The state of English departments has been on my mind of late. So I’m interested that the new issue of Chronicle Review devotes three long articles to the topic “What Ails Literary Studies?” That alone suggests that my perception that something is amiss is widespread. No doubt the timing also has to do with the Modern Language Association meetings opening later this week in San Francisco, (and how did I fail to work up some scam to be there rather than central Ohio between Christmas and the New Year?).
I’m not going to spend a lot of time here, at least not now, bewailing how literature is taught or how curricula are structured. More immediately interesting, for the sake of the KR blog, is the growing paradox that the writing of literature (or at least the attempt to do so) is thriving as never before both in undergraduate and graduate institutions. The point is that students of all ages–and the KR Young Writers program is evidence as well–do still care about literature. They love it. They read it. They want to write it and be part of the ever more healthy community of writers and readers. I don’t think this is just misguided narcissism or a large fraud perpetrated by MFA administrators. These student writers, and certainly those who teach them, are well aware of market realities. They know putting pen to paper, or digit to keyboard, ain’t any way to get rich or famous–the odds are far better with lotteries and lightening strikes. There’s a kind of altruism at the heart of this that may well be naive, but I find quite moving.
A further irony: as commercial publishing is collapsing at about the same speed as the Madoff Ponzi scheme, the hundreds of literary magazines in print and, increasingly, online are finding audiences. They may be small, have always been, but people are reading, submitting, participating. The literary community is thriving as never before. Readers in the future may well be a relatively small niche of an infinitely fragmented population, but I’m convinced more than ever that they will never disappear altogether, no matter how the media change that provide stories, poems, and essays.
Now back to the classroom. I’m increasingly of the mind that English departments are playing a desperate game of emperor’s clothes. No, that’s not it: more like, pay no attention to the phony wizard behind the curtain. In today’s academy no single literary curriculum has any real coherence. Each department has its rationale, of course, its requirements for majors to fulfill. But it all seems a sham–a way of dodging the reality that there’s no substantial underlying coherence or agreement. I don’t need to get into name calling about political correctness or academic fashion or theory bashing. It’s just that few literature teachers (myself included) really agree any longer on what we’re trying to do or why.
I’m not for a moment saying we should try and resuscitate a Great Books curriculum or a purely Western canon from the 1960s or 70s. That would be preposterous even if it were possible. Nor am I suggesting that opening the curriculum to authors and texts from other cultures or classes has been wrong headed. Far from it. We have all been greatly enriched. The problem is that we lack any agreement on how to talk about any of that literature, and so each teacher and professor tends to go about it according to personal druthers in the privacy of a classroom.
My sense is that students are increasingly aware that something is lacking. Statistics certainly show a strong falling off undergraduates seeking English majors, especially among men, and I don’t think that’s entirely because of a rotten economy. I’m not sure that were I eighteen or nineteen today I’d choose to pursue an English major again.
Years ago, in my first year in college–good lord, now I really am sounding like the Ancient of Days–I was surrounded by–and taught by–people who not only believed in the singular importance of literature and literary study, they were unabashed in their passion. Studying, reading, arguing, caring wasn’t about righting political wrongs, nor about any other particular use. Literature mattered in some deeper way that was resonant with holy writ. Maybe that was just the last vestiges of modernism or romanticism, but the passion communicated itself.
Certainly, I loved novels and poems before I went to college. But only there was I struck by the lightening of how special it would be to devote myself, that literature was a cause, an end in itself, almost a blessing. That was communicated to me by the professors who taught. And what mattered was their attitude, not the particular curriculum of that moment. Weren’t most of us who are teaching today inspired like that? Well, I think few of us communicate any similar passion to students very well these days. We’d be far too embarrassed. We’d feel vulnerable to criticism and mockery. Isn’t that sad?