English After the Fall: From Literature to Textuality - Softcover

Robert Scholes

Softcover

ISBN 10: 160938055X ISBN 13: 9781609380557

Publisher: University of Iowa Press, 2011

Synopsis

Robert Scholes’s now classic Rise and Fall of English was a stinging indictment of the discipline of English literature in the United States. In English after the Fall, Scholes moves from identifying where the discipline has failed to provide concrete solutions that will help restore vitality and relevance to the discipline.

About this title

Review:

"With freshness and cogency, Robert Scholes's English after the Fall argues that literature departments need to move from the 'cul-de-sac' of 'literature' and embrace a broader study of 'textuality.' Scholes presents a set of striking examples of how the profession can move from narrow study of 'literariness' to a more all-encompassing study of texts from all media--from a running commentary on The Man Who Shot Liberty Valance to lucid analyses of biblical texts in the context of debates over right-wing fundamentalism and gay marriage. Here Scholes illustrates how foolish and self-defeating it is to segregate the teaching of highbrow literature from the wider field of cultural representation."--Gerald Graff, author, Clueless in Academe: How Schooling Obscures the Life of the Mind

"Robert Scholes's English after the Fall arrives just in the nick of time to join a nationwide debate on the relevance of teaching the humanities. In a perceptive, candid, and wide-ranging book, Scholes argues with passionate insight from a lifetime of experience. Equally comfortable with poems, fiction, scripture, public documents, film, musicals, and opera, Scholes provides us with a method of reading (and teaching reading) that is provocative, innovative, important, and very welcome indeed."--Geoffrey Green, author, Voices in a Mask: Stories

"Not for the first time, Robert Scholes challenges us to dare imagine a different way of professing English, one where narrow specialties give way to a broad engagement with our media-saturated modernity. The argument is as urgent as it is learned, wending its sinuous way through a dazzling array of materials. English after the Fall is a necessary book that should be read by students, teachers, scholars, and anyone interested in understanding how we might all become better readers and better users of the many languages that make our world."--Sean Latham, Pauline Walter Professor of English and Comparative Literature, University of Tulsa

About the Author:

Robert Scholes is Research Professor of Modern Culture and Media at Brown University, where he directs the Modernist Journals Project. A past president of the MLA, he is author or editor of numerous books, including Semiotics and Interpretation, Textual Power, Protocols of Reading, The Rise and Fall of English, The Crafty Reader, Paradoxy of Modernism, Modernism in the Magazines, Fields of Writing, and Fields of Reading.

About this edition

• Publisher: University of Iowa Press
• Publication date: 2011
• ISBN 10: 160938055X
• ISBN 13: 9781609380557
• Binding: Paperback
• Edition number: 1
• Number of pages: 176