“Smallness, narrowness and servility”: Resisting English at university over 30 years

This chapter is a reading as much as a writing, an attempt to think and draw together the commonalities, continuities and differences between two experiences of studying English in higher education 30 years apart. It uses aspects of critical writing and the critical theory that were tentatively influencing English at the end of the 1980s (and appears to have been partially side-lined as it is taught in some institutions the early 2020s) to think through our experiences and their impact, as well as some broader thoughts about aspects of curriculum, learning, teaching and expectations.