Abstract

Ten years ago in The Rise and Fall of English, I argued that the fall of English studies might be fortunate if the field could be reconstituted as a discipline. That no longer seems possible to me. In this article, I therefore argue for a shift from a field organized around the concept of literature to one organized around textuality: the production and reception of texts in all the media that use the English language. This will only be possible if we first recognize that English studies has really fallen.