Introduction:

English  Studies  in  Transition

NICK VISSER

This issue of Clit-ical kn£i arises out of a protracted  and often
acrimonious debate that has engaged  South African departments of
English for over a decade.  While the papers gathered  together
here are concerned specifically with literary studies, the de-
bate has not been conducted in the splendid  isolation of academic
departments and disciplines.  Indeed, in a variety of ways the
papers call into question the efficacy, or even the possibility,
of an exclusively  'literary' study of those discourses which we
customarily group together and valorise under the rubric  'liter-
ature1.  Where once the exhortation to study poetry first as
poetry and not as another thing seemed compelling, now increas-
ing numbers of academics and students  find the appeal to larger
social and historical frameworks far more persuasive.  The
sources for those frameworks, as these essays demonstrate, lie
not in the official poetics of modernism, but in social theory
and social history.

Although only one of the papers -- Rob Nixon's was written
specifically for this issue  (the others having been produced
initially for various conferences  in South Africa and elsewhere) ,
they form a fairly tightly ordered set of related inquiries.
My own effort to describe the situation  in South African liter-
ary studies;  Michael Green's insistence on laying bare the
'manifestos' silently inscribed within conventional  critical
and pedagogic practices;  Ian Glenn's argument that since liter-
ary value is a site of social contestation rather than an essence
to which the fortunate few have access, the academic critic has
less the role of powerful broker than simply a minor part to
play within a larger set of processes and struggles;  Rob Nixon's
demonstration of the relevance of post-modern fiction to South
Africa or.ce a formalist  indulgence in the  'literature of exhaus-
tion' is dropped for an approach more alert to historical and
material forces -- all these can be seen to move  implicitly to-
wards what Michael Vaughan makes explicit  in his concluding
question: "In what way can our academic concern with  literature
in English best support the objective of the cultural  liberation
of South Africa?"

The urgency of that question is sufficient reason for this issue.

OMical hvU Vol 3 No 2  1914  1