History Of English Literature By David Daiches 67.pdf _BEST_

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The departmental organization of English has had an especially peculiar history. It grew out of the study of rhetoric, which was one of the subjects usually entrusted to the professor of mental and moral philosophy. As originally taught, rhetoric had no special reference to English. The text books were lineal descendants of the treatises of Aristotle and Cicero and the models or illustrations were taken from classical and foreign writers as often as from English. To the study of rhetoric were next added masterpieces of English literature annotated for details of meaning and allusions, and then came outline histories of English literature, usually unaccompanied by any reading of the literature itself.

The departmental organization of English has had an especially peculiar history. It grew out of the study of rhetoric, which was one of the subjects usually entrusted to the professor of mental and moral philosophy. As originally taught, rhetoric had no special reference to English. The text books were lineal descendants of the treatises of Aristotle and Cicero and the models or illustrations were taken from classical and foreign writers as often as from English. To the study of rhetoric were next added masterpieces of English literature annotated for details of meaning and allusions, and then came outline histories of English literature, usually unaccompanied by any reading of the literature itself. Meanwhile there were rumors of the great discoveries of the kinship of the English language with the Germanic, the Celtic, the Slavic, the Latin, the Greek, the Sanskrit and the Persian languages, and of the theory that languages were organisms existing and developing independently of the peoples who used them, but subject to laws as invariable as those of zoology and botany. Consequently, the history of the English language became a fascinating object of research and the earlier forms of English, commonly known as Anglo-Saxon received special attention. With the growing interest in the evolution of human culture and the doctrine most brilliantly expounded by Taine that all art products, including literature, were inevitably determined in character and quality by time, race, and environment, arose the study of literature as a product not merely of the individual author bu of the whole social organism to which he belonged. The development of English became then what it has since remained, a conglomerate of knowledges and disciplines loosely bound together by the fact that they were all in one way or another related to the English language.[29]

With the growth of the study of English as an art product, American graduate schools of English came into existence, and in time English departments were organized in universities to teach students not merely grammar, rhetoric, history, comparative literature, and English philology, but also dramatic theory, theory of literature, and methods of interpretation. It was not long before an academic jargon of its own was developed, complete with its specialized terminology and its jargonistic terminology. The founding of American Studies by Barnard, Olin and Williams, the reaction to their notions by the traditionalists, the launching of the leading periodicals, the creation of the leading universities, the founding of the Association for the Study of Linguistics and Folklore, the formation of the Modern Language Association, the publication of the Papers of the English-Speaking Union, the founding of the Journal of English and Germanic Philology, the founding of the American Journal of English, the founding of the American Academy of English Studies, etc. all contributed to the homogenization of the subject. The older scholars who had felt the need to react against the growing activity of the new schools of English thought and to defend the old order were in the majority, but they were in a minority. The homogenization of English is a process which to this day is never complete, but the results are fairly well-established. 827ec27edc