This work examines the nature and direction of English studies in America. Robert Scholes offers an intervention in current debates about educational and cultural values and goals, showing how English came to occupy its present place in the American educational system, diagnozing the educational illness he perceives in today's English departments, and recommending theoretical and practical changes in the field of English studies. Scholes's position defies neat labels - it is a deeply conservative expression of the wish to preserve the best in the English tradition of verbal and textual studies, yet it is an argument for reconstruction of the discipline of English. The book begins by examining the history of the rise of English at two American universities - Yale and Brown - at the end of the 19th and beginning of the 20th century. Scholes argues that the subsequent fall of English is the result of both cultural shifts and changes within the field of English itself. He calls for a fundamental reorientation of the discipline - away from political or highly theoretical issues, away from a specific canon of texts and towards a canon of methods, to be used in the process of learning how to situate, compose and read a text. He offers a proposal for a discipline based on rhetoric and the teaching of reading and writing over a broad range of literatures, a discipline that includes literariness but is not limited to it.