History Bump

Ohmann first identifies the inappropriate tendency of the Humanities to organize themselves around the research design logic of the scientific disciplines. He then identifies several institutions that he argues represent English Literature most clearly (the MLA, the Advanced Placement test, and Freshman English). His analysis of these institutions as ‘gatekeepers’ suggests that they are in place in order to assure a docile, but ‘cultured’ workforce. He argues that teachers of English (and most profoundly, Composition) work crucially to ‘sort out’ who in post-fordist society will fail and who will succeed as the distance between rich and poor widens. The second edition (1996) contains an introduction in which Ohmann addresses the reception of his text over the intervening twenty years as well as the ways that his own perceptions have changed and/or stayed the same. He wrestles interestingly with a comment that “lay quietly coiled in a in a subordinate clause on page 256” (xxv) of the first edition in which he calls for a “socialist revolution” as the only remedy for the ills of the English department. He seems to be both embarrassed and proud to have let that sentence remain, but asserts strongly that he now believes that change can and must also happen slowly. In a final chapter of updated “Afterthoughts,” Ohmann points to advances (institutional gains of feminism and Marxism, politics in composition, the good sign of anger from the right), but reasserts his “call to politics” (341).

1. Stance of researcher/writer: Ohman claims to write from the position of a committed ant-war activist who has been disillusioned by the reactionary center of his chosen field and its refusal to engage in national politics. As a successful white male academic, he critiques the institution from the inside and includes himself among the practitioners he critiques. He writes also as an avowed Marxist—he acknowledges in his 1996 introduction that the depth of his knowledge in 1976 was superficial, but he reasserts its importance in his analysis now that he knows better. He also emphasizes his commitment to the study of literature: “I shall assume that we believe the study of literature to be the most central of our concerns” (5), and, “Our goal, I think, is the fostering of a literary consciousness” (13).

2. His/her purpose: To persuade his audience (of English Lit academics) of the existence of a crisis, and to persuade them to take steps to change their practice. This “history” has a very strong investment in the present (Omann’s 1976 present)—Ohmann marshals evidence gleaned from recent historical texts in order to tell a particular story of a crisis in the present—he does not write as a historian; he uses a historical perspective to construct an polemic calling for action—sort of like Crowley’s Composition in the University.

3. Method of data collection: Archivist (Institutional reports, letters, textbooks, scholarly articles), personal anecdote.

4. Method of analysis: Identification of key moments (1968 MLA conference, 1989 dissolution of the Soviet Union), textual Analysis, arrangement, juxtaposition, personal response, anger/rage, polemic.

5. Apparent disciplinary aim: Disciplinary change, reform—to urge the field to acknowledge and address the distance that exists between what practitioners of the field say they believe and what they do. To initiate, outline and complicate the discipline’s discussion of the impact of post-Fordist pressures on English teaching. To recognize the damage that occurs as a result of a general lack of resistance to the market pressures of the military-industrial complex. A call for the discipline to take up a direction that is “politically grounded” (303).