Dear Colleagues,
Your ideas are most welcome
... regarding social class inclusivity and the formation and development of US College English departments. What were their founding principles?
How have these evolved over time?
How do the theories grounding College English Departments affect the teaching of literature?
Concerning Gerald Graff's Professing English and Terry Eagleton's Literary Theory: An Introduction, again, your ideas are most welcome!
I am reviewing the history of post-secondary English Departments' literature programs for The Routledge Companion to Literature and Class.
Does the rhetorical mode of teaching literature as a part of civic discourse affect the way literature is taught? Eagleton and Graff appear to split over this.
I may add more questions as I finish Graff.
I think this varies program by program. I have taught at a UK "post-92" university that was proud of its origins as a teachers' college in the era of the March of Intellect and the Chartists. (Rest in peace, Prof. Peter Widdowson, who was particularly proud of this aspect of his final institution.) I have taught at a frat school / great research university that donates money to Sons of the Confederacy and is a football fiefdom, and then there's my current institution, with neither of these cultures. Each treated the goal of class inclusivity within the English curriculum differently than the others, though all have to some extent professed that it's a goal. I do think it interesting that there seems to be a curricular divide between broadening the elite (everyone: learn Shakespeare and the Inkling! Then the elite will be a meritocratic one!) and questioning how the elite and its canon has got to its dominant position (thanks, Terry Eagleton, Stuart Hall, Paddy Whannell, and the New Left!)
Any theoretical grounding is ex post facto, which means it's not really a "grounding" but rather grounds for continuation. The grounding occurred historically, when the Humboldt University was created in Berlin in the early 1800's. The motivation (as opposed to reason) for literature's inclusion was to institutionalize the split between the rational sciences and the domain of the irrational. Institutionalization was necessary in order to free the sciences of a burden they could not carry, namely; to give a rational account of everything. Religion was at the crux of the problem; faith is not rational. As the sciences advanced, they threatened to drive religion into a corner. You can imagine the defensive outcry this provoked, and you can read its vociferous expression in Hamann's Socratic Memorabilia. Hamann, as the story goes, influenced Herder, who describes the proper way to read literature, e.g. not in an armchair but aboard a ship in a tempest. And Herder influenced Goethe, who fictionalized the conflict and concentrated its impact on the individual, his hero Werther, who commits suicide because his passions cannot be made to accommodate the demands of a practically ordered and rule-bound life. The conflict had intensified to the point that it threatened the health of the psyche. Thus "literature," music, and the fine arts were reconceived as media whose ungovernable fantasy and inspiration-driven nature suited them to give expression to the explosive and ineradicable conflict between the rational and the irrational. It was essential to acknowledge this new conception and embed it in the social fabric. So "literature" was born as a formal field. The same argument continues to be made, even though we might think the sciences well out of danger and religion has proven itself adaptable and durable. Films such as "Dead Poets Society" renew the argument made by Goethe's Werther. "Ghostbusters," on the other hand, argues that it is time that we drop the pretense of a strict delineation between the normal and paranormal. This film enjoins us to "Cross the streams!" and mix it up. Humor and seriousness, imagination and technology need to cooperate, it suggests, if we are to face present-day problems. And the film assures us that, just as the separation was meant to benefit religion, religion will now benefit from the supposed opposites back merging together.
The introduction of what was once called Third World literature into the debate has created surely immense doubt about the nature of literature and what is taught. I came across a Pelican Original, dated 1940 but republished in 1969, with the usual troupe of dead white men perpetuating a real or imagined tradition. South American and West African literature broke that mold. Now, with internet and public performance literature like art can be anything. Mostly still, literature possessing form is still the literature taught.
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