subject: The History Of English Literature Is A History Of Translation In Part [print this page] It is fitting that this pilot course took place at the University of Alabama. In 1993, fourteen years before our translation studies course met, our university hosted the Nineteenth Alabama Symposium of English and American Literature, described by organizer James C. Raymond as "a fitful conversation, at times a series of monologues, sometimes convivial, sometimes hostile," organized around Links Of London Bracelets the question '"Is there a discipline in this department'". Diverse scholars have historicized these divisions, demonstrating how the perpetual quest for a fixed definition of literature has always been a feature of the discipline of English.9 Twenty years ago, Gerald Graff and Michael Warner lobbied for coherence in literary studies "based on the recognition of conflict rather than on a traditional consensus".
In Professing Literature, Graff suggests that English departments suffer from "disconnection" between their separate parts and proposes that departments utilize conflicts and debates to their advantage. John Guillory's prefatory remarks to Cultural Capital are also well suited for our proposal: "The most interesting question raised by the debate is not the familiar one of which texts and authors will be included in the literary canon, but the question of why the debate represents a crisis in literary study" (vii). This is particularly true in the United States where, as Franklin Court has argued, curricular debates occasion unnecessary alarm "precisely because of the persistent misconception that the history of the discipline is changeless, historically homogeneous, and consistent with the ideals of a valorized concept of culture".
The history of English literature is, in part, a history of translation. We believe that students should learn this at the undergraduate level in Links London a translation studies course. We propose that such a course be mandatory, in the belief that it will enhance not only the learning and scholarship of the students, but also the professor who teaches it. Even the most traditional English departments offer broad coverage; we are convinced that this further extension will benefit student engagement with all class readings, perhaps the current syllabus mainstays most of all. The translation studies course herein described might well mean that undergraduate English majors finish their degrees with one course fewer in American or British literature, but it would also mean that they understand the complexity of these designations. What we propose, then, is not merely an introductory course, but a potential instrument of change in the way a nation reads.
