WHAT'S MY NAME? COMMUNICATIONS IN EDUCATION TODAY

Abstract

"Literature thrives in the lived world as part of the process of human communication." There has always been recognition of that emphasis on "part," and in acknowledgment of the Greek and Renaissance humanist tradition in modem education, Donald Theall recalls the awareness among the outstanding literary figures of those eras - long before English literature became a study - of the importance of the non-literary milieux of which their art was a most intense expression. But it is the awakening of an acute modern consciousness of the need to understand the disorders of communication, within what should become a democratic society, that has challenged English studies in his view either to meet that need or, surrendering the task to the social sciences, to go the way of classical and rhetorical studies into near extinction.