An (Anti)genealogy of Metaphors for the English Curriculum

Abstract

In an era of conformity and control, in which critics frequently pronounce the ‘death’ of English (Bennett, Lambert and Smith, 2023), the urgency of cultivating a disciplinary language with which to reflect upon and critique the representation of the subject has never felt more acute. The power of metaphor to shape the beliefs of discourse participants, in relation to a range of social issues, has been well established since the publication of Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980/2003) Metaphors We Live By, and in this thesis, I trace the metaphors that have been used to conceptualise the English curriculum, in relation to both the progress of students ‘through’ the subject and the representation of the discipline as an entity in itself. I attend to the language of ‘official’ documents, represented by a series of Ofsted publications, and that used by practising teachers in conversation with myself, in relation to a Foucaultian-inspired (anti)genealogical framework. This is underpinned by a contemporary version of spatial relations that considers “the happenstance arrangement in-relation-to-each other” (Massey, 2005, p. 39) of potentially disparate elements. Methodologically, as suggested by the interdisciplinary application of linguistics to the field of English education, I embrace the qualitative tradition of bricolage, drawing on a variety of tools including Critical Metaphor Analysis (Charteris-Black, 2004), discourse analysis, corpus linguistics and the analysis of narrative, as well as utilising a productive “thinking through theory” (Jackson and Mazzei, 2018). Distinguishing between linear and non-linear metaphors, I demonstrate how the authors of the Ofsted documents, in accordance with a neoliberal conception of education, gradually come to rely almost exclusively on static and linear representations of the subject. In contrast, the English teachers interviewed self-consciously embrace a kind of negative capability (Keats, 1817) and are willing to hold linear and non-linear conceptualisations of the subject in a refreshingly generative tension.