Customer Reviews

English Studies: An Introduction to the Discipline(s) (Refiguring English Studies)

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The previous reviews of this book seem to be a bit off-target, not to mention hostile, so I thought I'd provide a bit of balance. The book does a very nice job of providing an overview of English as a discipline. If that's what you are looking for, then this book will work well. It starts with a chapter by the editor that traces the history of English, a history that explains how the discipline came to be so varied and often misunderstood. The editor goes on to argue that English should make better connections across its subdisciplines in order to guarantee itself a future now that its traditional focus of studying literature seems to be less central to the enterprise of higher education. After that introduction, the book offers lengthy essays by different scholars discussing the history of their subdisciplines and potential futures. The essays discuss composition and rhetoric, creative writing, cultural studies, education, linguistics, and literary study. All of the essays are very accurate (except for the cultural studies chapter which focuses too much on the British academic tradition of cultural studies and doesn't discuss enough the American tradition of popular culture studies--though that chapter's discussion of critical theory is very good), and the book overall provides a solid understanding of English as a discipline. If you come to the book with other expectations (say, that it might be entertaining like a Harry Potter novel or something), then you might be disappointed (though I don't know why anyone would expect that of this book anyway, as it is pretty straightforward as to its purpose as an introduction/overview of English studies). In any case, the book fulfills its stated purpose well, so readers interested in an overview of English as an academic discipline (for example, a new English major who doesn't know all the subdisciplines covered by the umbrella of English) will be rewarded.

I had to purchase this book for my English 380 class and out of all of the books that I have ever had to purchase this one is the worst. Usually I can figure out a need to keep a book as a resource for something later on in life. Not only was this book boring, but it has no use after the class is over and even in the class there was no point in having it other than it was needed. There was absolutely nothing educational in it. Maybe if this was used for like a 100 level English class, so that you understand the different sub-departments within English, but even then it seems like such a waste of paper. Save the trees!