<< Yet Another Established Writer Swats at the 'Loud-Buzzing' Blogger | Front Page | Google Fun >>
Wednesday, November 18, 2009
What Defines an ‘English’ Course, Anyway?
Yesterday my department debated a motion to cross-list a course on Dante offered through the Italian Studies program*--that is, to enable students to take it as an English course, and thus, among other things, to let English majors count it towards the number of English courses they need to fulfill their degree requirements. There was a fair amount of discussion, some of it about practicalities, but some of it about principles. Nobody questioned that it was a good thing to encourage English majors to study Dante, but should their doing so be considered part of their work in ‘English’? If so, why not Boccaccio, Proust, Flaubert, or Tolstoy? It was pointed out that we already cross-list a Russian course on Nabokov. We also offer courses ourselves that feature literature in translation: World Literature, for instance, or Canadian literature (Quebec, remember?). We used to have a course on the Bible as literature. So the working definition of ‘English’ as a discipline is not ‘the study of literature written in English.’ Is it ‘the study of literature written in English, or highly influential on English writers, or in the context of Anglophone colonialism’? Or is the discipline defined, not by its content, but by its methodology? But there is no one ‘methodology.’ What does it mean, in theory but even more pressingly in practice, if we can’t point to anything and say ‘that is not what we do,’ or, to a student, ’this is what we do here’? To be sure, departmental or disciplinary boundaries have many arbitrary or circumstantial features. My university, like most these days, is keen on interdisciplinarity, and most of us recognize that English has been interdisciplinary all along. And yet I couldn’t help feeling during yesterday’s discussion that our inability to explain (or our refusal to delimit) what counted as an ‘English’ course and what didn’t reflected a broad and, in some ways, disabling incoherence in my field. It is certainly pedagogically disabling, at least in classes with a literary-historical framework, because you can’t count on any student having learned anything in particular before he or she shows up, even in a 4th-year seminar. For example, in my seminar on Victorian sensation fiction, many of the students have not studied any Victorian literature before. As far as they are concerned, Mary Elizabeth Braddon and Ellen Wood are representative Victorian novelists--and so, in some senses, they are, except that essential to critical work on their novels is some sense of how and why they had until fairly recently been excluded from ‘the canon.’ it is very difficult to engage the class with the implications of our reading Wood at all when they haven’t read any Dickens or George Eliot. Now, English students have yet one more course they can take towards their degree instead of The Nineteenth-Century Novel (or Romantic Poetry or Restoration Drama or African-American Literature or Science Fiction). It’s a zero-sum game for them, after all.
And yet it’s hard not to see it as a good thing that more of ‘our’ students might read The Divine Comedy. I never have, and I know it is my loss.
*The course is taught in English and the works are read in translation.
Comments
Is the ‘Russian course on Nabokov’ specifically on Nabokov’s Russian novels? If it’s on the ones he wrote in English, this looks absolutely uncontentious.
It may vary from year to year; most recently it was on both, highlighting The Gift (in translation, presumably) and Lolita. That this strikes me as unproblematic (as do CanLit courses including French texts in translation) is one of the reasons I personally am confused about what principle is operating--in my own head!
Yup. The anglophone fifty percent of African literature sits comfortably within the English department, while the other ninety percent that’s written in French and Lusophone (and Arabic, Kiswahili, etc) occupies strange exotic places like comparative literature and linguistics, or nowhere. There’s no rhyme or reason to it at all, except the contingencies of institutional history.
Also, Dante! God, the Commedia is good. I spent a semester reading nothing but Latin Literature and Dante (in translation) and it was the best semester of coursework I did.
At my undergraduate institution the English department offered a 2 semester “world literature” course that was basically the classic Great Books curriculum: everything from Homer to Cervantes.
I’m certainly glad I took it, even though it’s debatable how appropriate it was for an English literature degree.
I know that the whole concept of Great Books is wildly out of fashion (I was in college in the late 80’s/early nineties when the canon wars were at there peak. Has anything changed?), but it was pretty convenient to have so much of the stuff people will assume you’ve read gathered into one place.
Interesting discussion. Back in the 70’s, my undergraduate English department had a course on “European Literature in Translation.” And we cross-list a course on the epic in my present department.
You can also argue that since the Romantic period, Dante has been a fairly major presence in English literature: he is an essential reference point for the Rossettis, or T.S. Eliot, and is a favourite for poets to translate.
Literature in English as long as over half the texts across the curriculum were originally written in English by citizens of Great Britain, Canada, and the United States.
I don’t have any arguments against the good reasons for English students to read Dante (or other classics of world literature). And I take Aaron’s point that institutional contingencies account for a lot of the way things are set up. Also, I have recently been feeling strongly that the best possible use of my own next sabbatical would be to spend it reading, not another 200 essays on Dickens and George Eliot from ever more unexpected angles, but all kinds of ‘great books’ I’ve missed (though until now I admit I hadn’t thought of Dante, but more of Balzac, Flaubert, Dostoevsky, Tolstoy, Cervantes...). Maybe I’m just belatedly realizing that we should all really be in one big Literature & Culture department (after all, we offer courses in film and television now too) and are divided up as we (more or less) are because logistically that’s not possible.
I do like the idea of a “Literature & Culture” department, maybe with subprograms in various languages, film, cultural studies, etc. Of course, the institutional barriers to this are probably nigh impossible at most places, but I think it makes more sense than “English,” for all of the various reasons people have mentioned or alluded to above.
I keep being drawn to Hillis Miller’s remarks on his 50 years in the biz. At the beginning of his career: “English literature was taken for granted as the primary repository of the ethos and the values of United States citizens, even though it was the literature of a foreign country we had defeated almost two hundred years earlier in a war of independence. That little oddness did not seem to occur to anyone.” Yes, there is that oddness. The discipline is deemed necessary for citizenship though it’s based on the culture of a foreign nation, or that’s how it was 50 years ago. Not all that coherent. And now: “...the changes I have named in English departments—the New Criticism; the rise of theory; the development of cultural studies, global English studies, film studies, studies of popular culture, and so on—can be seen as spontaneous attempts to find again the social utility that is being lost for the study of canonical works of English literature.” It looks pretty much like we’re now making things as we go along. And then there’s administrative convenience.
”...at their peak.”
Evidently the Great Books didn’t teach me how to spell.
Aren’t English studies modeled directly on the old classical studies curriculum in English schools? I gather that it was only late in the 19th century that universities began to realize the utter uselessness of a “general education” that consisted of learning Latin and reading Cicero in the original. Greek and Sophocles if you were ambitious.
The classical languages and the classical canon had been the basis of European education for more than a thousand years, during which time Latin was the language of Western scholarship. Clerics and learned men wrote and communicated in Latin. Forced to admit the increasing practical uselessness of Latin, English-speaking academe substituted the study of good English and the English canon. This canon was to have the same civilizing effect as the old Latin canon: all educated people were to have read the same books, been steeped in the same ethos, so that they could catch the same literary allusions and move in the same elevated social circles.
I’m not in any way an expert on academic history, so I could be totally off-base here. Corrections welcomed.
I for one would welcome our new Literature and Culture overlords.
Zora, I think that’s probably a fair enough general account of the historical origins of English departments. But it has been a long time since people working in or defining the discipline have seen their project as “civilizing” or “elevating,” I think. So one way to consider what I’m puzzling over is what principle exactly we think has taken over. Bill may have said all that can be said with “we’re making it up as we go along.”
These departmental boundaries do not reflect anything of importance either in the content or the disciplines. An English major should take a certain number of “literature in translation” courses, of history courses, of philosophy courses, and of art/music/dance history courses, along with four years of one foreign language.
Re Luther’s comment about foreign languages. I agree that students should either do one in depth, or courses in more than one language. But I find it very hard to persuade students who want to pursue a scholarly career to study languages, which are not compulsory for a BA at my institution. A few years ago a colleague in German complained to me that students did not work hard enough at their German course, but if she was too rigorous in her standards she would lose them, and the course would be cancelled. That must be a common problem in the less popular languages, and one of the reasons there are so many courses of literature in translation, or courses on things like the ancient world in film.
In the Renaissance/Early Modern period that I study, these national and linguistic boundaries are particularly constraining, especially when you think of humanism and reformation as transcontinental intellectual movements.
An undergraduate ‘Latin classics for English majors’ course that read Caesar, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid in translation would have been helpful.
Most interesting, jph, most interesting.
"In the Renaissance/Early Modern period that I study, these national and linguistic boundaries are particularly constraining, especially when you think of humanism and reformation as transcontinental intellectual movements.
An undergraduate ‘Latin classics for English majors’ course that read Caesar, Virgil, Horace, and Ovid in translation would have been helpful. “
Yes. That’s exactly why I appreciated the “world literature” course. When we read the Renaissance and early modern English authors, I had at least some sense of the intellectual background of the writers we were studying.