Editor's Introduction

Authors

  • Jessie Casteel

Abstract

As we move into the role of professional English academics, I think we're all concerned about the relevance we can have to the world outside the rarefied circles of academia. Like scientists researching for the pure joy of discovery, of course many of the texts we produce are simply to serve our own interests – and I am not saying there is anything wrong with that. But like those same scientists, I think we can also find that what begins as intellectual curiosity may still develop practical applications. Among my own student cohort, I've noticed a strong central concern with deriving praxis from theory, in order that our ideas might translate to actual social change; this idea lurks at the periphery of much of the theory we read, but in so many cases remains unsatisfyingly amorphous or rhetorically inaccessible to the outside world. Nevertheless, it is possible to find work that demonstrates the potential practical applications of what we do. We need not imagine that our future scholarly lives must always be fraught with an uncomfortable tension between our research and the wider world; we need not be haunted by the anxiety of our irrelevance.

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Published

2014-01-26

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Section

Editors' Introduction