Books by Robert Scholes
The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline
In this lucid book an eminent scholar, teacher, and author takes a critical look at the nature and direction of English studies in America. Robert Scholes offers a thoughtful and witty intervention in current debates about educational and cultural values and goals, showing how English came to occupy its present place in our educational system.
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The Rise and Fall of English: Reconstructing English as a Discipline
In this lucid book an eminent scholar, teacher, and author takes a critical look at the nature and direction of English studies in America. Robert Scholes offers a thoughtful and witty intervention in current debates about educational and cultural values and goals, showing how English came to occupy its present place in our educational system, diagnosing the educational illness he perceives in today’s English departments, and recommending theoretical and practical changes in the field of English studies. Scholes’s position defies neat labels―it is a deeply conservative expression of the wish to preserve the best in the English tradition of verbal and textual studies, yet it is a radical argument for reconstruction of the discipline of English.
The book begins by examining the history of the rapid rise of English at two American universities―Yale and Brown―at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. Scholes argues that the subsequent fall of English―discernible today in college English departments across the United States―is the result of both cultural shifts and changes within the field of English itself. He calls for a fundamental reorientation of the discipline―away from political or highly theoretical issues, away from a specific canon of texts, and toward a canon of methods, to be used in the process of learning how to situate, compose, and read a text. He offers an eloquent proposal for a discipline based on rhetoric and the teaching of reading and writing over a broad range of literatures, a discipline that includes literariness but is not limited to it.
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The Little Review "Ulysses"
by James Joyce, Robert Scholes, Sean Latham, Mark Gaipa
James Joyce’s Ulysses first appeared in print in the pages of an American avant-garde magazine, The Little Review, between 1918 and 1920. The novel many consider to be the most important literary work of the twentieth century was, at the time, deemed obscene and scandalous, resulting in the eventual seizure of The Little Review and the placing of a legal ban on Joyce’s masterwork that would not be lifted in the United States until 1933. For the first time, The Little Review “Ulysses” brings together the serial installments of Ulysses to create a new edition of the novel, enabling teachers, students, scholars, and general readers to see how one of the previous century’s most daring and influential prose narratives evolved, and how it was initially introduced to an audience who recognized its radical potential to transform Western literature. This unique and essential publication also includes essays and illustrations designed to help readers understand the rich contexts in which Ulysses first appeared and trace the complex changes Joyce introduced after it was banned.
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Textual Power: Literary Theory and the Teaching of English
“Robert Scholes has written an enviable book on the uses and abuses of literary theory in the teaching of literature. One of [his] most forceful points…is that ‘literary theory’ is not something a teacher may either ‘use’ or not use, for teaching itself is an unavoidably theoretical activity.”—Gerald Graff, Novel
“Scholes’ emphasis in Textual Power is indicated by the book’s subtitle. After a provocative analysis of disciplinary values and departmental tendencies…[he] proposes that ‘we must stop “teaching literature” and start studying texts’…His book is essential for college libraries.”—R.C. Gebhardt, Choice
“There is no issue more current, more relevant to the present scene, than the problem of pedagogy and its relation to contemporary theory. Textual Power is an important, provocative, and above all useful contribution to this discussion.”—Gregory L. Ulmer
Robert Scholes, author of Structuralism in Literature and Semiotics and Interpretation among other books, is Alumni-Alumnae University Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Brown University.
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The Nature of Narrative: Revised and Expanded
by Robert Scholes, James Phelan, Robert Kellogg
For the past forty years The Nature of Narrative has been a seminal work for literary students, teachers, writers, and scholars. Countering the tendency to view the novel as the paradigm case of literary narrative, authors Robert Scholes and Robert Kellogg in the original edition offered a compelling history of the genre narrative from antiquity to the twentieth-century, even as they carried out their main task of describing and analyzing the nature of narrative's main elements: meaning, character, plot, and point of view. Their history emphasized the broad sweep of literary narrative from ancient times to the contemporary period, and it included a chapter on the oral heritage of written narrative and an appendix on the interior monologue in ancient texts.
The fortieth anniversary edition of this groundbreaking work has been revised and expanded to include a new preface and a lengthy chapter on developments in narrative theory since 1966 by James Phelan. This chapter describes the principles and practices of structuralist, cognitive, feminist, and rhetorical approaches to narrative, paying special attention to their work on plot, character, and narrative discourse.
A continued leader in the field of narrative studies, The Nature of Narrative offers unique and invaluable histories of both narrative and narrative theory.
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Modernism in the Magazines An Introduction
by Robert Scholes, Clifford Wulfman
If modernism began in the magazines, as Robert Scholes and Clifford Wulfman argue, then the study of modern culture should begin with these publications. Scholes and Wulfman's radically inclusive approach not only considers the "little" modernist magazines alongside the "big" or mass magazines often dismissed as antithetical to modernism's elite culture, but also insists that scholars must investigate their contents as a whole--from poetry to advertising--to appreciate their full significance. The book's appendix also reprints a previously uncollected critique of popular British magazines from 1917 and 1918 by Ezra Pound.
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English After the Fall From Literature to Textuality
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 providing concrete solutions that will help restore vitality and relevance to the discipline. With the self-assurance of a master essayist, Scholes explores the reasons for the fallen status of English and suggests a way forward. Arguing that the fall of English as a field of study is due, at least in part, to the narrow view of “literature” that prevails in English departments, Scholes charts how the historical rise of English as a field of study during the early twentieth century led to the domination of modernist notions of verbal art, ultimately restricting English studies to a narrow cannon of approved texts. After tracing the various meanings attached to the word “literature” since the Renaissance, Scholes argues that the concept of it that currently shapes the work of English departments excludes both powerful sacred documents (from the Declaration of Independence to the Bible) and pleasurable, profane works that involve the performance of roles like those of clown and teacher in many media (including popular musicals, opera, and film)—and that both sorts of works should be studied in English courses. English after the Fall is a bold manifesto for the replacement of literature with what Scholes calls textuality—an expansive and ecumenical notion of what we read and write—as the primary object of English instruction. This concise and persuasive work is destined to become required reading for anyone who cares about the future of the humanities.
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