Raymond Williams, "The Future of English Literature"
(from What I Came to Say, 1989)
The fact is that what is waiting at the end of the road I was describing
earlier -- where having read books of all kinds, you see a path ahead in
which there will be more of that kind of activity, more people and more
experienced people to discuss it with in a continual expansion and interchange,
in all the many stimuli and pleasures of different kinds of writing --
what is waiting is of course the syllabus, and this requires rather
precise definition. I don't think you could simply say, we've all developed
these strong kinds of personal interest in reading and come to a university
where there's a library and we can all pursue our individual courses. I
mean you could argue that position, but it's difficult really to
make the case for a university if that's what you do mean....And yet immediately
you look at a syllabus you see that the limits are in fact inscribed in
it, and this is the most difficult professional point. For a syllabus is
always offered as if it were a fairly common-sense, self-evident description
of what is agreed common ground in the study of the subect -- English Literature.
It is not offered as a matter for argument but rather as the way the subject
as it were constructs itself.
[text omitted]
I am saying that there's a real problem about that 600 years of English
literature when it is regarded as the creation and expression of the whole
people. After all, that is what the claim to Englishness, essential Englishness,
is: that in learning this you learnt the real fibre of your people, they
almost said 'race'. And yet, we must then insist, not until the last 100
years or so could the great majority of the people of these islands have
been in any significant sense contributors to that literature, or readers
of it, responding in the way in which readers do, helping both to constitute
it and in some sense to shape it, giving certain shapes, affecting certain
tones which involve the historical transacation of writers and readers.
One doesn't raise the only as a 'political' issue, as people
say, fighting an old cause, fighting the cause of a people consciously
kept illiterate -- though of course that's what it was. The struggle for
literacy was a real a social struggle as any struggle for subsistence or
food or shelter. It was at several points viciously beaten back, and then
in a sense only admitted on terms which are again becoming highly fashionable
and contemporary; because people would need to read instructions and even
to write down certain things in the way of record to be able to work....Is
not that deep substratum of the language-situation, not in a technical
sense of language but in a social sense, a major issue in itself?"
Now it's in all these ways that the existing orthodox syllabus reveals
itself as a stabilisation before the very forces that are now visibly disturbing
it, disturbing the situation, in some ways ending the situation. ... If
[the case for syllabus reform] is made simply in the form that these are
undesirable restrictions of my total individual freedom of choice, then
it will not get through because it concedes too much. It concedes the notion
that we have some common responsibility to knowledge and its maintenance;
it concedes the sens of a certain necessary organisation as a basis for
much more individual choice and options which lead out from that. The case
is stronger when it doesn't concede these points, which are almost the
only serious points left to the defenders of the status quo; and they defend
it the more easily if the challenge is not an intellectual one, with the
examples that make sense from our own reading, problems and discussions.
[text omitted] |