The collusion of poetry, politics and Englishness in Australian public life perhaps found its fullest expression in Prime Minister Robert Menzies’ well-known tribute to the young Queen, Elizabeth, on her first visit to Australia: ‘I did but see her passing by, / And yet I love her till I die’. For Menzies, as for so many of his generation, England became an imagined place of extraordinary power, a place shaped by its representation in English literature and the teaching of that literature. On visiting England he wrote in his diary,

It is an unexpectedly sentimental view of the relationship between land, nation, character and literary form, each nourishing the other – a synthesis impervious to conflict or change.

Menzies’ diaries record an anxiety about being recognised by the custodians of culture and tradition as ‘one of us’, a fear that some

14marker, like accent, would betray the speaker as a colonial. For those who went to England in search of taste, training or tutelage, the final seal of approval was to be able to ‘pass for English’, a desire that can be seen in memoirs by writer/academics like Jill Ker Conway and Andrew Riemer. This anxiety about being recognised as a member of the cultural and intellectual elite permeates the discipline of English for decades, shaping pedagogy, examinations and what is valued in personality and training when selecting staff. More importantly, perhaps, tens of thousands of readers made the journey to England in their minds via the medium of literary texts. Perhaps readers experienced and believed in the authority of this imagined place all the more powerfully for never having experienced it in any material form. This book attempts to examine what might be called the imaginative authority of English.

One of the more interesting obstacles to such an enquiry is the problem of challenging what might almost be called faith. Notwithstanding the ubiquity of claims that the English are defined by their pragmatism, their uncomplicated common sense approach to the world (by which claims they seek to be distinguished from Celts and Catholics, among others), there is a sense that the particular appeal and authority of the English landscape, literature and character is based on an almost incongruously ineffable element. And this faith, which recoils from pragmatic inquiry or motive, has generally gone unnoticed in histories of the discipline, despite being central to understandings of the role of the universities and study in the humanities in Britain in the nineteenth century and earlier. In his study The Platonic Renaissance in England, Ernst Cassirer says of English scholars that they

Although Cassirer is speaking here of a different period and discipline, his words nevertheless offer a superb précis – to the extent any précis is ever possible – of the ethos of teaching English as it was 15generally understood in the period under analysis: to ‘fortify and defend’ the past.

To begin with Menzies, or more accurately, to begin with Menzies as a reader (and an author) of an enchanted and enchanting England is also to point to the importance of the relationship between reading literary texts and the formation of subjectivity. By this I mean that some sense of our self – what story we might tell of our origins, of our beliefs and of the shape of our lives – is formed through reading literary texts, and through the relationships we develop with books. In reading we rehearse, explore, recognise or reject different ways of being, and in the texts we value or reject, we reject or value aspects of our selves and of others. Or as Thomas Hill Green expressed it, ‘The personal experience and the fictitious act and re-act on each other, the personal experience giving reality to the fictitious, the fictitious expansion to the personal’.2 It is this relationship between reading and subjectivity that gives the practices of teaching and reading literature their particular emotional intensity. For debates about the teaching of English have an intensity which reflects the fact that a widely indulged and celebrated private pleasure (reading) and a major industry (publishing) can also take the form of an academic discipline, charged with teaching and testing the skill of reading. And the discipline everywhere shows the strains of its relationships to these other institutions, the strain of the desire to be modern and to be old; to offer reverence and to offer critique. Emotion is paramount here. In the introduction to the first edition of this book, I noted that renowned Sydney University academic Mungo MacCallum had, after his retirement, decided not to assist with teaching as he had planned, because his lecturing had been subject to ridicule in a student magazine.3 The use I made of the MacCallum story, emphasising his vulnerability even in the face of a lifetime of excellence in teaching and scholarship, was anecdotal; it should have been (and now is) methodological.

16Contrary to assumptions which underpin the modern discipline of English, there are good reasons why universities might be seen as being on the fringes of literature. In the period under study tertiary institutions were not major players in creative writing, nor in publishing or book selling. However they were and remain sites where a most precious attribute is bestowed on literature: canonicity. No matter how contentious the case of individual books or writers, it remains true that canonical texts have a mystique and authority that many writers and readers value. And notwithstanding the rise in universities of reading practices which valorise critique, in opposition to that reverence for the past embodied by Menzies, students continue to assume, not unreasonably, that a book is being studied because it is valuable. In the light of this, one aim here is ‘to emancipate’ students ‘from prematurely naturalized … facts’ about the role, purposes and structure of the discipline (Latour, 227). For thinking historically – by which I mean trying to understand why the influence of particular people, ideas or books persists or wanes, resists change or rides it – allows us to consider the present as a historical moment in which those forces remain in competition.

Notwithstanding the claims made above about certainty, it is also true that there is an occasional lack of professional self-confidence evident in the work of academics engaged in literary study. This anxiety, which spans historical periods, critical approaches, and personalities, seems to have two main sources. First, in the period covered by this history, all disciplines were affected by demands for ‘relevance’, the assumption being that if education were to be publicly funded it should serve the needs of the state rather than those of the individual. Within the institution and in the public sphere, every academic discipline must struggle, rhetorically, to balance the competing demands of specialism or research – which brings prestige – with a notion of relevance – which brings students, who in turn bring income. The conflict is a structural effect of competing needs: each discipline’s need to demonstrate that it is undertaking specialist training, and its need to make that claim in spheres outside academia to potential students, and funding agencies who value ‘usefulness’. The second kind of anxiety is more specific to the 17discipline of English. It reflects the failure to articulate a methodology for literary criticism. Using the paradigms of science, even the most rigid formulae for literary interpretation often leave students unable to replicate the inquiry, let alone the findings of it. In short, literary study has never adequately acknowledged the sheer complexity of its subject, and developed a pedagogy or an account of its practice which acknowledges that complexity. This situation perhaps is a reflection of the simple but complex fact that the best questions, the most interesting questions, to ask of text (or author or genre or period) A, might be irrelevant, obvious, or unproductive when asked of text (author/genre/period) B, since literary texts, whilst they are frequently said to fall into certain kinds of categories, are almost never adequately described by those categories. Thus the best criticism in any era almost invariably seems to deploy a range of techniques or practices or assumptions which are or which seem, in purely methodological terms, quite contradictory. But literature is, as noted, both an industry and a leisure activity; it is almost impossible, therefore, to make credible claims about the subject’s ‘difficulty’ – except to those who are studying it.

In these circumstances, teaching the history of the discipline can be a powerful tool for alerting students to the difficulties and the contingencies which underpin their own learning. For when we historicise and specify the nature of the conflict over subject areas it can help us to understand that there is nothing inevitable about either the study, or the failure to study, any particular field. On the other hand, using historical inquiry in this way can go badly wrong if it encourages students simply to believe that the present is a superior place to be, something encouraged by the fact that modern forms of criticism seem more self-reflexive than those they appear to have replaced. Self-confidence is also increased by the fact that basic research tools now make an incalculably vaster array of materials available. Ideally, though, this teaching of history would not ‘convert objects, institutions, and practices with which we have lived relationships into relics of other times’ (Chakrabarty, 243). Rather, it would encourage us to understand that

It is a beautiful and brilliant formulation, and it informs the methods and aims of this book. Although there is one qualification.

The author of these words, Dipesh Chakrabarty, is a renowned historian. One of his own pasts is, of course, his Australian one, and he speaks of this when he uses the term ‘cultural cringe’ (28). He does not reference AA Phillips, who coined the phrase, although on the same page, indeed in the previous paragraph, of his book Provincializing Europe, Chakrabarty draws attention to the power of not naming authors and authorities when naturalising cultural difference.4 Phillips is an important figure for this history and for any critic of Australian literature, although he still has no entry in the ADB. We can bear in mind the fact of him never obtaining a university position, despite a prolific career as a critic, and the casual malice that saw fellow students at Melbourne University think it a good joke to cast Phillips – who in recounting the incident, describes himself as ‘a Jewish boy’, his grandfather a prominent rabbi – as Shylock in a student performance of Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice.5

One very overt agenda in this book is to examine the ways in which the term ‘Australian’ has functioned in relation to the study of literature: to identify the texts, periods and discourses – intellectually authoritative ways of speaking – which have brought Australian writing and the criticism of Australian writing to prominence or into disrepute. What is at issue is the sustained dominance of an ethos, an aesthetic and a canon that come under the ambiguous nomenclature of ‘English’, and a parallel and closely connected dominance of English universities and English-trained academics, for several generations exclusively male. This dominance meant, inversely, the exclusion of women from positions of authority notwithstanding the fact that – or perhaps because – they

19have usually constituted a majority of students in the discipline. And the dominance of an aesthetic of Englishness structured a sustained disdain for local literatures, writers and critical issues. One can argue that these kinds of patterns have faded; one can argue they are being refreshed, not least by technologies which require heavy investment and therefore focus on the canonical. In relation to both, though, it is essential to know that until the 1970s almost no student who wanted an academic career would seriously have thought of restricting themselves to their national literature; until then, when newly passed legislation made it possible for married women to retain their jobs in public organisations, no woman student, no matter how brilliant, would have realistically imagined becoming an intellectual leader in the field. As the space for humanities shrinks, pressures external to the discipline narrow the curriculum, and commensurately, the range of people thought appropriate to teach it. In these circumstances, the arguments presented here about the ways in which ‘disinterested’ academic judgements are underpinned by wider social values might become more relevant to the present than I would wish.

Part of the difficulty, though, in making this kind of claim is that reading, considered either as a private or as a scholarly activity, is generally understood as being an exercise that is free of prejudice. An equally strong faith in individuality encourages us to believe that, when reading, we are somehow free to form our own judgements. For slightly different reasons, universities encourage a strong faith in the notion that academic inquiry is structurally free of the pressures of personality and politics. Thus the claim (made in this book) that reading as an activity and the teaching of reading as a scholarly practice are shaped by larger patterns of cultural value might seem overly aggressive towards the status quo. But as Ross Chambers (among many) has so brilliantly argued, culture attempts always to disguise itself, to make beliefs and values seem natural whilst identifying others as ‘unnatural’. This means that drawing attention to the making of authority, or to the (self) interest of those in authority, is intrinsically unsettling. In terms of classroom practice, this is the student who speaks at the ‘wrong’ time, who asks the ‘wrong’ question, who criticises the fashionable writer, or, 20on one memorable occasion at the University of Queensland, declares to the visiting superstar of theory – if rather tentatively – that ‘it’s all a bit of a wank, really, isn’t it?’ These moments are seen as disruptive, reactions which expose the ways in which academic cultures, whilst ostensibly structured to value originality, often resort to the imposing of convention. Perhaps it is not just classrooms but literary texts which play a role in shaping our sense of what is proper; yet literature can also open up the imagination, allowing us to rehearse turns of phrase and habits of mind, senses and sensibilities that allow us to think differently about what is valuable and what is right.

Perhaps because of the sustained and systemic exclusion of women from positions of authority in universities, some of the most persuasive critiques of educational institutions have been written by feminist scholars. Feminist critics of texts and of institutions have discerned the many ways in which images and expectations about the world function against the interests of female readers, students and academics. Studies of reading and teaching practices, criticism, curriculum, staffing, promotion and peer pressure have all pointed to systematic exclusions. This exclusion is enacted daily, and reinforced through the ways of behaving which make identifying merit an all-too-simple process, described by legal scholar Margaret Thornton:

The only difficulty I see with Thornton’s formulation is that it implies that patronage must be wrong. But what of, say, feminist patronage which attempted to redress the imbalances created by such habits, and where might one draw the line between patronage and mentoring? In other words, in the light of such processes, and in light of the notion that 21almost any academic appointment involves patronage of some kind, what is to be done? For at times it can seem that the institutionalising of procedures to ensure equity have driven discrimination to take more subtle and therefore less contestable forms. One further question raised by Thornton’s compelling vignette is this: what becomes of those ‘youthful images of themselves’, the young men who benefit from such patronage, who are levered into positions for which they might not be prepared or capable of functioning effectively in? Do those in positions of power, able to distribute this kind of patronage, demand conformity, or gratitude, and what toll might this take? My sense is that there is a frequent tendency among senior academics to overrate their protégés, and that loyalty is poor compensation for the lack of qualities which a more obviously meritocratic system might demand. The question, perhaps, is the balance between the local currency and the disciplinary one.

What is perhaps even more difficult to identify and redress systemically is that the dynamics of this process of making authority open up a space in which those most strongly identified with the institution, those who are most routinely assumed to be relying on informed judgement, might actually be making judgements based on not much more than the positive impression created by such conformity. The application of ‘merit’, in other words, reflects cultural values which give priority to certain forms of masculinity, say, over any qualities or knowledge or achievements specific to a discipline. (If this claim is true, it would make it impossible to conceive of the university as a place cut off from society, as is so often claimed, pejoratively, about it.) For example, on any given selection committee, it is unlikely that there will be any person sufficiently familiar with the field of research offered by every candidate to make a firsthand assessment and comparison of the relative quality of that scholarship; indeed, there might be no-one in the discipline present at all. In such situations, people groping for judgement can be threatened by a candidate who, for example, seems to have a strong personality; who is pioneering a new area of research; who seems likely to start asking awkward questions about the organisation of curriculum or research priorities in the institution. Often, in other 22words, the most intellectually interesting candidates are those most likely to be rejected because they ‘do not fit in’. Quite how narrow most forms of expertise are is something often disguised, but in fact, even in delivering lectures, an academic can be some distance from the place where they are genuinely able to make firsthand judgements, rather than relying on secondary sources. Some students realise this; many do not.6

As I have implied, this resorting to cultural rather than research-based assessments of value can have its most lasting effect at those moments when expertise is most ‘on trial’, such as the selection of staff. What happens during such processes is that elements of personality and background are subtly brought into play, particularly by more influential members of selection committees who have the capacity to make a moment at which a candidate ‘just doesn’t seem right’. Writing now, as an academic, I can say that although I have seen blatant prejudice in action, this seems to be the exception. As I speculated many years ago, what are seized on are violations of ‘good taste’, the failure to fine tune gesture, dress, accent and presence to institutional norms. These ‘breaches’ are gently pointed out by the staff members most threatened by them, who might quickly follow their observation with a disclaimer: perhaps a languid ‘never mind’, as proof of their tolerance. I saw this in operation at a selection committee meeting at which the most influential member, who, having pointed out to colleagues some finer points of protocol to reinforce their status and experience, lingered just a fraction of a second too long over the word ‘queer’ when reading out the title of a book by an applicant. Nothing more needed to be said; the homophobia wafted across the table so deliberately yet so delicately that the only violation of protocol would have been to name it.

To argue that the shape of ‘scholarly’ imperatives and the institutions through which they are cultivated do, in fact, respond to the

23same kinds of cultural forces which shape non-academic culture raises complex questions about education and the formation of subjectivity. Implicitly, it raises equally complex questions about the links between representation in literary texts and cultural values. It is not enough, in debating formations of literary studies, to look at literary texts and to extrapolate from them arguments about culture, the academy and power as was the pattern for critiques of the academy in the 1960s and after. As John Guillory has demonstrated, debates about literary canons have too often rested on the assumption that there is a simple homology between society and literature, that representation in the literature curriculum (as authors or as characters) correlates directly with status in society (Canonical and Non-canonical). If we simply assume, for example, that strong interest in works by Indigenous authors reflects and sustains an equally strong political and socioeconomic position of Indigenous people then we are obviously mistaken – just as we are mistaken to argue that such interest has no significance.

The ordering of value is a complex process in which there are competing imperatives, not least that of preserving the reputation of a particular institution or profession. It is a well-kept secret that some members of any profession are incompetent; what is even less often noted is that students, as well as colleagues in other fields within that profession or institution, have no way of knowing this except by impression or rumour. Running counter to the latter is the shared investment in silence, not least because the reputations of professionals are protected by their status as professionals, and because the very idea of a professional culture, of ‘acting professionally’, implies keeping mistakes and disputes ‘in house’. I think it is no coincidence that the rise and consolidation of the professions (and tertiary education) were congruent with the rise of the English middle class, and its strong ethic of containing conflict or disgrace behind domestic walls. So, too, academia and similar professions like medicine, which develop subjectivities that abhor public disputation: ‘not in front of the children’ becomes ‘not in front of the students’.7 The reputations of individuals and of institutions

24are protected by this belief that there is something intrinsically ethical about maintaining silence about systemic or individual failure. One interesting effect of this prohibition is that the most publicly active defenders of a field or discipline tend not to be academics at all but students and graduates, who are invested in the discipline rather than institutional norms. The difficulty is that the status of these critics as outsiders (or, often, apostates) weakens the force of their criticism – a point which would come to be acknowledged by poet and academic Vincent Buckley (Education and Dr Leavis, 153). Structures seem to reflect an absolute reality because the processes of their formation are not open to public view. In the case of teaching literature, for example, this includes debates about which texts might be studied; about the selection and promotion of staff. How might it change or challenge students’ sense of literary study if, for example, rather than being presented with a list of texts to study, that list were debated as a means of generating reflection on the processes of canon-making?

Just as cultural values underpin impressions of the authority of particular academics, so too with texts. There is strong evidence to suggest that what is actually taught in the literature classroom is not ‘the text’, as we might assume, but the proper mode of responding to it – a point which makes struggles over ‘which book’ less important than debates about methodology and pedagogy. It seems that we do not learn the ‘content’ of a novel or a poem so much as what is regarded as the appropriate way for an educated person to respond to a ‘great’ or to a ‘popular’ work. This process involves not simply a training of the mind but moulding the most intimate and apparently personal details of the self such as movement and tone of voice (see for example de Castell). This education about what to value in a literary text, this modelling of how to behave with books and, commensurately, the censuring of other responses or opinions, occurs in small-group teaching, in lectures, in casual discussion with fellow students and academics, and most routinely, in assessment.

Alan Sinfield suggests that during assessment ‘what actually happens is that candidates are required to take up a certain system of values’ (Give an Account of Shakespeare, 140). But these values are 25represented as a set of objectively determined competencies. The values, reframed as competencies, are what must be displayed if students are to ‘submit’ acceptable answers. For example, as Sinfield argues, in the case of the student who successfully answers ‘the Shakespeare question’ in an English exam, it is likely that

For those in search of advancement it is essential to develop a ‘perfect sense of limits’ (Moi, 1027). Breaking those limits immediately voids the speaker’s authority, thus

In The Logic of Practice, Pierre Bourdieu suggests that the regularities of institutions seem not merely necessary but natural because those habits of mind which incline us to abide by institutional patterns and expectations are actually produced by those patterns and expectations. As properly acculturated individuals, professionals experience their decisions as ‘free choice’ because the terms of those choices and related distinctions of manner they produce and enforce are made within limits that institutional beings find appealing. Bourdieu describes the process of acquiring these institutional selves with majestic precision, using his notion of habitus, a self-generating self-sustaining milieu that

26is experienced as a space for free will even as ideas and values are subtly remade and re-formed by institutional norms:

In the light of these claims, the aim of this study is to catch academics in the act, as it were, of being authoritative: of resisting or making their place as professional authorities on the subject of literature. Another aim is to track, where possible, the perspectives of those whose careers and criticism fell beyond those limits or who fell prey to what Bourdieu denounces as ‘terrorism’: the ‘peremptory verdicts which, in the name of taste, condemn to ridicule, indignity, shame, silence … men and women who simply fall short, in the eyes of their judges, of the right way of being and doing’ (Distinction, 511).

In trying to describe such transactions in the light of anti-colonialism and feminism, I am mindful of Eve Sedgwick’s warnings about the overuse of ‘inconceivably coarse axes’ in critical practices that themselves claim to be opposed to universalism. I take Sedgwick’s point that

In trying to make some kind of broader sense of the lives of individuals, it is clear that scholarly reputations are made in and by living, by the social relations with students and colleagues which makes authorities of some and fools of others. Death changes that balance in the most drastic way possible, and yet some survive, even grow. Those who have made themselves ever-present in the archive loom large; the 27lives of others diminish to a newspaper clipping, a funeral notice or a footnote in an official history.

There is one final point to be made about this shaping of the self. I agree with Bourdieu’s claim that those who are attached to institutions give ‘disproportionate weight’ to early experiences, and this is observable of postgraduate study. The latter period is crucial as rebellion and the desire for affiliation contend with each other, for as a new researcher one must be different enough to be original, yet similar enough to be recognised as potentially ‘one of us’. This study bears out Bourdieu’s implicit contention that very few academics change the fundamental approach to their discipline or the notions of value acquired during postgraduate study, recycling and reapplying throughout their careers the ideas and arguments absorbed as normative behaviour decades before.9 It is this peculiar coexistence of methods and values from different times that accentuates something we can call institutional memory, habits of procedure and judgement which persist long after memory of the reasons for their introduction has been lost; this is something of that ‘presence of the past’ of which Chakrabarty speaks.

Sources and Structure

Because I am concerned with the making of institutional authority, the focus of this study is the professoriate. Thus it needs to be emphasised that in the period under discussion, professors were dominant figures within and beyond universities. As head of department, the often lone professor had authority over which books were taught and examined (not always the same thing); often carried the bulk of the teaching (especially of senior classes); and might hold his position for decades. Foundation professors in a new university, in particular, were able to establish a curriculum that reflected their own preferences of author, period and genre.10

28Teaching was generally done through lectures rather than tutorials, or small-group discussions, although smaller class sizes at the honours level seem to have made these groups slightly more relaxed places where student opinions might be proffered and ideas debated. Until the last third of the twentieth century, only a minute fraction of the Australian population could afford to attend university, but the mood militated against discussion and critique. A photograph of John le Gay Brereton, Challis Professor of English Literature, lecturing to undergraduates in the Great Hall at Sydney University shows him peering down from the stage at straight-backed audience members, seated in neat rows and strictly segregated by sex (ladies at the front). Many students seem to have transcribed their lectures word for word, and independent thinking does not seem to have been encouraged. As two examples among many, Vera Jennings, a student of English at Melbourne University from 1917 to 1920, who later became an academic in the department there, noted she did not usually use library resources or modern critics. She and her peers worked from set texts and lecture notes.11 Neither could Alma Hartshorn, a student at Queensland in the 1930s, remember being directed to any critic’s work (personal communication). This trend might not have reflected authoritarian pedagogy so much as the fact that libraries were inadequate for independent study. The cycle of distributing, absorbing and testing knowledge was ideally a smooth one, but that is not to say that students could not be riotous, with stories about dissent or disorder frequent.

My sources for this book include the professional literature of the discipline and university staff files. I examined critical articles and books, book reviews, private letters, memoirs, university handbooks, examination papers, even job references, all of which might signal the status of specific creative writers and critics, journals, and universities. In the initial stages I compiled a biography and bibliography for each professor of English who worked in the period under study (initially, to 1970), as well as a database of every text taught. It was noticeable

29that professors of literature were profiled in various series on ‘important men’ and often were contributors of reviews, essays or comments to the print media. In other words, they had a strong public presence that left another extensive archive, in metropolitan newspapers. They were engaged by government and other organisations for a wide variety of tasks from censorship to propaganda, and frequently determined and assessed matriculation for their colony or state – a task which would become massive.

Whilst the source material used in the original study has been supplemented, the neat historical and geographical divisions used to structure the dissertation and, in a different way, The English Men, have more or less broken down here. This reflects two changes, one related to method, the other to the subject. Methodologically, I had understood the past to be a place that was discrete from the present, making periodising an embarrassingly simple exercise. I now understand the developing, dispersing and deprecating of ideas to be a much messier process, temporally and intellectually speaking. By this I mean that approaches to literature can seem to have been entirely discredited but can reappear a generation later in a sentence, a choice of book, or a student of a renowned or obscure teacher. At the time of writing, the reliance of media criticism on ideas about literature strengthened through mid-twentieth-century appropriation of mid-nineteenth-century public commentary is one such example of this shuffling and re-emergence of ideas, which complicates claims – a staple of most similar histories – that critical approaches can be categorised, and that such approaches have origin, influence, or obsolescence. Thus, each of the chapters in the first half of the book posits a different (possible) beginning for English study: in classics, in philosophy, and in imperial governance (respectively). The second half of the book divides roughly into two parts: the first, on the intellectual narrowing and the converse demographic expansion which characterised Australian universities after the Second World War, when Leavisite criticism came into vogue; the second on debates over the introduction of Australian literature as a subject at tertiary level. Here, again, the neat periodising breaks down: key influences in postwar criticism were Matthew Arnold and 30the Leavises, but Arnold was a Victorian, and the Leavises particularly active in England in the interwar period. The final chapter aims to summarise and draw broader conclusions from the discussion, and to consider some questions for the discipline in light of this history.