Pedagogy: Critical Approaches to Teaching Literature, Language, Composition, and Culture Volume 10, Number 1 doi 10.1215/15314200-2009-025 © 2009 by Duke University Press 117 The Figure of Writing and the Future of English Studies Marc Bousquet The Literature in English Studies For me the most compelling tension in English studies today is the one between the fgure of reading and the fgure of writing, especially as it plays out in what David Downing calls managed disciplinarity, the disciplinary division of labor between writing and literature. Nearly everyone thinking about this issue acknowledges that the distinction serves to justify the divi- sion of resources and rewards — time, salary, prestige, power — rather than a coherent intellectual division. This was the case for much of the twentieth century. So long as the literature curriculum remained central to sustaining nationalist and imperial projects, faculty working under the sign of “litera- ture” were steadily more likely to be associated with research-intensive, or at least tenurable, appointments. In these positions they were more likely to control institutional resources, shape the disciplinary agenda of the feld, receive funding and media recognition, and so on. As Robert Connors (1997), Sharon Crowley (1998), James Berlin (2003 [1996]), Stephen North (2000), Bruce McComiskey (2006), and many others have observed, the emergence of “literature” as a synecdoche for the many concerns of English sometimes came at a heavy price for faculty whose research or teaching encompassed such concerns as rhetoric, composition, philology, English education, cre- ative writing, even critical theory and cultural studies. Many faculty with these concerns simply abandoned English departments, joining schools of education or departments of linguistics, communications, or philosophy;