simpson, talking about the early middle english romance sir degare. (oh dear. fancy having a name like degare - the unprotected, the lost. a car, simpson quips, out of the garage - it is from the same word isn't it? garage, train station, garer la voiture somewhere or other. poor man - an unsheltered, unprotected knight.) and how it might be justified as literature. through its structure, he suggests, and not through its style, obviously, or else it could not make it into the literary studies, style being the thing that english professors are most concerned with, since it is what (or so it is supposed) the only thing that distinguishes literature from what we might call the "prose sense" of things.

i don't know i agree with that - that things have a "prose sense" or "meaning" or "statement" and style is what confers literariness on a text.(how very formalist i sound, heresy of paraphrase etc. oh dear oh dear.) not that i have an answer either, but the development of english as an academic discipline is increasingly interesting to me (not least because it coincides with my interest in francis j. child - not that our times are not filled with interesting people - this isn't a good old days rant - but there are so many people i want to meet who are dead.) the twinned questions of what makes our discipline a discipline, and what distinguishes it from other disciplines, is more than the matter of battling over turfs or justifying continued support. english departments are seen these days as ivory towers, but it was first seen as a great social leveller when universities began teaching english literature. to teach vernacular literature rather than latin and greek was precisely the opposite of a high-brow enterprise; it was a major concession to expanding access to education. but today, as english departments are faced with the charge of being highbrow and self-indulgent, they have had to expand their scope even more to include media and cultural studies, as a concession to "relevance." it's hard to know to what degree this "opening up" can be seen as dilution or progression.