English Studies Beyond the 'Center'

Teaching literature and the future of global English

Myles Chilton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317574965
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Pedagogía
• Subtopic: Educación superior

This book addresses the shape of English studies beyond the 'center' by analyzing how the discipline has developed, and by considering how lessons from this analysis relate to the discipline as a whole. The book aims to open a cross-disciplinary conversation about the nature of the English major in both non-Anglophone and Anglophone countries by addressing the tensions between language and literature pedagogy, the relevance of a focus on hyper-canonical Anglophone literature in a world of global Englishes, world literature, and multilingual students, and by reflecting on the necessary contingency and cross-purposes of blended literature and language classrooms. Many of the book's points of discussion arise from the author's experience as an English professor in Japan, where the particularities of English language and literature pedagogy raise significant challenges to Anglo-centric critical and pedagogical assumptions. English Studies Beyond the 'Center': Teaching Literature and the Future of Global English therefore argues that English literature must make a case for itself by understanding its place in a newly configured discipline. Issues discussed in the book include:

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• English language and literature pedagogy in Japan

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• The modes through which EFL and English literary studies converge and diverge

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• Globalized English beyond the Anglo-American perspective

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• English classroom practices, particularly in Japan

1
Japanese lessons

Global English, English literature, and the Japanese academy

For many Japanese professors of English literature, teaching communicative English is one thing; teaching literature is quite another. While they tend be highly proficient readers (and to a lesser extent writers) of English, having their students use English – in the broadest sense of being able to read with minimal use of a dictionary, write English prose at a reasonably sophisticated level, listen to and understand a lecture or presentation in English, and sustain a conversation – takes a back seat to reading an English text with the aid of a dictionary, translating it into Japanese, writing commentary on the text in Japanese, listening to the odd lecture in English, and engaging in English conversation only when it cannot be avoided. This split is one reason why the teaching of English in Japan is a hot topic, while the teaching of English literature in Japan is in decline. It is also because Japan’s Ministry of Education, Culture, Sports, Science, and Technology (MEXT) apparently wants it that way. The Ministry’s 2003 “Action Plan” (in full: “Regarding the Establishment of an Action Plan to Cultivate ‘Japanese with English Abilities’”) has two main objectives, “(1) to have Japanese acquire English abilities, and (2) to have them develop their ability to express themselves in their first language, Japanese” (Tanabe). Worthy, unobjectionable goals, to be sure, and particularly impressive, as far as Yoji Tanabe ¹ is concerned, is that the MEXT appears committed to “the teaching of English as a means of practical and worldwide communication for the nation,” because “English is not a mere foreign language for some selected individuals any longer. Everybody needs English.” Cultivating this mass English ability means, as Tanabe believes, that the MEXT is “apparently promoting the teaching of English for general purposes and specific purposes as well.” Literature and literary studies, in the context of either general or specific purposes, make no appearance in the MEXT’s Action Plan; instead, the emphasis is on communicative English classrooms, particularly for lower grades, and standardized testing benchmarks. It appears that the divide between literature and language will only get wider.

This chapter’s analysis of the place of literary studies in Japanese higher education is meant to respond to James English’s claim that the most important developments in the teaching of English are happening beyond the center (although, it must be said that English believes that “We need to look past Japan” because of the shrinking college-age population (85), and because “Japan is not a country in which English literary study ever claimed a significant share of the curriculum… and English studies is mostly given over to EFL” (103, n 70). As we will see, these latter two observations are not completely accurate). ² Whether the Japanese case presents us with generalizable claims about the future of global English studies is something I leave to the reader: what I want to do with this chapter is present a historicizing of pedagogies of English language and literature in Japan in order to illustrate for those in the center how the discipline has developed in one of the world’s largest tertiary education systems. I believe that however particular and localized the study of English literature and language is in Japan, achieving an understanding how and why the discipline developed there puts pressure on Anglo-centric assumptions about the discipline.

Like so many other places around the globe, the diminishing of English literature’s place in Japanese higher education can be seen in terms of the broader weakening of the cultural capital of literature in education systems. As Matsukawa observes, “[l]iterature departments – whether they are teaching Asian literatures or European literatures – are suffering from a lack of popularity among students and universities have been trying to lure students by focusing more on language skills and international exchange by… name changes” (“Provincial?”). The latter refers to the names of new departments, or renamed English departments, that feature buzzwords like ‘international,’ ‘global,’ ‘communication,’ and ‘culture,’ in some combination before the word ‘studies.’ This mode of reorganized English studies reflects how the corporatization of higher education has enmeshed itself with certain historically and culturally sedimented features of the Japanese university system, throwing up further obstructions to the pursuit of an education in any literature, not just English. Literary studies also suffer from a crisis of relevance and interest, though the blame is often laid on the rise of electronic and digital media, and of course the general inferiority of today’s young people. It is also felt that universities must struggle harder than ever to teach the pleasures of extended deep concentration, and find it increasingly difficult to make a case for detailed analysis, unless that analysis yields wealth, or at least the path to wealth. These are the well-rehearsed complaints, and while there is truth to them, it is important to remember that universities have never been flawless in their delivery of disinterested, academic knowledge or the cultivation of wisdom. The university has been far more successful as shaper and supplier of the middle classes of modern, capitalist economies. In this sense, Japanese universities have excelled, perhaps more so than other national university systems. Hence, it is with a review of the history of the place of the university in Japanese social, cultural, and political life that we must begin our analysis of the diminishing place of literary studies.

Japanese higher education

Brian McVeigh, in an analysis of Japanese higher education based on several years’ experience as a faculty member, argues that higher education in Japan is perhaps best understood as a system that has moved from serving the political interests of the state to a system that, while not totally abandoning that function, has been reformed to support the economic interests of the state. Of course all national university systems do these things, but residues of the pre-World War II state-controlled education, which was designed to create unquestioning Emperor-worshipping subjects, mean that even at present in Japan the degree of involvement with statist projects is considerable. According to Teruhisa Horio, emeritus professor of education at the University of Tokyo (one of the most trenchant, penetrating, and respected figures in the Japanese educational world, and foe of the Ministry of Education), even though it is constrained by the postwar constitution guaranteeing both democracy and the people’s inalienable rights to education, post- 1945 Ministries of Education have sought to erode these rights by stressing the “administrative efficiency of the State’s bureaucratic apparatus” (5–6). This is a ruse, critics contend, that the state deploys to shift attention away from its real goal, which is to make sure “that the Japanese people never become the masters of their own educational system and the free-thinking beings this would inevitably lead to” (Horio 8). The background to this tension between state authority and the growth of the Japanese people’s democratic consciousness would take us well beyond the purview of this chapter. For now it is enough to know that people having the right to learn, according to Horio, was an idea Japanese scholars imbibed along with their study of democratic principles (Horio himself grounds his democratic principles in the works of the Thomas Paine, Alexander Hamilton, and the Marquis de Condorcet), thus linking citizenship with the right to know the truth and the freedom of inquiry, all of which could only come through educational liberty. These are powerful ideas that threaten social, political, and economic hegemony. The Japanese state understands this, and as a result

[b]oth colleges and upper secondary schools lost their previously cherished individual character as students devoted all their efforts to preparing for the severe entrance examination competition. When these students finally enter university, they are placed in a situation where they can enjoy a four-year moratorium on living and thinking, by virtue of their special status as candidates being groomed for positions as ordinary salaried workers within the Japanese industrial leviathan.

(Horio 308)

Horio’s criticisms of the statist turns Japanese education has taken despite the promise of and efforts towards democracy is redolent with pain, frustration, and disbelief. His criticisms also belie the fact that ridding Japanese education of its problems (which I will discuss in more detail, and with specific reference to English, later in this chapter) is not simply a matter of school, classroom, or pedagogic reform: “it is necessary to think about the problems involved in the organization and running of our schools in relation to the cultural consciousness of the society which supports those schools, and the problems implicit in the structure of our society” (17). Which is to say that addressing the place of literature in Japanese higher education means addressing the larger contexts in which (in the order in which power travels) bureaucrats, administrators, politicians (maybe), teachers, and students operate.

Perhaps the most pernicious manifestation of state involvement in higher education is the prevalence of examinations. In short, the entire Japanese education system “has been subordinated to the exam preparation industry” (Horio 17); as such it is structured around entrance examinations at each major step up the ladder, with difficult entrance examinations to university standing as the final, ultimate test of a student’s academic abilities – though academic abilities in this case really means the ability to memorize and recall. For critics, the system’s reliance on these sorts of memory-based evaluations has a distinct social, and ultimately political, purpose, which is to create a sense of dependency. “Examinations,” argues McVeigh, “have become not merely formalized methods for testing an individual’s mastery of a body of facts; rather, they have become a key means of forging linkages between being a good Japanese… official versions of knowledge… and being a diligent worker” (87). By thus combining the objectives of statism, nationalism, and capitalism, entrance examinations have enormous symbolic capital. They imply a successful enculturation: the feat of memorization required in passing an entrance examination for a prestigious school is itself not the accomplishment; the process of enduring long class hours at regular and cram schools marks the candidate as a successful member of the society. Unfortunately, the academic effect of this process renders knowledge “sliced, disconnected, disjointed, stored, packaged for rapid retrieval, and abstracted from immediate experience” (McVeigh 87). Education in Japan, to quote another critic, “works, ‘provided one thinks of it as an enormously elaborated, very expensive intelligence testing system with some educational spin-off, rather than the other way round’” (Dore, qtd. in McVeigh 87).

Other studies of Japanese education have stressed important changes that suggest a strong desire within Japan to relax and reorient education away from its conformist, collectivist, and markedly culturalist commitment to social, intellectual, and academic egalitarianism. In the 1990s, with “the growing sense that the country needed to reassess its longstanding goal of economic development and turn instead to creating a more ‘livable’ society” (DeCoker 11), the MEXT began experimenting with policies under the yutori kyoiku (relaxed education) rubric. Aimed at depressurizing the exam based competitiveness of Japanese education, yutori kyoiku signaled relaxed MEXT involvement in setting curricula and administering funds. Unfortunately, the result was something of a vacuum: teachers, untrained and unprepared for what turned out to be the vaguest of guidelines around what was a fairly airy concept to begin with, scrambled to fill the mandatory yutori kyoiku class periods. Moreover, yutori kyoiku came to be blamed for a general weakening in academic achievement. Consequently, new educational reforms sought to undo the damage by turning back to certain old practices, while at the same time increasing the commitment to nurturing individual abilities.

Overall, however, what has not substantially changed is the fact that the pressures to gain entrance to university still demand a near-total commitment from high school students. Given this pressure, combined with the pressures to conform to the rigidly hierarchical and largely joyless life of a corporate soldier awaiting the ‘successful’ university graduate, it is no wonder that Japanese youth view the four years of higher education as an interlude in which to have fun, find love, travel, and meet all kinds of people from all over Japan. Curtis Kelly characterizes this as a period in Japanese social development devoted to ‘play’ – in Japanese asobi, which takes both the sense of play as amusement and as experimenting with experience. This student play or experimental indulgence rarely veers into bacchanals (although certainly some Japanese students debauch with the best of them). Rather, it is both the reward for having earned a place in a university, and an opportunity to engage in, almost risk-free, activities and excesses not available to those who failed to get into a school. But while this play-period has its decadent side, and cuts deeply into study time, it also has a social role. Kelly characterizes it by comparing it to the social function of high school and college in the United States, where the former is generally seen as the time for personal, individualized development, while the latter is the time for study. In Japan, the situation is reversed. As individualization is not the orientation of Japanese culture, the priority is placed on having Japanese learn how to negotiate the challenges of a group-oriented society when they have matured enough to realize that their post-graduation futures are fairly limited. Thus by spreading their wings, but also picking up on the ‘correct’ codes for socialization – gained largely through club and ‘circle’ activities, membership, and leadership – students complete, through four years of university play, their “rehearsal for entry into adulthood” (Kelly 177). Entry into Japanese adulthood also means something different than it does in the West. It is both an investment in one’s identity – “adulthood is defined as being truly Japanese” (DeVos 187) – and an investment in order – “Adulthood is accepting the normality of control from those in authority” (DeVos 187). As they progress through adult hierarchies, whether they be work or social, the responsibility for control will fall to them. The rules and nuances of socialization – never clear even to native-born Japanese – therefore demand a period of learning and understanding, and constant vigilance.

This tends to strike outside observers as detrimental to the goals of higher education. After all, isn’t a university-based liberal arts education supposed to be all about disrupting and contesting rules and nuances of socialization, not to mention constructs like ‘adulthood,’ ‘authority,’ ‘identity,’ ‘order,’ and, well, ‘play’? It would seem that the only way to justify what happens in a Japanese university is to repeat Kelly’s claim that higher education in Japan fulfills a different social function than it is assumed to do in the West. To bring us back to the question of teaching English literature in Japan, simply put it would seem to mean that the student is not motivated to unearth an inner self or quest for universal truth, as per the implied reader of the Western self-stereotype.

To sum it all up in a way that will seem obvious by now, one crucial factor behind the precarious position of English literature is that students are disinclined to apply themselves to difficult reading, thinking, and writing. Of course, this affects other disciplines as much as it does English. There are, however, motivated students, and there remains among these students, and their teachers, a strong sense of responsibility towards the idea of intellectual and literary inquiry; moreover, there are institutional and professional imperatives – there is a job to be done, and rules to obey – so throwing in the towel is not an option. If the spirit of disinterested intellectual and academic activity is contestable terrain in the Japanese academy, then there can only be confusion and dissatisfaction with a mode of education that seemingly ignores its social context. Japanese themselves complain the loudest about the shortcomings of their system, and insist on reforms – indeed, higher education reform white papers are something of a MEXT staple, appearing with comforting regularity. But if Horio is right, they do not engage the heart of the issue, which is that the kind of intellectual inquiry on which Western universities are based is not native to Japan, and that importing the Western research university onto soil that has not reconciled individualistic democratic ideals with traditional notions of culture and authority can only result in ontological and epistemological confusion. This confusion, however, is what we have to work with. This confusion also underlies the state of English education in Japan, which we will address in the next section.

Japanese English education

While English has recently been introduced at the elementary school level, it is typically in junior and senior high school (and in cram schools that supplement regular schooling) that most Japanese students first encounter English, and what they encounter are classes geared towards preparation for entrance examinations. Even with the MEXT call for more communicative English, it appears, according to studies done by Keita Kikuchi, that students “perceived a large gap between the goals stated in the [MEXT’s] Course of Study guidelines and what teachers did in their high school English classes” (206). Rote memorization of vocabulary, grammatical structures, certain sentence constructions (“not only… but also,” “It is said that …”), and translation continue to constitute the six years of junior and senior high school English. Students with good memorization skills tend to do well with this mode of instruction, if ‘doing well’ means getting good marks on difficult entrance exams. However, if this student gains any ability in English, this “competence falls within the agreed-upon territory of ‘exam English’ (juken eigo), which has very little to do with English as it is spoken” in sites where English is the first or commonly used language (Miyoshi, “Invention” 112). Thus, as Masao Miyoshi observes, better students can understand the language, but only as “the particular object and mode of understanding that results from the curricula as organized in Japan,” which unfortunately means that “the successful college entrant is unlikely to be able to speak or write easily understood English” (“Invention”112). When looking at what the pretertiary system delivers to the universities and colleges, perhaps it is no wonder that university English faculty feel there is little point in reforming old practices. As one English professor laments, “‘standard reading and comprehension strategies are just not taught...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1 Japanese lessons: Global English, English literature, and the Japanese academy
• 2 Finding new homes
• 3 The provincialized future of English literary studies
• 4 Class time
• Epilogue
• Works cited
• Index