Englit in Japan (Part One)

  Time was that it made perfect sense to say I was studying 'English' because everyone understood what that involved; literature. English as literary study was so inate to secondary education that no one expected otherwise in higher education. Of course the discipline was self-questioning and critical (some said too much so); I was in a fairly trendy department of English and American Studies in the middle of the 'theory wars'. Suffice to say that English or English studies was the agreed ground on which battles commenced. Alan Sinfield has called it 'Englit'; that institutional combination of inherited literary tradition, progressive social idealism and cultural capital that uses the reading of literary texts to postulate aesthetic or cultural claims.  Linguistics, as I now ruefully recall, was left to the psychologists.
  Working in Japan, professional definitions necessarily shifted. 'English' very obviously denotes a language and university English is generally assumed to be TEFL/TESOL and this of course makes perfect sense (although I must admit I have never joined JALT because I have no curiosity in applied linguistics-sorry, but there it is). Anyway, I eventually found myself hired in the 'British Literature' wing of a English department, which leads to my quick observations about what happens to an idea of  'English' as 'Englit' when it becomes 'British Literature' in Japan.
  Firstly, a pragmatic and geographical device that acknowledges that in Japan, American Literature and culture (or, to be accurate, the USA) is the first choice of many students. Consequently, British culture becomes the outlier of a modern US literary sphere. Secondly, the proposition that literature is contingent to the study of the language rather than inate to it or its apotheosis. Thirdly, and most interestingly I think, the divorce of Literature in English from any automatic assumption to a social mission or cultural project. When Englit is no longer the best of what the tribe has said, but a type of British area studies, then it acquires a further sense of contingency as a local knowledge. This is an educative point for anyone who studied English/ Englit as it should make us ask again to what extent the discipline assumes a faith in its own socially transformative potential as criticism. Furthermore, if that potential is nothing other than a romantic nativism of the British Islanders, then what has ever been the point of learning British Literature in Japan?