This article seeks to illuminate a crossover area between subject research and ‘scholarship of teaching’. It proposes that a strategic bridge between discipline as body of knowledge and discipline as pedagogy is the formation and socialization of the student through practices that are at once social, rhetorical, and intellectual. While acknowledging that many current formations are generic, and stem from extra-disciplinary priorities, the article takes two case studies from the history of English Literary Studies. In each of the two moments (...) explored , radical change in the subject was closely tied to the formation of paradigmatic identities for the student. In each case, radical change in the knowledge base and practice of subject professionals was mirrored in changes of practice in the classroom. Learners were socialized into a sense of belonging through rituals of opposition: in the one case to the perceived perils of mass culture, in the other to the collusions attributed to the chief practitioners of their own discipline. While actual students inevitably need to negotiate their own path through the discourses into which they are being socialized, the article argues the importance of close attention to the rituals of initiation into an ‘academic tribe’. (shrink)