Do We Need New Method Names? Descriptions of Method in Scholarship on Canadian Literature

Thieme, Katja

doi:10.1353/esc.2017.0049

Cited by 3 publications

(2 citation statements)

References 24 publications

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“…Or perhaps, to the contrary, University of Alberta’s customizable degree signals faculty members’ deliberately decanonizing conviction that the field of English studies is, in contemporary professional practice, precisely an undefined territory. While we acknowledge the attractions (and the philosophical point) of an undefined degree, we would point to evidence that English studies is defined, in professional practice, by patterns of argument (Fahnestock and Secor, 1991; Wilder, 2012), methods and motivations (Banting, 2023; Linkon, 2011; Thieme, 2017), and threshold concepts (Corrigan, 2019) that structure not only what professors do in their research but how they expect students to perform (Wilder, 2012). There is structure to English studies, even in the absence of a canon.…”

Section: Decanonizing By Re-imagining the Traditional Degreementioning

confidence: 94%

Decanonizing the curriculum: English degree requirements in Canadian universities today, and the promise of a method-focused degree

Banting,

Scarlett

2023

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

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This paper proposes that a curricular shift we call “decanonization” is shaping contemporary English Major degrees at Canadian universities. We believe it is a response to a complex set of challenges currently facing departments as they program their undergraduate degrees in English, and, in a qualified way, we endorse it as a positive change: it can be seen as a step toward decolonization. But we argue that some forms of decanonized degree have unfortunate implications. While we affirm that our colleagues across the country are doing everything they can to sustain robust, current degrees in challenging circumstances, those circumstances have resulted in some cases in what appears to be a hollowed-out, underdefined degree. We propose an alternate curriculum, based on method, that seems to us particularly promising in the current context.

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Section: Decanonizing By Re-imagining the Traditional Degreementioning

confidence: 94%

Decanonizing the curriculum: English degree requirements in Canadian universities today, and the promise of a method-focused degree

Banting,

Scarlett

2023

Arts and Humanities in Higher Education

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“…MacDonald (1994) warned that literary critics might want to face the consequences of not practicing a more epistemic rhetoric (p. 197). Thieme (2017/2018), similarly, wondered whether literary critics might not want to name their analytical methods more similarly to how social-science researchers name theirs (p. 99). In highlighting how the rhetoric of literary criticism differs from knowledge-producing activity in other disciplines, these studies raise important questions about how literary critics undertake research activities.…”

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confidence: 99%

Humanistic Knowledge-Making and the Rhetoric of Literary Criticism: Special Topoi Meet Rhetorical Action

Banting

2022

Written Communication

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This article examines the power of special topoi to characterize the discourse of literary criticism, and through emphasis on rhetorical action, it sheds light on the limitations of topos analysis for characterizing research articles in disciplinary discourse more generally. Using an analytical approach drawn both from studies of topoi in disciplinary discourse and rhetorical genre theory, I examine a representative corpus of 21st-century literary research articles. I find that while most of the special topoi recognized by Fahnestock and Secor and Wilder remain prevalent in recent criticism, contemporary literary critics tend to draw on only a select subset of those topoi when making claims about their rhetorical actions. The topoi they use most often— mistaken-critic and paradigm—help identify the ways knowledge-making work is undertaken in literary criticism, a discipline often considered epideictic rather than epistemic. But what the special topoi do not capture is precisely the distinctly motivated, actively epistemic character of this disciplinary rhetoric. Based on these findings, I suggest that special topoi must be seen as functioning in the context of the rhetorical action undertaken by literary research articles. These articles undertake not simply persuasion but the particularly humanistic act I refer to as contributing to scholarly understanding: a rhetorical action worth attending to for scholars of disciplinary discourse, because it is deliberately more concerned with practice than product.

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Lexical Bundles of Stance in Upper-Level Argumentative Literary Essays and Expert-Level Literary Criticism Articles: A Comparative Dispersion Study

Lake

Lee

2022

World Englishes, Global Classrooms

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Do We Need New Method Names? Descriptions of Method in Scholarship on Canadian Literature

Cited by 3 publications

References 24 publications

Decanonizing the curriculum: English degree requirements in Canadian universities today, and the promise of a method-focused degree

Decanonizing the curriculum: English degree requirements in Canadian universities today, and the promise of a method-focused degree

Humanistic Knowledge-Making and the Rhetoric of Literary Criticism: Special Topoi Meet Rhetorical Action

Lexical Bundles of Stance in Upper-Level Argumentative Literary Essays and Expert-Level Literary Criticism Articles: A Comparative Dispersion Study

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