Volume 23, Number 9 · May 27, 1976
Is There Hope for English?
By C.L. Barber
English in America: A Radical View of the Profession
by Richard Ohmann, with a chapter by Wallace Douglas
Oxford University Press, 344 pp., $4.50 (paper)
F.O. Matthiessen: The Critical Achievement
by Giles Gunn
University of Washington Press, 248 pp., $9.50
Richard Ohmann's English in America: A Radical View is a very insistent book. It insists that the English teaching profession serves destructive capitalism and cannot do anything else unless 'we teach politically with revolution as our end.' Wallace Douglas contributes a chapter on 'Rhetoric for the Meritocracy' in which he describes the change from the small nineteenth-century college for the propertied class to the pluralistic, departmentalized modern university, along with the change from gentleman's Latin and Greek to English. What Eliot created at the new Harvard in the 1870s was an institution to train organization men to serve property in the industrialized society. Ohmann argues that the modern English department grew fat in this situation primarily because it met the need to teach composition as a managerial skill. Literary studies were shaped by the need for English scholars to justify themselves as professionals by making 'contributions to knowledge,' in competition with other specialized departments.
Review, 3684 words
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