On Dec 17, 2008, at 2:22 PM, Thomas Dalton wrote:
Perhaps in universities where students study a wide
range of subjects.
In UK universities, most people never go near the English department
but almost all of them will learn how to do academic research and
writing (often as you go along, rather than in a specific class on
it).
I am not an expert on the UK university system, but if my hazy memory
is correct, the UK system is generally not as invested in the notion
of general education as the US system. Thus you don't get a general
class on the subject period.
We get to another fundamental bias here, but I do think that there is
a regard in which Wikipedia, by being invested in being a general
resource on everything, is a bit more American in flavor than British.
In any case, my point remains - inasmuch as there is a general, multi-
field approach to and belief in principles of research and
scholarship, as it stands such approaches are more easily located in
English departments or in fields that share a large amount of
theoretical figures with English departments than elsewhere.
If nothing else, the list of stuff Carcaroth provided that you wrote
off is a pretty good list of fundamental debates in the question of
how to read sources and what they mean - debates that have
ramifications in all fields. To declare them irrelevant to our process
is... problematic.
-Phil