The condition of music : the aesthetic turn in English

There is an 'aesthetic turn' currently occurring in English. This article traces some of the recent history of this aesthetic/expressive view of the subject from Abbs, through Britton to the present time. Moreover, the author's argument is that the aesthetic turn in English has the potential to re-emphasise 'productive' practices in a post- critical literacy age. Form, pattern, shape are key terms here and a sense of English-as-making has, in its turn, some potential for re- valuing notions which the functional-literacy paradigm has neglected in curriculum discourse: 'creativity', 'imagination', 'the personal. These are things we value as part of our professional identity. Britton argued in the 1970s that English had its peculiar domain in the expressive-poetic end of his famous continuum; the aesthetic turn gives us new reasons for carving out our territory around notions akin to what he regarded then as 'spectator' functions in language. The next question the profession needs to consider is its commitment to such a move.