Language BLANK literature: from conjunction to preposition

THE STUDY of language and the study of literature have been artificially separated for far too long. The origins of the separation can be traced back to classical times, but we have had our fill of it in recent decades, with generations of children being forced to live within the parallel universes of'lang' and 'lit' in school, then moving to the more sophisticated and intellectually challenging world of the university only to be faced there with the same divide though usually presented in a more intriguing (i.e., vituperative) mode. After university, some of them might engage in a career of teaching English as a foreign language, and find themselves in centres where the institutional demands of the syllabus require an interest in prepositions or pronouns to be rigorously separated from one in Pasternak or Pinter. There is rarely a chance to cross the divide, in either direction, to allow the interests to interpenetrate. So often the boundary lines between the two subjects seem to be universal, permanent, set in stone. Yet, though sanctioned by generations of practice, it can be argued that the division is intellectually indefensible, creatively limiting, and pedagogically absurd. It surely has to go. At the very least, as my title suggests, in the new millennium we should be aiming to replace in our mindsets the use of conjunctions, which keep the two domains apart, by prepositions, which integrate them. But, which preposition?