The debate we're having ("What is English?"; "Why English?"; "What's the future of English?") is found in medieval studies, especially Anglo-Saxon studies, all the time. (Sometimes it feels that medievalists like to talk more about the state of the field than the field itself.) A particularly interesting recent conversation about this topic occured among Anglo-Saxon bloggers, and was subsequently compiled at the online journal The Heroic Age. It is worth checking out.

The divide in A-S Studies tends to be centered around a "Philology/Theory" axis (though of course the many sides and arguments are much more diverse than that binary suggests). At stake here is really the question of how to make "Anglo-Saxon Studies" relevant to both the rest of the field and the wider world, and whether "objective" methods of study are appropriate or even valid.

Does anyone have examples of similar debates happening in other English subfields? If, for example, historical distance gives medievalists concern about relevance, how does the opposite (historical proximity) pose problems for modernists? Do rhetoric scholars struggle in their relationship with composition scholars?

-Tom Elrod