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Essays and Studies

English: Shared Futures

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Essays exploring the opportunities for and challenges to the discipline of English language and literature in education.

The study of English literature, language, culture and creative writing is an important and dynamic enterprise. Shared Futures celebrates the discipline's intellectual strength, diversity and creativity, explores its futures in the nations of the UK and across the world, and brings together the huge scholarly, cultural and social energy of the biggest subject in the Arts and Humanities in Higher and in Secondary the most staff, the most students. It represents the synergies produced when practitioners and students from across the discipline come together, and aims to enable new understanding of the challenges that the discipline faces within schools and universities, the vital cultural and political role that English plays, and a renewed appreciation of the intellectual vitality and commitment of its scholars and students. Overall, it demonstrates the rich ecosystem of a subject crucial to social, cultural, and economic well-being, and offers ways in which its vitality can be ensured in the face of new challenges within and beyond the academy.

ROBERT EAGLESTONE is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought, Royal Holloway, University of London; GAIL MARSHALL is Head of the School of Literature and Languages at the University of Reading.

James Annesley, Katherine Baxter, Barbara Bleiman, Elleke Boehmer, Kirsti Bohata, Benjamin A. Brabon, Linda Bree, Susan Bruce, Billy Clark, Stefan Collini, Jane Davis, Sarah Dillon, Clare Egan, Elizabeth English, Emily Ennis, Martin Paul Eve, Corinne Fowler, Bárbara Gallego Larrarte, Marcello Giovanelli, Diya Gupta, Rob Hawkes, Ann Hewings, Keith Jarrett, Clara Jones, Seraphima Kennedy, Ben Knights, Simon Kövesi, Clare A. Lees, Alison Lumsden, Andrea Macrae, Lewi Mondal, Paul Munden, Daniel O'Gorman, Lynda Prescott, Ilse A. Ras, Catherine Redford, Rick Rylance, Helen Saunders, Jenny Stevens, Marion Thain, Stephen Watkins, Harry Whitehead

253 pages, Hardcover

Published November 15, 2018

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About the author

Robert Eaglestone

71 books5 followers
Robert Eaglestone (born 1968) is a British academic and writer. He is Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought in the Department of English at Royal Holloway, University of London. He works on contemporary literature, literary theory and contemporary European philosophy, and on Holocaust and Genocide studies.

His work explores how literature ‘thinks’, especially in relation to issues of ethics. This was the subject of his first book, Ethical Criticism: Reading After Levinas, on literary theory and the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas. This focus on ethics broadened to a concern with ethical relationships to the past, centrally the Holocaust, other genocides and atrocities, in The Holocaust and the Postmodern. His work draws on memory studies and trauma studies, as well as on the thought of Jacques Derrida and Hannah Arendt.

He works widely on contemporary literature, including Salman Rushdie and J. M. Coetzee and is the author of Contemporary Literature: A Very Short Introduction. In that book he writes:

Literature thinks. Literature is where ideas are investigated, lived out, explored in all their messy complexity… Perhaps… ‘think’ is not the right word: ‘think’ is too limiting a description of the range of what a novel can do with ideas. In any event, the way literature thinks is bound up with what it’s like to be us, to be human. Literature is how we make ourselves intelligible to ourselves. And contemporary fiction matters because it is how we work out who we are now, today.

He is also concerned with the teaching of literature, and has written the text book Doing English, a Guide for Literature Students; edits a series of books introducing major thinkers, Routledge Critical Thinkers, and is a commentator in the national press on literature teaching at school and in Higher Education.

He lives in Brixton, London, and has two children.

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