Comments on: the decline of english

By: The Long 18th contemplates the death of just about everything . . . . « The Long Eighteenth

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 15:15:02 +0000

[...] some credit for raising these issues, and for provoking the thoughtful responses from CR of Ads Without Products and Joseph Kugelmass of the Valve. Now let’s see if he responds to [...]

By: Look Back In Anger: The Death of Literary Studies « The Kugelmass Episodes

Look Back In Anger: The Death of Literary Studies « The Kugelmass Episodes — Wed, 09 Apr 2008 00:58:33 +0000

[...] writing for The Nation, and also to the outstanding response written by CR and posted to Ads Without Products and Long [...]

By: Josh

Josh — Thu, 03 Apr 2008 12:21:43 +0000

Yes, anti-hippo, you said that at The Valve. Thanks for initiating an otherwise great discussion, CR!

By: Anti-hypocrisy Advocate

Anti-hypocrisy Advocate — Sat, 29 Mar 2008 05:18:16 +0000

Undergraduate Literature majors become Literature majors because they first and foremost love “stories.” And one of the reasons that Literature majors were often the best and the brightest is that all learning passes through “story”. (All sorts of research on learning and cognition has arrived at this conclusion for quite some time now: story, story, story — even in the teaching and learning of the sciences and technology — story, story, story.)

And yet, “story” is precisely what English departments have primarily abandoned. Rather than have the “stories” of the texts call the tune of the course, the faculty have been doing the “story-telling” — and the stories have been of the faculty’s preoccupations and “literary approaches” and not necessarily the “stories”: the preoccupations of the literary works themselves.

In short, it is the professionalization of the undergraduate curriculum, its transformation by faculty into a pseudo-graduate program (that the faculty wish they could always teach at/in), that has destroyed the Literature major on American campuses.

This is not a defense and illustration of specialisation by periodisation (Xth century literature, etc.) but rather a pleading for a return to the texts of literature (written and visual and auditory), a return to reading and seeing and hearing, a return to their attendant pleasures and, often, their pain.

American students would kill to become Literature majors — if only we’d let them.

By: New House Rule « Even Unto Thy Shoes

New House Rule « Even Unto Thy Shoes — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 20:09:17 +0000

[...] God bless Ads Without Products for having more heart than I do. Original notice from ED. Posted in absurdity, kulturkritik, [...]

By: adswithoutproducts

adswithoutproducts — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 16:09:32 +0000

Again, the short version: because vulgar decon / new criticism helps them to deal with the literary work as work, which is not something that is easy to do with out long observation of someone else doing it and practice.

I think there are a lot of courses where the baffling nature of the literary work - and the incredibly baffling question of what to say about it - is immediately bracketed in order to turn to historical context (or, increasingly, the material circumstances of the emergence and the publication of the text). I deal with students in the aftermath of this all the time. They understand, for instance, the status of marriage during Chaucer’s time, but they don’t know how to begin talking about Chaucer’s text, how to manage its complexities of tone and presentation… So they’re totally lost, having been placed on a methodological path they can’t possibly contribute to in the space of a 6 pp paper…

Now how to make the leap from this to politics is incredibly complicated, I’d be the first to admit.

By: bjk

bjk — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:55:29 +0000

Agreed. I’d be interested to hear why you think, by your own account, the students are most interested in “vulgar decon” or new criticism, and not in sociology. I don’t think the answer is that they’re attracted to radical politics, but I’ll wait to see what you say about that.

By: adswithoutproducts

adswithoutproducts — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 15:04:28 +0000

Pollian,

Exactly. (Ah if we could only, you know, go over this at the bsah).

BJK,

Dunno. I’m not sure the politics really pushes out and through in that case. Maybe rendered enthusiastically… But then perhaps the failure of enthusiasm (or, as pollian says, the confidence that underwrites it) is the problem…

By: pollian

pollian — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 03:12:09 +0000

My own sense is that, yes, the disappearance of the radicalized classroom is strongly related to the decline in student numbers–but that what actually matters is less the loss of radicalism and more the loss of confidence. What was appealing about English, when I was an undergrad, was that it had something valuable to contribute to my understanding of the world–something I couldn’t get elsewhere. That happened to be theoretical radicalism (and I was too young and too ignorant to see the holes), but it needn’t be. The problem is that most of us English types don’t know what it is that we have to offer. Historicism fails in large part because Historians do it better. Philosophy fails for the same reason. But there are things–more native to literature–that we, and only we, have to say.

By: bjk

bjk — Wed, 19 Mar 2008 01:26:01 +0000

. . . however valuable historicism is a scholarly stance, it tends to fall relatively flat in the classroom. I say this as a historicist, a part historicist, myself: given equivalent teaching quality, the students will be hooked by the magic tricks you can perform on The Waste Land via vulgar decon and/or new critical torque far faster than they will by the status of the industrial society in Victorian Britain and the way that it informs Hard Times.

Isn’t the lesson there that students prefer literary approaches to literature? They can smell the politics a mile away in “the status of the industrial society in Victorian Britain and the way that it informs Hard Times,” and they don’t like it. There isn’t an obvious politics in either deconstruction or new criticism.