ENGLISH 5000 DISCUSSION QUESTIONS SPRING 2014
Discussion
questions for 1/28/14. Please
reply to two: # 1, and then either #2 or #3. Bring your printed responses
(which should be at least 400 words each) to class. Please double-space your
replies (and please do not reprint the questions).
2. Eagleton (sweepingly) and Baldick
(in a more limited survey) describe the historical justifications for the study
of English—what the practice will allegedly do for the soul, or for society, or
for civilization. Do you see this
history reflected in contemporary thinking about the topic—in departmental or
college mission statements, in the popular press, in friendly conversations
with strangers who discover that you’re an English major?
3. Matthew Arnold writes in “The Function of
Criticism at the Present Time” that the rule for criticism should be
“disinterestedness”(703)—a “free disinterested
treatment of things” (707). (A) What
does he mean by this? (B) Do you think
he is correct to recommend it, and that such a thing as he describes is
possible?
Discussion
questions for 2/4/14. Please respond to one of the following in answers of at least 400
words.
1. Culler and Eagleton make what
has become the standard contemporary argument that the question “what is
literature?” is best answered functionally rather than ontologically—that is,
that "literature,” as Terry Eagleton puts it, cannot be said to exist
"as an 'objective,' descriptive category." Do you agree with this
claim? If not, why not? And if you do agree, have you always held that opinion,
or is it of more recent vintage? What was your “conversion experience,” and
what have the consequences been for your reading/writing/teaching/thinking
about “literature?”
2. Writing during the height of
the “culture wars” of the 1990s, John Guillory suggested in Cultural Capital that both the traditionalist defenders of the central
importance of “Western Civilization” and those “multiculturalists” who sought
to open the canon of university-taught texts to previously excluded or
neglected works shared, unwittingly, both some common assumptions and some
common blind spots. Like what?
3. Speaking of common assumptions: does the contemporary philosopher Martha Nussbaum share any with the 19th- and 20th-century writers and critics responsible for “the rise of English,” as Baldick and Eagleton describe them? Where does she differ from those earlier champions of the importance of literature?
Discussion questions for 2/18/14. Please
respond to #1 and either #2 or #3.
1. Provide four good
sentences of the sort that Stanley Fish describes at the beginning of How to Write a Sentence...— four sentences
that you would count among your favorites.
Two of the sentences must be sentences you wrote—not new
sentences produced for this assignment, but sentences you wrote some time in
the past (in an essay, a letter, an email, a blog post) and felt pleased about
having composed. Include a sentence (a
new one) about each sentence that explains what we should admire about it.
**Please email me
your sentences by 10PM Monday, February 17, so that I can make them available
in class.**
2. When it comes to
language and language use, do you consider yourself a descriptivist or a prescriptivist, in the terms Anne Curzan
sets out? Describe and defend your
position. (For more on this matter, you
can look at the New Yorker piece by
Joan Acocella on MyGateway,
and the response to Acocella by Stephen Pinker at http://www.slate.com/articles/arts/the_good_word/2012/05/steven_pinker_on_the_false_fronts_in_the_language_wars_.html)
3. At the end of her
book about Westerns, Jane Tompkins turns from cowboys and gunfights to what she
calls the “bloodless kind of violence” that takes place between professors, at
conferences and in essays. Is she
correct that the fundamental mode of academic discourse is agonistic? Does the
expository advice provided by They Say/I
Say confirm or refute her suspicions?
What does your own experience—in reading and writing—suggest about her
claims?