Susan Bruce

Some Notes on a Project: Democracy and Authority in the Production of a Discipline

The Production of University English: A Project and Its Background This essay describes the parameters, the methodology, and some of the initial findings of a collaborative research project, begun in September 2006, involving colleagues in English and education departments in five different British universities. Our project, funded by the English Subject Centre, investigates how English (understood as a form of knowledge socially constructed through disciplinary tradition, institutional context, and immediate exchanges in the teaching room) is “produced” in the context of the teaching space, a site less formal than, but as significant as, the scholarly articles and books produced by academics working in a field, or the scholarly histories of a subject qua subject. How do university teachers and their students “produce” their subjects, we ask, moment to moment, in situations and with sets of resources and constraints that are not fully — and, some would argue, ever less — under their control? In what communicational practices do students and teachers engage in their discussions of material in the classroom, and how might we “read” those practices once we have identified them? How might multimodal theories — theories that attend to forms of meaning making that involve gesture, posture, gaze, and movement as well as the spoken and written word — help to describe and interrogate what actually happens when a discipline is taught and learned? And how do broad patterns of institutional

Using your profanisaurus: Comparisons, analogies and cultural capital in two English Literature seminars

‘Using your profanisaurus’ derives from a project, The Production of University English, whose earliest findings were published in Arts and Humanities in Higher Education in 2005. By analysing ‘ordinary’ discussions in ‘ordinary’ English Literature classes in diverse universities, the project seeks to uncover what really happens when English is taught and learned in British Higher Education. This article examines two instances where students compare the text they are studying with another artifact, in order to raise questions about canonicity, culture, and the act of comparison itself. The project also aims to show how analytical methods generated from the discipline of English may be employed to elucidate other texts, including the ‘text of the classroom’. Consequently, the article begins with a discussion of three artifacts whose form presupposes a comparative reading.

‘There’s none / Can truly say he gives, if he receives’: Timon of Athens and the Possibilities of Generosity Or The Gift of a Stranger

Timon of Athens, like King Lear, charts a man’s tragic trajectory from largesse to misanthropy. Faced with his daughters’ ingratitude, Lear experiences what one of the most sensitive of contemporary readers of Shakespeare, Stanley Cavell, has described as a classically Shakespearean reaction to loss: a ‘self-consuming disappointment that seeks world-consuming revenge’ (Cavell 1987, 6) a phrase which just as aptly describes Timon’s reaction to the apprehension, into which the play compels him, of the failure of his own generosity. The disappointment that he feels is nothing if not self-consuming; the revenge he seeks encompasses the consumption of his world: the sack of Athens. Indiscriminate and absolute philanthropy metamorphoses into its opposite, as the very figure of friendship becomes that of absolute enmity: ‘I am Misanthropos, and hate mankind’ (4.3.54).

For Love of People, Culture and Society

This is the first of three chapters about love of one’s subject area. The centrepiece of higher education is the study of particular subjects. It is through particular concepts, ideas and disciplinary ways of thinking that students and teachers re-make their understandings of themselves and the world. Thus, this chapter and the two that follow it divide the myriad of different subjects in higher education into three broad categories.

Introduction: Fiction and Economy

In Money to Burn, a recent narrative of a real historical event by the Argentinean writer Ricardo Piglia,1 a group of men steal seven million pesos (the equivalent of almost six hundred thousand US dollars in 1965, when the story takes place) from the Provincial Bank of Buenos Aires. After their initial plans of escape fail, they cross the border to Montevideo, where they end up besieged in an apartment previously bugged by the police. Sustained by an arsenal of weapons, a good provision of various drugs, their faith in their leader’s capacity to come up with a plan to rescue them and a deep hatred for the armed forces, the men resist increasingly violent attacks from the police force, scoring several ‘victories’ (deaths) in the process. According to a journalist’s account, ‘every victory achieved under such impossible conditions increased their capacity to resist. … This was why what followed had the aspect of a tragic ritual that no one who was there that night could ever forget’ (Piglia 2003b, 155). In the episode from which the narrative takes its title, the men’s resistance reaches its climax when they set fire to the stolen money and throw the burning 1000-peso bills out of the window, one by one, ‘in a move that left the city and the country horror-struck, and which lasted precisely fifteen interminable minutes, which is exactly how long it takes to burn such an astronomical quantity of money…’ (ibid., 157).