A generation ago, teaching and studying literature was traditional and familiar. If you majored in English, chances are you studied Homer and Dante, Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Spenser, Dickens and the rest of the literary canon that has stood the test of time.
Well, times have changed.
Students can graduate from Virginia’s leading colleges and universities without studying basic English, according to a report released last month by the Virginia Association of Scholars.
In some colleges these days it’s even possible for English majors to graduate without studying Shakespeare, choosing instead from a smorgasbord of electives that include such courses as “Detective Fiction as Social Critique” or “Studies in the Literature of Sexuality.”
“You would have to look very, very carefully to find (a college) that would give your child a really good grounding in the magnificent writers of the past,” says John M. Ellis, a professor emeritus of German literature at the University of California-Santa Cruz.
Ellis also is secretary-treasurer of the American Association of Literary Scholars and Critics, a 2,200-member organization founded in 1994 to restore the study of literature as imaginative art.
In the view of Ellis and others in his group, the once stodgy world of academic literary criticism has turned into a maelstrom of competing factions analyzing literature in terms of race, gender, class or arcane theories, and equating popular culture with the Great Books.
The result, Ellis says, is that literature in all its diversity gets lost.
Another group, the American Council of Trustees and Alumni (ACTA), was formed three years ago to respond to what its president, Jerry L. Martin, calls “a general erosion of academic standards and academic integrity” and threats to academic freedom presented by political correctness on campus.
ACTA conducted a research study in 1996 to examine the English curricula at 70 of the nation’s top colleges and universities and discovered that only 23 now require English majors to take a course in Shakespeare. The other 47 allow students to graduate with a bachelor of arts degree in English without studying Shakespeare in any depth and in some institutions it’s possible not to encounter Shakespeare at all, even in a survey course, according to the study.
A spokesperson for Northwestern University says that English majors there study Shakespeare in a required English literature survey course, and that with three courses in pre-1798 literature required, a Shakespeare course is one of the “most likely” choices.
At the University of Chicago, there is no required Shakespeare course, but English majors encounter the Bard in a core humanities course and in a methodology and issues course.
Both Roosevelt University and the University of Illinois at Chicago require a separate Shakespeare course.
“It’s disturbing,” Martin says of the movement away from Shakespeare study. “It’s almost mind-boggling. Two-thirds of top college English departments have dropped the Shakespeare requirement, and what are the electives that are coming in? We find (it’s) gangster films, prison literature, a lot of sex, a lot of pop culture. Some of it looks vaguely political. Some of it looks like just one professor’s interest.”
This trend, Martin says, has resulted in an extraordinary role reversal.
“It used to be that professors upheld high academic standards and tried to persuade the public, alumni and so forth that that was important,” he says. “Now it’s the professors who are lowering academic standards and the public, alumni and trustees who are saying, `Wait a minute. Isn’t Shakespeare important?’ “
In many universities, battle lines have been drawn, pitting professor against professor as the two factions (who often refer to each other, respectively, as “reactionaries” or “conservatives” and “radicals”) jockey for power within college English departments.
The vociferousness of the current debate may be unusual, but Herman L. Sinaiko, a professor of humanities at the University of Chicago, notes that arguments about the canon have been occurring for most of the 20th Century, especially after World War II when the G.I. Bill opened up higher education to more people.
“The canon had been, essentially, works that had come down through the tradition of the Protestant establishment in the United States, but since the emergence of a kind of awareness of other great traditions besides the Western — Indian, Islamic, Japanese — there have always been arguments to expand the canon to include great books of other traditions as well,” Sinaiko says.
“At the same time, education is a limited kind of thing. There’s less and less room to read more and more stuff. Since the ’70s, there’s been a great debate about the ancients versus the moderns. But now there’s a real movement growing that the canon should be dispensed with altogether, that it represents works that have been imposed on people, a standard that is aristocratic and masculine, not sufficiently democratic, the dead white European male stuff.”
Sinaiko readily acknowledges that “there may well be cases of books that aren’t in the canon that should be,” but he cautions that “the central claim for the canon is that these are works of extraordinary quality that have continued to be read for hundreds of years.”
“Shakespeare is a standard canon figure,” Sinaiko continues. “Yes, he was a monarchist. He wasn’t democratic. He was an aristocrat. But he may also be the greatest poet in history.”
A few years ago, Gerald Graff, a professor of English and education at the University of Chicago, and his colleagues started Teachers for a Democratic Culture, to combat the “bad press that was coming down on multiculturalism and on changes in the curriculum.”
Graff declares: “It’s simply untrue, as the Right has been charging, that the classics have been thrown out and are no longer being taught in major college programs.
“It’s certainly true that many new authors have come into the canon and into the curriculum, going back to the paperback revolution, which made a lot of new authors available and democratized the literary and humanities culture. But these new things have usually entered the curriculum by accretion and by addition, rather than by simply eliminating Plato, Shakespeare and Milton.”
Professors on Graff’s side of the debate generally cite a survey conducted in 1990 by the Modern Language Association (MLA), the chief professional organization of English professors, to counter criticism that “politically correct” faculty members have abandoned the classics.
The survey found that such writers as Charles Dickens, John Milton, Edmund Spenser, Nathaniel Hawthorne, Herman Melville, Jane Austen, George Eliot and Thomas Hardy are still being taught. And some professors have added less commonly taught authors, including Elizabeth Gaskell, Mary Shelley, Oscar Wilde, George Gissing, Harriet Beecher Stowe and Frederick Douglass.
Questions about how literature is taught seemed to reveal more of a change. Respondents were asked to choose among nine educational goals and each, on average, chose six. For example, while 92.8 percent chose traditional historical reading of the text as one goal in their teaching, 61.7 percent chose understanding the influence of race, class and gender on literature and its interpretation.
Critics lambasted the survey, charging that it was calculated to show as little change as possible in the way literature is taught but, nevertheless, points toward radical change.
Graff disagrees.
“Another charge (was) that the curriculum has been radically politicized, that feminism and black studies and Marxism and multiculturalism and various political approaches have made it risky to teach Western culture or to express admiration for Western culture,” Graff says. “That has been grossly exaggerated.
“What you do get in schools and universities is a severe sort of Balkanization within which traditional teaching goes on just as it always did before and then you have an overlay of the newer kinds of studies and approaches, which are influenced by feminism and multiculturalism. These two things co-exist in an uneasy armed truce.”
A recent recipient of a doctorate degree in English from an Eastern university says that students suffer from “narrow and exclusive approaches to literature,” resulting in fragmentary training.
“I’ve never known another graduate student to be closed-minded about either what to read or how to read it, but I have too often met professors, especially junior professors, who were closed-minded on what to read and how to read it,” continues the man, who requested anonymity because he says he would not get a job if he openly criticized “anybody or any department.”
Still, Bonnie Zimmerman, president-elect of the National Women’s Studies Association and a professor at San Diego State University, believes that women’s studies and analysis of literature in terms of race, gender and class “has added an entirely new dimension of knowledge and the questions that people ask.”
“There is a strong connection between literature and reality,” she says. “Literature is one of the ways in which gender roles and expectations are transmitted from generation to generation.”
These matters are complicated further by charges that, in general, all higher education is less rigorous today, that it is what high school used to be 30 years ago.
“Some assessments have been done, and college students read about one quarter as much as they did 30 years ago,” says Rita Zurcher, research director of the National Association of Scholars, an 11-year-old organization based in Princeton, N.J.
The Virginia Scholars Association study of general education at Virginia’s six largest public colleges and universities revealed that a rigorous, required English composition course that involved reading assignments drawn from English literature has evolved since 1964 into a “writing requirement” that might not even be administered by English departments and can be easily bypassed. And George Mason University gives full composition credit for a class in remedial English as a Second Language for non-native speakers.
“What happens nowadays,” Zurcher continues, “is that colleges are very interested in retaining students. They also want to graduate students within a reasonable amount of time because their funds are dependent on it.”
And she says that if there are a lot of choices in the general education programs, students are more likely to enroll where it’s “easier to go and graduate, rather than to another school where it’s very strict.”
The conflict in English departments often breaks down along generational lines, with professors who came of age in the 1960s often championing race-gender-class analysis of literature while older professors argue to retain such authors as Tolstoy and Dostoevsky.
Don Marshall, professor and chair of the English department at UIC, where, he says, much of the traditional curriculum is intact, notes that some professors are understandably distressed “when we move away from their favorite things, the things that they remember as important.
“I understand that, but I really do think there are new subjects whose legitimacy has to be conceded.
“I sometimes think that reading everything in terms of race, gender and class is misguided or puts the emphasis in the wrong place, but I don’t see it in the apocalyptic way that some people do.”
