Almost 70 years ago, Philip Wylie’s Generation of Vipers taught me a lesson never forgotten and almost always observed: listen to and learn from one’s “enemies.” For about 60 years, I have heard conservative, usually Republican, politicians decry the liberalism of America’s institutions of higher education. Usually, they have meant the best public (Berkeley, UCLA, Michigan, UNC, UVA) and private (MIT, Stanford, California Institute of Technology, Duke, Johns Hopkins) colleges and universities. Tops on their list and sneered at as “elitist” are those constituting the Ivy League.
For 45 years, I have reacted to trends in my field, English. It was my second major as a Cornell undergraduate and my field of graduate study at Michigan, where I earned a Ph.D. Unlike conservatives, I have supported the trend expanding the canon. By and large, English literature consisted of works almost exclusively by white males until about 1800, added works by white women thereafter, and expanded to include works by writers of diverse races, genders, and nationalities after about 1950. Like conservatives but for different reasons, I have opposed the pernicious trend politicizing the humanities, the social sciences, and administrations.
Current controversies about campus politics prompted my curiosity about changes in Cornell’s English Department since my day 65 years ago. Its website revealed its new name, Literatures in English Department, and only one course description, that of the first semester of its introductory survey, recognizable to me. Then, the course title of English 251 was, as I recall, “English Literature from Beowulf to 1800”; now, English 2010 is “Literatures in English: From Old English to the New World.” The implications of the different titles are significant. I do not recall the older description then, but I know it was nothing like the new one now:
English 2010 is an introduction to key works of English and American literature for majors and non-majors. Here's a chance to study some of the greatest hits of the literary tradition in a single semester: Beowulf; Arthurian legends; works by Chaucer, Shakespeare, Anne Bradstreet, Ben Franklin, Sageyowatha, Phillis Wheatley. Reading across history and geography allows us to ask big questions about literature and society. How did literature factor in England's transformation from a cultural backwater into a global empire? What role does literature play in disciplining, civilizing, and colonizing subjects? When and how is it used to delight, resist, and rebel? From our reading, we will create a toolkit of literary terms and techniques. And through a series of exercises, students will get hands-on experience with literary experimentation. The class counts toward the pre-1800 requirement for English majors.
I was put off by the Department’s use of the phrase “greatest hits,” as if the professor were a D.J. playing them in a lecture hall, in a tawdry attempt at folksy “with-it-ness” to appeal to those who might think the study of English stuffy and old hat. The “key works” or “greatest hits” of the authors cited do not represent “the [or even a] literary tradition” by definition: a “literary method or style established by [a] … writer … and subsequently followed by others.” The diversity of the authors and their works makes the only unifier the English language, if one assumes the similarity of the Old English of Beowulf and the modern English of Phillis Wheatley. The inclusion of Sageyowatha, or “Red Jacket,” points the problem. An eloquent speaker in English, he contributed no “greatest hit” to “the literary tradition” (emphasis mine).
The Department’s misuse of the word “tradition” reflects the political desirability of giving a certain gravitas to some minor authors not white or not male in an introductory course. Unhappily, its concern for diversity and inclusion overrides cogency. The word “Literatures” in the title and the claim that “Reading across history and geography allows us to ask big questions about literature and society” undermine the idea of a unified “the literary tradition” (emphasis mine). Notwithstanding, politics expands the “tradition” of American writers on the basis of their race or gender: a white woman (Anne Bradstreet), a white man (Ben Franklin), a male Native American (Sageyowatha), and a black woman, a slave from Africa (Phillis Wheatley). Whatever their achievement, they made little contribution to “the literary tradition.” (My second-guessing adds Jonathan Edwards or, white man for white man, replaces Franklin with him.) The Department might have less politically, less pretentiously, and more honestly said that the selections were a sampling of important literary works (excepting Sageyowatha) throughout the period.
More importantly, the Department’s political considerations underlie the three “big questions.” Students do not ask them, cannot answer them by reading the “greatest hits,” and lack the information to address a relationship between literature and society. An answer to question one requires knowledge about the relationship between cultural attainment and political power, and the role played by literature in influencing the growth of that power. An answer to question two requires knowledge about the political, educational, and cultural circumstances in each colony of subjects, and about how literature can discipline, civilize, and colonize suppressed people. (Note that the question assumes the “white man’s” definition of “civilized” and posits that literature can “colonize” people.) An answer to question three requires knowing who so uses literature and under what conditions; and why the purposes are limited: “to delight” but not to instruct, and to “resist” and “rebel,” but not to accept and comply.
Since the “greatest hits” cannot provide answers to questions which go beyond their literary boundaries, whence cometh the information or opinion to answer these “big questions”? Necessarily, from politically oriented lecture hall or classroom instruction, or assigned reading. As the questions are biased by political considerations, instruction and assigned reading are likely to involve political preaching, not humanistic teaching. For many of today’s English professors believe that the proper purpose of the study of literature is to use literature as a pretext to address political issues. Whence cometh this political orientation? Historically, from a change in literary theory and criticism, from my day’s New Criticism, seeing a work of literature as an aesthetic object, to today’s New Historicism, viewing it as a force in society operating in matters of race, gender, class, and colonialism—a change much for the worse. Raised in a different time and place, I regard this approach as having little, if anything, to do with the purpose of the study of literature, to appreciate the variety of experience represented in literature.
Two nits. Meant to be alluring, the chances to “create a toolkit of literary terms and technique” and “get hands-on experience with literary experimentation” are instead peculiar and puzzling. No need exists to “create” (whatever that process entails) a “toolbox” (whatever that object is). Glossaries of “literary terms and technique,” like Cornell’s late distinguished English Professor M. H. Abrams’s, A Glossary of Literary Terms, are available. The idea of “literary experimentation” by “hands-on experience” suggests the fanciful manipulation of texts (improving a Shakespearean sonnet?).
Despite a little incidental mockery along the way, I am serious about the pernicious effects of literary criticism which politicizes the study of literature. I am not surprised by lower enrollments in English courses and declining numbers of English majors on many campuses, results which punish professors who have dismayed themselves and discredited the field by preferring politics to literature. My daughter took a politically oriented English course at Cornell in the 1990s and swore off taking another; obviously, she is not alone. My “big questions” are why are English professors blind or indifferent to a self-defeating, politicized approach to literary criticism, and why do they no longer maintain the study of literature as a part of a humanistic education. Self-righteousness?
I began by affirming that we can learn from our “enemies.” I assume that other course descriptions reflect a similar politicized approach to the study of literature. I assume that conservative teachers politicize English courses as well, but on a smaller scale or on smaller and less prestigious campuses. Although conservatives have been right about the liberal bias in many colleges and universities, their criticism stops at eliminating only liberal biases, not also conservative ones. In my field, they offer no alternative based on an appreciation of literature per se or the humanistic tradition in research and teaching—where I plant my flag.
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