June 25, 2000

STUDYING ENGLISH LITERATURE IS NOT WHAT IT USED TO BE

Why do college students decide to major in English? Presumably not as a ticket to a high-flying career in dot-com land, though it happens. More likely, because they cherish literature and believe that its study will enrich their lives in other ways.

But it's getting harder and harder to find that kind of program. A recent study of 25 prestigious colleges, released last month by the National Association of Scholars (http://www.nas.org on the Web), shows that trendy trumps traditional nearly every time.

The NAS is routinely described as "conservative" by people for whom that is a term of opprobrium, but that's misleading, because the members are by no means all political conservatives. But they do tend toward the traditional in educational matters.

"Losing the Big Picture: The Fragmentation of the English Major Since 1964," by NAS president Stephen Balch and associate director Gary Brasor, compared college catalogs then and now to document a strong tendency to replace a structured major with a loosely organized collection of electives, to emphasize literary theory rather than literature and to reduce or eliminate requirements for a comprehensive exam or a senior thesis.

The authors focused on colleges, rather than research universities, because the authors felt that the presence of graduate departments focused on literary theory would influence the undergraduate courses as well.

But that influence is pervasive even on campuses with no graduate school.

The catalog for Colorado College (which was not included in the NAS study) lists three courses in theory and criticism, including one covering "Cultural criticism, Marxism, structuralism and deconstruction, feminist theory, ethnic criticism, psychoanalysis, hermeneutics, rhetorical criticism, etc."

A little of that goes a real long way -- unless, of course, you are going to graduate school, where you'll need it to survive.

Balch and Brasor attribute much of the effusion of highly specialized courses to increased emphasis on publication. "Even at 'teaching institutions,' professors feel strongly pressured not to divert too much time from their research," which usually means they try to teach whatever they happen to be researching. Not to pick on Colorado College -- except that it's handy and not atypical -- but the English Department lists courses such as Anglophone Caribbean Literature; Reading the Popular (genre fiction, including romances, Westerns, mysteries and science fiction); Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom; Afro-American Folklore; Irish Writers after Joyce and Yeats.

There's no shortage of more traditional courses, and no one is arguing that specialized courses are bad. But basing an education on them is like always ordering dinner off the appetizers menu. It's hard to get a balanced diet.

As a rough measure of the change in emphasis over the years, Balch and Brasor count up how often an author's name is cited in course descriptions.

The number of courses devoted exclusively to Shakespeare has increased, but not nearly as fast as the number of courses overall, and they are much less likely to be required than they were. Preoccupation with issues of race and gender are clear. "As far as citations can attest, African-American novelist Toni Morrison is now considered -- by English professors at least -- to be the sixth most important author in the entire history of the language." Shakespeare, Milton and Chaucer claim a far smaller share than they did, though they are still in the top six, along with Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf.

Where literature is a family affair, the women are gaining ground. Robert Browning has held level at 16 citations, while Elizabeth Barrett Browning went from none to 14. In 1964, Percy Bysshe Shelley had 16 citations and Mary Shelley none. In 1997, it's 25 each.

"One can argue somewhat over the artistic justice of these re-evaluations," the authors say, "but not so much over the forces that are driving them."

They conclude that students can pass through programs like these and emerge with "only rudimentary knowledge of English literature's longer history, or of its greatest writers and works."

And that's a pity.

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