The History & Well-Being of English Studies

English Studies is rooted in the early oral tradition of storytelling; the recording of these stories was a method to preserve the experiences of generations of people and as far as I am concerned, this purpose is still upheld in today’s literary exposition. A couple of centuries of documentation is what lead to the evolution of language and genre in the writing discourse; this explains the elegance of Shakespeare’s words and today’s obsession with dystopian literature. Jessica Yood in “Writing the Discipline: A Generic History of English Studies” discusses in her essay how the personal essay and autobiographical writing has influenced the ebb and flow of writing styles and genres because the personal essay turns the writer from object, the thing that documents information, to subject, the primary source that uses firsthand experiences to recount knowledge. “To reflect on the discipline [English] is not to bookmark its beginning or end but to experience its practices in the present,” Yood concludes her critical essay on the history of studying the written word (538). The way I interpreted this statement is that writing tracks the history of the people who were alive during the time that a given writer sat down to write a poem, play, novel, etc., which gives present and future readers of the literature a kaleidoscopic look into the lives of each generation of human beings hence literature and composition being labeled as a part of the “humanities”. Literature, as other expressive forms of creation, track human history on a much more explanative and profound level than a history book which merely states when and where an event happened; literature is the why. The Big Question that scholars in the humanities ask themselves isn’t “Why are we here?”, but “Why the humanities?” because isn’t it possible that technology will expand so much as to literally bring us through a wormhole to witness Shakespeare writing Hamlet? Nothing is impossible when it comes to science and technology, but no creation can be as pure and organic as the meshing and recording of a language present in particular time and context.