and will play in the various conceptual mutations in contemporary times is a fundamental one. The nomenclature "Department of English" is an incongruity in this day and age as it smacks of a very limited body of literature, and conspicuously ignores the other literatures in Englishes that are so enthusiastically studied at innumerable departments of English around the world. A change in the nomenclature to Department of Literary and Cultural Studies or Department of Comparative Literature or School of International Literatures in English would help in bringing about a more defined focus in the multifarious areas of study that are undertaken at the departmental level. It is a change that suggests teaching and research that students pursue in interdisciplinary areas such as anthropology, film studies, literature, American or African or Asian studies, and history, which range widely over a diverse terrain.

The new discipline of cultural studies must have a new paradigm for the common analysis of canonical as well as non-canonical texts. Many departments have already undertaken to radically change the methodology and approach to literary studies.

Through a detailed criticism of competing theories, including Cultural Studies, New Historicism and Cultural Materialism, literary critics in Indian universities have tried to show how this new study should - and should not - be done.

We are at a juncture where it is important to alter the specialised intellectual work in the academy because, as Edward Said has also argued, it speaks increasingly to itself rather than the world of everyday life and ordinary need. Such specialisation and methodology has a tendency towards a doctrinaire set of assumptions and a language of professionalisation allied with cultural dogma and a "surprisingly insistent quietism". Our consistently advocated preference is for a form of criticism and a teaching methodology that dispenses with all this obscurity and instead contests at every point the confined and limited specialisation of most academic discourse in English studies. For a teacher of English today, the text is a vast web of affiliations with the world. The literary text, for example is not simply located in a canonical line of books called "English Literature" but is something that has its roots and connections with many other aspects of the world - political, social, cultural - all of which go to make up its relevance to our day to day life.

It is well known that there is a complacency in the obsession with the status quo.

It is surprising to hear each time the often-used argument that there is no need for a debate since the proposed change would not be allowed by the authorities; such academics, like many more who have devious and selfish agendas, are not prepared to consider one of the central battlefields of the culture wars in the universities where liberals and conservatives have fought over questions of diversity, tradition, and current innovations in pedagogy.

The battles have been fierce in many universities around the world, complicated by the university's unsettled, ever-changing nature, whereas here in many of our so-called forward-looking universities senior faculty members feel threatened to hear or afraid to put across radical views exploring the university's engagement with "culture" and its vast number of different, competing representations.

SHELLEY WALIA

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