This site uses cookies, as explained in our privacy policy. If you agree to our use of cookies, please click accept message and continue to use this site. Robert Scholes began to defect in the sixties. He was a young critic, and his faith was waning. So long as you had a story and a storyteller, the two men argued, you had a narrative worthy of analysis.
The time had come to open the curricular gates. It was when Scholes walked away from the novel. He was 37 then, still bouncing between schools, only a budding rebel, not yet a turncoat. Still he clung to concepts like meaning and narrative, and still he analyzed novels according to questions of story, structure, and personage. This, too, would change.
Scholes was dipping his toes in structuralism; soon, he was a full-fledged semiotician. In , he arrived at Brown and turned to the text. They studied language at the level of signifier an expressive device and signified the content or image of such a device , embracing the distance and instability between the two.
They brushed aside questions of authorial intention and meaning, and they tossed away syllabi of high literature, embracing a curriculum that spanned wide forms of media. Scholes saw the discipline of English at a generational turning point, split between two ideals.
Literariness, he felt, was more important than literature. It bled, with textualism more generally, into other aspects of the humanities, intertwining with an overdue revision of the literary canon. Over time, however, the political logic of these interventions grew blurry, and what began as a radical reimagining of the university withered into a tepid revision of the curriculum.
