Inviteret taler

Academic fields, especially in the humanities, and especially languages, are under severe and multiple pressures. A pervasive factor is the decline of authority in the cultural sphere, where critical voices and market pressures join hands in putting a question mark against the definitions and gatekeeping procedures that constitute academic fields and associated school subjects. One consequence is the tendency for centrifugal forces to gather strength, with a traditional canon as the main, increasingly tattered bid for unity. This is to some extent inevitable. The problem is that unless academic subjects have a focal structure with a certain normative ‘attractor’ force, they will ultimately disappear: it is not a given thing that ‘English’ should continue to be a subject. If we assume it should, how can it get beyond the discontents and justify continuing the cultural lineage? The talk will discuss Bildung, qualification, consumer satisfaction and competency as competing overall educational norms and the viability of different normative identities for ‘English’ in the present educational culture.