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[–][deleted]  (4 children)



    [–]IczyAlley 5 points6 points  (3 children)


    Though I get the sense that you're a bit troll-y, I'll bite. I went to Columbia and post-structuralists taught the single-author canonical classes that you seem to think disappeared. Students of Derrida showed me what was of value in the Western tradition, and though I can't be certain, I don't believe they did so ironically.

    You seem to have a much bigger bug in your bonnet that has little to do with English literature. While taking the core at Columbia, I also took Latin classes and read many of the classics you seem to prize in their "original" languages. I learned Old English. I studied linguistics. Yet I also firmly believe that race, gender, and class are integral to reading any text. I'm sorry, but for a thousand reasons its demonstrable that their concerns are not new or trendy. You can dismiss me as a charlatan or something, but (and though I'm not trying to be a dick, there's no way to say this without coming off as one) I know far more about these texts than you ever will. And my colleagues do too. And we disagree with you. That's not enough to convince you on its own, I know, but it should register with you on some level. I'm not sure which scholarship you hate so much, but I can assure you that even Harold Bloom at his most fuddy-duddy would not dismiss everything with a wave of his hand as you are.

    To continue addressing your anger at the shriveling of a perceived golden-age, I think you have misplaced your anger completely. The reason Old English withered and died is because universities no longer get the money for education in those subjects. This is because they do not make students more employable. IF you have a problem with this, blame anti-intellectuals who do their best to marginalize and de-fund English departments, not the people in them who are always trying to do their best in pursuit of a Truth that they are eternally skeptical of. Don't blame some poor schmuck trying in earnest to show why gender is important in Shakespeare (which it is for anyone who isn't willfully ignorant, but which is seemingly being dismissed by you right now). Don't blame someone who finally demonstrated why Langston Hughes is a master poet and jazzman. Consider for a moment what you're really angry about.

    And as for your ideas about the value of the canon and the past...I've published on Milton and Donne. I even value Old English and read it passably well. I'm not saying that the canon is useless. No one is (there may be someone who rhetorically makes such claims, but they are EXTREMELY rare and if you talk with them for more than 5 seconds you'll realize that they are trying to make a political point). But even if someone was saying to blow it all up, I think you place far too much value on things you deem canonical without placing them in context. If you want everyone to know the classics of Western Civilization, that's fine (though I think that's a separate argument entirely from this article, which is about English). But even there I'd have to say you're being hostile and myopic. IF you want us to read Koine and Ionian Greek, or even if you want us to read Dante, Homer, and Virgil in an English translation, then I think there's a strong argument that we should also be required to teach sub-Saharan African tales that defined Egyptian mythology, Egyptian mythology itself, Gilgamesh, Tale of Genji, the various Chinese epics, the Mahabharata, etc. Each of those works has just as much of an impact on modern English literary productions as the things cited in those article or by you. If you're talking about sending English lit students to school forever and paying for them to read the Sanskrit classics, then I agree with you completely. I bet many students and professors of English literature would agree with you. Let's make this happen!

    But before that, one final thing--though I do value the canon, I don't think that requiring English students to read La Comedia or the Symposium necessarily makes them better thinkers or citizens. Since this thread is deep enough for Godwin's Law and I suspect you're being a little trollish, I don't feel like it's too out of place to bring up the Nazis. The Fascists read Thucydides just as closely as people who didn't execute millions of people (maybe even more closely), but I don't think that reading the books that you think are important will automatically improve the quality of education. It didn't even help them realize they shouldn't fight a two front war, even though Thucydides spells out how important that is in the ancient Greek equivalent of ALL CAPS. But on a more reasonable note, even the classic philological literary studies that you seem to remember fondly relied on scraps and trash to define what good reading and good reading practices were. IF you go into an archive, you have to read monks lists of food to figure out what a word of The Bible means. Things that seem value-less can become valuable with the careful meditation of a good literary scholar. That's our job, and that's why categories you deem unimportant are actually integral to the Serious and Important work of Good Scholarship.

    Sorry about the weird formatting, I wrote this on my phone.

    [–]redundanteater 1 point2 points  (2 children)


    I hear where you're coming from, but as a grad, you have to be aware that Columbia is renowned for being one of the last "great book" oriented undergraduate programs. It basically stands alone in higher education for its approach to both the bridge and the first year curriculum in general (mostly due nowadays to Roosevelt Montas). I think that this matter was even a research topic at either the AAC&U or with the Carnegie people a few years back.

    I'm not dismissing applying theory to the study of literature in graduate school, but I am firmly against both forcing it on undergraduates or teaching theory for its own sake in English Departments. English Departments shouldn't be dumbed-down versions of other departments. We have enough to do as it is.

    Mostly I'm angry at needlessly obfuscatory theory work, which has moved further and further away from proposing useful tools for the analysis of works of literature and which is instead used to indoctrinate students to specific political agendas. I don't want to be around the sorts of people who confuse teaching literature with what you call "trying to make a political point." My view is this: Leave post colonialism and Shakespeare for a graduate seminars, and teach undergraduates the nuts and bolts of the plays and poems first.

    And if you think that sub-Saharan literature or the Tale of Genji has had as important an effect on English literature as has Dante, I don't know what to say. The Inferno is more influential on the development of western literature than absolutely everything ever written on the continent of Africa combined. And once we exclude the Bible, even the literature of the Levant is unimportant… e.g. Gilgamesh, which is interesting as an early epic (and we could easily add Atrahasis among others)… it was only rediscovered in the 1870s.

    Undergraduate majors are limited in terms of credits, usually about 36 at the most. That means a grand total of 12 courses (UCLA's much discussed program being 4 "historical," 3 "broad," 2 electives and a capstone). If you look at UCLA's offerings, the different areas have enough options in them to create an incredibly useless BA where students would come away with not only a narrow but stilted understanding of one thousand years of English writing, and who would be almost guaranteed to bomb on the subject GRE. I don't think it would be difficult to go back to a more rigorously defined historical core of say 5 courses. I put this entire thing down to self-centered baby boomer faculty in the 1980s wanting to teach their own little pet areas without any consideration for their students or for a broad understanding of English literature.

    [–]savdec449 0 points1 point  (0 children)


    This is completely anecdotal, but I attend a program with very, very loose period requirements, am interested mostly in contemporary poetry, and my subject test score was higher than the average at Harvard and Berkeley. I don't say this to show off but to say that if you are motivated enough to make the (stupid) choice of doing grad school in literature, then you will do the necessary work on yr own. (For what it's worth, Columbia is part of the large coalition of schools which do not require the subject test from applicants).

    [–]MerOper 0 points1 point  (0 children)


    There are other, much better thought-out comments that say what I wanted to say, but I'd very strongly advise against treating the GRE subject test as usefully indicative of anything, much less the quality of an undergraduate education in English.