Decline and fall of the English major

Parents Forum
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<p>JHS, great point. </p>

<p>The way kids communicate has changed. It is text messages, tweets and short communication. Hardly anyone learns even to write with script. Many kids barely read or write English, but that is not too difficult to understand. In many parts of the US, the Hispanic culture way outweighs English culture. Math has also changed. A high percentage of kids cannot do simple arithmetic. It is not all gloom and doom because things are changing. The knowledge at our fingertips has grown beyond all comprehension.</p>

<p>Educators need to understand how to adapt and how to teach what will be useful. Trying to maintain the old patterns or to go back to the remote Western cultural classics may not make sense.</p>

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<p>I don’t think the primary purpose of a college literature class is to teach students to write clearly, although that is important and something that a good college course will devote some attention to. Ideally, students should arrive at college already capable of writing reasonably clearly. Obviously, this is not the case at a lot of schools, and I’m sure that plenty of professors at those schools do give proportionally more attention to teaching how to develop a thesis, support an argument, and convey ideas effectively in writing. </p>

<p>One of the aims of a literature class is to teach students to think in a more nuanced way. In theory, that goal is not at odds with the development of a lucid, elegant prose style; I think there has, thankfully, been a push-back against the excessive jargon characteristic of too much of the criticism of the second half of the twentieth century. However, the more complex an idea is, the harder it is to express it clearly. Looking back, the papers I wrote in my freshman year of college were in many ways stylistically superior to the ones I wrote in my sophomore year. That’s not because I had been ruined by the English Department, but because I was struggling with more sophisticated ideas. By my senior year, and certainly by grad school, I was able to write papers that possessed both sophistication and clarity, but I couldn’t have gotten there without writing some fairly lugubrious prose while I was still developing into a mature writer. </p>

<p>I don’t want to get drawn into the canon wars too deeply, but I do think that one reason studying Shakespeare is in some respects more important than studying a contemporary playwright is that the jury is still out on how enduring even acclaimed recent works are going to be. We know that Shakespeare has had an extremely influential role on subsequent literary history. His works have become a cultural touchstone. Even people who haven’t read them are expected to have some basic knowledge of his plays. Our understanding of later, and sometimes much later, texts can be enriched our awareness that they are playing off of Shakespeare. On the other hand, while I think Tom Stoppard’s Arcadia is every bit as good as many of Shakespeare’s plays (something I can admit on an anonymous forum!), he doesn’t and is not likely ever to have the same reach. In fact, while I think this would be a shame, it is possible that in a generation almost no one will know his works at all.</p>

<p>That’s not to say that there aren’t also excellent reasons for having courses devoted to other kinds of texts. And, of course, including Invisible Man or Beloved on the syllabus of a Great Books survey course isn’t necessarily a sop to political correctness; those works are, in the opinion of many, among the best works of the 20th century. I do think that if a student only has one required literature course, it is best that that course not be too narrowly focused; African-American lit may be fine, given the richness of that tradition, but I think it would be a shame if the only exposure to the subject one got in college was “Protest Literature of the 1960s,” worthy as that course might be. </p>

<p>NJSue, as usual, I’ve greatly appreciated your posts.</p>

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<p>A.prof, very nice post. </p>

<p>I do wonder about lots of the issues you discussed; e.g., “Even people who haven’t read them are expected to have some basic knowledge of his plays.” I wonder if that will still be said of Shakespeare in another generation or two. Certainly I wonder about the future of classical music. The average age of someone attending a concert of classical music must be well past 65 years old. I have not been to a Shakespearean play for many years but I would bet that except for plays on college campuses the age of the audience members is also very advanced.</p>

<p>You also made some interesting points about literature that might replace some of the more classical works. I think your education in English may have warped your perspective. To a great extent, I think literature is being replaced. TV and movies are way more popular. I don’t even know where to look for the facts but I suspect the percentage of people who are readers of fiction and the amount of time that they spend in reading has greatly decreased and that trend will continue. There is some considerable concern about the future of printed books, but I guess that is mostly a separate issue.</p>

<p>Academia, and most of the world, is controlled by a bunch of gray-haired people. I don’t think they are keeping up with the explosion of knowledge and ideas that is going to accelerate and change our world in ways we can barely imagine. I personally don’t think Shakespeare and Dickens and Dana are going to be of importance much longer. I love Melville and even the boring parts of Moby Dick, but what young person is going to want to read that?</p>

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God, I hope you’re wrong. Who specifically is going to push them out? </p>

<p>Shakespeare will continue to be of importance at least in part because today’s (and tomorrow’s) actors, directors, and producers want to do his plays. That is not going to change, no matter how difficult some people may find his language.</p>

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<p>Are you sure tomorrow’s actors, directors and producers are going to be interested? Even so they need paying audiences. Look at classical music. There is no shortage of musicians. Conservatories are cranking them out by the hundreds. But where are the jobs? Orchestras are not hiring. There is a seniority system. Once hired, musicians tend to hold onto those jobs for life. Many play to a very old age. So with a shrinking market, job prospects are dim regardless of how many young musicians might be interested.</p>

<p>Change is what pushes out the past…and the world is changing rapidly. We don’t need new playwrights to push out Shakespeare or Euripides. Movies and TV have about done that already. If there were no movies and TV, can you imagine the demand for performances? Imagine all you want we are already down to the last remnants. Our grandkids will be learning about the ancient history of cinema instead.</p>

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<p>The question, I think, is “important” to whom and for what? Dickens and Melville are important to me. They’ve added value to my life. I think they have and can add value to other lives. There are other source of value, of course, but this is one and I think it is still worth exposing people to these authors in literature classes, if only because, if we didn’t, I wouldn’t have experienced them or known what I was missing. </p>

<p>As for the what, well, for one, they add to our knowledge of the people of another time and place. They tell us something about what those people cared about, how they told their stories, and how our stories have been shaped by them. They make us more attentive to language and its uses. They can make us think about people and classes of people we usually ignore, and allow us to see familiar objects and experiences in a different light. None of this is necessarily practical, but then, most of what anyone learns isn’t going to wind up being practical for that individual. I haven’t used any math more complex than fractions and long division for a long time. If all that matters is learning skills for a job, we might as well just abandon the university and have everyone in glorified trade schools. The idea of having a wider perspective than that is still important to me.</p>

<p>I actually agree with you that the canon should be expanded to include film and television; if Dickens were alive today, he might well have been a showrunner rather than an author. Saying that a TV show is necessarily inferior to a novel is as arbitrary as saying (as people once did) that a novel couldn’t possibly be as worthy as an epic poem. As far as why we don’t recognize them, while crotchety English departments might be part of the problem, I think a greater one is that potentially serious scholarship on more contemporary narratives has gotten mixed up with a lot of specious, flavor of the month “wouldn’t it be cool to talk about my favorite comedy at a conference?” discourse. The Victorian novel was popular culture, but by the time people started teaching it in universities, the mediocre works had been forgotten, so the reputation of Middlemarch didn’t suffer by association. </p>

<p>As time goes on, Shakespeare may become less important only because everyone becomes relatively less important when the amount of material out there expands. By the same token, I bet at some point we won’t be having courses called “World War I” and “World War II,” but one on “The Great Wars.” I don’t think he’s close to irrelevant yet, however, and of course some events and works do have enduring importance. I would also hope that to the extent that Shakespeare is being and will be de-emphasized, he’s being replaced by materials of equivalent stature, and that the act isn’t directed solely by a sense of what"consumers" want. A university isn’t like a restaurant, which will take an item off the menu if too few people order it.</p>

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<p>In the case of the humanities, it’s not an explosion, it’s a narrowing enforced by ignorance of anything but the here and now. Why on earth is that desirable? Because a bunch of kids now write primarily to text each other, why should we cede the field to them? No. It’s doing them (and the world) a disservice. We should not cut young people off from the great achievements of the past. What a tragedy that would be. Societies have gone backward, have lost knowledge. Don’t think it can’t happen to us. One EMP can really mess up your day; then what will young people do then when their phones don’t work and they can’t write and can’t do simple arithmetic? Tech utopianism is foolish. Human nature remains the same. Over the winter break I just watched Band of Brothers, a series many people over the years have urged me to watch, but I never had the time. What a wonderful series; Shakespearean in scope (as the title would suggest), full of the irony, messiness and moral ambiguity of war, without being nihilistic. There is good art being made today, but it needs to be appreciated in cultural and historical context.</p>

<p>I am teaching Coriolanus this semester for the first time in many years. It’s amazingly topical: the cult of martial heroism, the critique of democracy’s failings. Is the play objectively pro-Fascist, as some have claimed? Maybe, but it asks some very uncomfortable questions. That is what great art does. And all this from some snoozefest cribbed from Plutarch’s Lives.</p>

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You know, Shakespeare’s been packing them in for 400 years. It’s pretty hard to get a ticket for a professional Shakespearean production in New York, or in any other town with a professional theatre scene. I have no objection to including television, movies, and contemporary writers in the literary and performing canons. I don’t see what makes today’s generation so different from theatregoers 100, 200, and 300 years ago that Shakespeare might be deemed unimportant or irrelevant.</p>

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<p>I can’t speak for Dickens, but I happen to have been to quite a bit of Shakespeare this past year including a highly acclaimed Twelfth Night with Mark Rylance and Stephen Fry and I got the impression that most of the audience was young hipsters. There’s also local group that does a steam punk Shakespeare every summer that attracts a younger crowd. I’m not worried about Shakespeare.</p>

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<p>Mathmom, I saw rylance in twelfth night and Ethan hawke in Macbeth over break. Thought rylance was amazing. And yeah, I’m a senior in high school & love this stuff; i’m applying to college as an English/ creative writing major. My brother is a junior in college…a neuroscience concentrator who performs Shakespeare.</p>

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<p>Dickens will be pushed out by Trollope. ;)</p>

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<p>Mokusatsu, I’m afraid the trend has been quite the reverse :)</p>

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<p>Somewhat counter to edad’s prediction of the imminent irrelevance of Shakespeare is what I see as a fascination with Shakespeare in contemporary Asian culture. There are Kurosawa’s Japanese versions of the major tragedies (which may no longer count as “contemporary,” but are close enough), and I have been watching a lot of Johnnie To recently and his films are very Shakespearean. </p>

<p>A little more than a decade ago, when my kids were young teens or tweens, there was a whole spate of decent-quality teen film versions of Shakespeare and Austen: ones I remember are 10 Things I Hate About You, Get Over It, O, Clueless, Romeo + Juliet . . . There there were the Oscar-winning Shakespeare In Love, and the stunning Julie Taymor version of Titus Andronicus. High-quality Shakespeare books by top-shelf academics Stephen Greenblatt and Helen Vendler crossed over to modest general-reader bestsellerdom within the past decade, and there’s a new book out of plays in which he possible collaborated.</p>

<p>I am really not afraid that Shakespeare is going to be irrelevant any time soon.</p>

<p>(Dana, on the other hand . . . that ship may have sailed . . . .)</p>

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<p>Edad- Surely you are not of the opinion that whatever is newer, is better? </p>

<p>If in the future teens communicate effectively and efficiently via nods and winks and dispense entirely with written communication and seem to get along just fine with that, is something still not lost?</p>

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<p>Lizzie Greystock’s new Twitter feed will introduce Trollope to the next generation.</p>

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<p>Artie: I don’t believe that newer is always better anymore than I believe the old masters are better and somehow irreplaceable. The world’s population of educated people is currently huge versus the very limited numbers of educated people in past centuries. Wouldn’t it be reasonable to expect some modern day masters of arts and literature? Somehow we want to revere the masters of yore. I am a photographer. I see all sorts of mediocre works in museums. They are safe for the curators because they are from the known photographers of the past. Now we have incredible numbers of photographers who are way more capable than the pioneers.</p>

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<p>Edad- Agreed. Old or new, works of art and literature need to be judged solely on their merits, however those are weighed.</p>

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<p>"That kind of writing — clear, direct, humane — and the reading on which it is based are the very root of the humanities, a set of disciplines that is ultimately an attempt to examine and comprehend the cultural, social and historical activity of our species through the medium of language. "</p>

<p>That’s NOT what they teach in English classes.</p>

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<p>Actually, there’s a lot more of that in English classes now than there was 20-30 years ago.</p>

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<p>californiaaa - depends on the English class, and who you take it from. That’s what I learned in MY English classes, even in high school. But I had excellent English teachers.</p>

<p>I also don’t understand this supposed feud between the “classics” and the new “PC/pomo” stuff. They’re not mutually exclusive; it IS quite possible for a good English program to offer classes on both the Shakespeare/Chaucer/Milton canon AND classes on literatures of non-white/non-male/non-European/American writers. There is definitely some writing on race and gender that has affected the Western consciousness as much, or more than, the canon (like Wollstonecraft, de Beauvoir, DuBois, Douglass).</p>