But certain media outlets would make you think the school doesn’t, as a result of an (anonymous) petition, and then you can imagine where certain news outlets went with it, as they so often do these days (College Fix seems to lead the way with the hysterics then is widely quoted and referenced by RT, townhall, etc).
That’s the front end of this article, dealing with how that was blown up and the abusive letters and such, but I found the rest interesting too.
Yale did make a curricular change and in short, an “English Literature” requirement for majors was expanded from just 2 courses in British poetry to 3 of 4 possible courses, the two British ones, an American one and one for literature from other countries (written in English):
So it’s possible for English majors at Yale, if they wish, to take only one of the poetry courses and then take the American and global Anglophone and then move on into higher level courses.
Perhaps the anonymous petition was a false flag of some sort? Such a false flag could be targeting or baiting either Yale, colleges in general, or the media and others that criticize colleges.
That it actually got reactions is symptomatic of the “get outraged first, think and fact-check later (if ever)” mentality that is predominant these days.
Sure, it could have been - apparently no one at Yale actually saw the petition. But the petition (as reported) also makes some points that have been made elsewhere, so it’s not odd to me that someone at Yale might have made it and even gotten some signatures.
It is entirely possible to have a great English literature curriculum without Shakespeare. Really. I mean a brief introduction would be vital for the historical component. But don’t we have a wealth of English literature that provide deeper understanding of life than Hamlet’s to be or not to be?
^Not to mention that most college students who had rigorous enough high school curricula to get to Yale would’ve already encountered plenty Shakespeare in high school. By the time I finished high school I’d already read and analyzed Romeo & Juliet, Macbeth, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, The Tempest, and Hamlet plus several of his sonnets, and was also pretty familiar with Othello and The Taming of the Shrew. And I went to a regular ol’ public high school that, to my knowledge, has never sent anyone to Yale. How much Shakespeare does one need?
(I also memorized the first 16 lines of The Canterbury Tales also in high school. I don’t remember them.)
Besides, what does this have to do with Shakespeare? Yale’s own department says that Shakespeare was only rarely taught in their Major English Poets sequence. Most departments include some of his work in their medieval literature courses or will have an entire lecture course or two on Shakespeare.
That said, while the major English canon has been and often still is exclusionary, it is not exclusionary for professors to require students to learn about the major English canon (both prose and poetry). Many of the later writers of color and women writers were just as inspired and influenced by the writings of the early canon as were white males - because that’s what they had access to.
What would be exclusionary is if they didn’t offer any coursework or other opportunities for students to read some non-white, non-male voices of English literature. But Yale absolutely does. They’ve got entire writing seminars on equality, identity, African American literature, multiculturalism in the middle ages, race and gender in the transatlantic during the 18th century…oh man, I want to take some classes in Yale’s English department, lol.
it kind of reminds me of (perhaps College Fix) complaining that so many “elite” schools don’t require US History. Given that most kids who go to “elite” schools likely took AP US History, which is on par with the course that they imagine college students should take… you can finish the thought.
Of course, a college course in US history at a more advanced level may dig a little deeper into some topics that may just go against some of the strongly held beliefs (e.g. the belief that the primary cause of the Civil War was not something about slavery, when https://www.civilwar.org/learn/primary-sources/declaration-causes-seceding-states shows how prominent slavery was in the causes).
To be fair, and I say this as a STEM major with no knowledge of Yale’s curriculum, but IMO Shakespeare at Yale is unlikely anything like Shakespeare in HS. Much like statistics in college is light years ahead of AP Statistics. I seriously doubt that 4 plays and a few sonnets from HS will compare to Yale’s curriculum.
I also was a graduate of a HS that read a Shakespeare play a year, yet I took a survey Shakespeare class in college to fulfill a gen ed requirement (plus it counts toward my minor), and I have to say, the professor was the most interesting, dynamic instructor that I have had to date. She really brought a new dimension to the material. Shakespeare is just one of those authors that can be read and re-read, and each time, the reader will discover something new.
I’m not a big fan of courses that focus on dead white men in general, but I really can’t imagine how/why one would be an English major without studying the Bard.
I will never understand the obsession over Shakespeare. I actively avoided it in college whenever possible. My youngest memory of Shakespeare is learning that Juliet was 13 and that kind of killed it for me from then out.
The world was a simpler place back in the early 60’s when there was still a canon for English literature study. The world is a better, more inclusive place, due to the changes that have occurred since, and in many ways more interesting. However, the humanities have suffered, and I do believe one reason for that is that the standards for curriculum have become uncertain, even chaotic. at different times in the last few decades. Hoping things are settling down and glad Shakespeare is offered, if not required.
I was really lucky. My HS boyfriend’s father was a classics professor at UT. He held a Shakespeare reading at his house every Sunday. He figured out a way for everyone to have different parts so you wouldn’t end up talking to yourself. I can’t even count all the plays we read. It was a wonderful experience for a STEM kid. Even though the boyfriend dumped me on Christmas Eve one year, I’m thankful that I had the chance to know his family.
I despised having to read Shakespeare in high school, and am pretty sure my classmates felt the same way. Thank God for CliffsNotes. My kids had to read "Romeo and Juliet’ in high school, and they both complained about it, too.
Sometime around the year 2000, I bought a set of Shakespeare classes from a company called, “The Teaching Company” (now called “The Great Courses”) and learned to truly appreciate Shakespeare. The key to understanding Shakespeare was reading a play, while at the same time reading footnotes that both translated Shakespeare’s form of English into something more modern, and gave more context to what he was saying.
I’m a STEM guy, so not quite the expert on English Lit., but can’t imagine getting a degree in English Lit. without studying Shakespeare. If you really want insight into human nature, nothing beats reading Plato’s Dialogues and Shakespeare.
I think Shakespeare has a great value to study. I just think there are other literature with even greater value to study. Since you can learn only so much during a BA in English, I don’t think more than introductory of Shakespeare should be a part of BA curriculum. Perhaps more suitable for MA and PhD, for those who want to specialize in it.
My HS didn’t have AP courses, it was a small private, but it did have certain courses top students were expected to take, one was Major English Writers, a yearlong course beginning with Beowulf (in the original English with a translation to refer to) and including plenty of Shakespeare (and @juillet - we also read and memorized the first 16 of C Tales). My kids took AP Comp and Lit and had similar exposure. Sadly my first English course in college was a review material-wise, but the approach and depth were different, so I also see @ucbalumnus point.
I’d also think that an American U should include American Lit and evidently at Yale it didn’t, at least not in this foundation level which had previously been 2 semesters of Brit Lit only. It’s still possible to skip it, but it’s one of 4 (pick 3) now, at least. And the fourth course, the Anglophone one, apparently is the one that includes James Joyce and Daniel Defoe, among other established authors many of us may not have read in school from around the British empire.
I think sites like the College Fix and the ones that copied the story use Shakespeare because he represents white English literature to the masses and they can use him to whip up outrage pretty easily - everyone has heard of him. “No John Donne at Yale” just doesn’t have the same oomph. The fact that there wasn’t a ton of Shakespeare in the classes that are now part of a set of 3 out of 4 doesn’t matter, they’re OK with making up an event that never happened (students delivering the petition to the department) so quibbling about the exact reading list isn’t likely to deter them from gaining outraged “death of our white culture” clicks.
Yale offers the same number of Shakepseare-specific courses that it did before. This change was to the “gateway” courses to the major.
Absolutely, if you choose to take the optional courses covering more of Shakespeare’s work. If you don’t, you probably won’t even get the four plays, as by the department’s own account Shakespeare is covered uncommonly and rather lightly in the intro sequence. They’ve only got 15 weeks to do an overview of ten centuries of English literature. You’re not even going to do a play in that time period. (But any coverage that they do is, of course - as you say - going to be deeper than an AP English literature course.)
There still very much is a literary canon, and quite frankly it hasn’t really changed much since the early 1960s. If you look at Yale’s requirements and the list of authors and works therein, you’ll see the same canon there. It’s taught in high school and college English literature courses across the country.
I don’t think the humanities have suffered because English departments have decided to teach a wider, more diverse array of works. If anything, they’ve improved: even if we just look at literature, the literature in the classical canon excluded works that examined life from the perspective of anyone other than wealthy white men throughout history. For example, although slavery and the Civil War were a defining period in American history, there are few if any works that address slavery (at all, but especially from the perspective of the enslaved) in the literary canon, even though there was definitely a lot written about it. Uncle Tom’s Cabin was the second-best selling book of the 19th century (after the Bible), and was responsible for a lot of social change…yet it’s not usually included in the literary canon. Even earlier, The Interesting Narrative of the Life of Olaudah Equiano was published in 1789, and was partially responsible for the passage of Britain’s law outlawing slavery.
I think the humanities has suffered because of the rise of the technological age, and the erroneous belief that humanities isn’t important for our information and technology driven society. (And, to be fair, humanities faculty haven’t always done a great job of demonstrating their worth.) It’s also suffered because funding to higher education has decreased, meaning that students believe they need to major in something “profitable” in order to earn enough to repay their enormous loans.
I think the professor’s quote at the end of the essay quite nicely encapsulates my feelings:
Shakespeare is still vital to the study of English literature, as are many other authors in the literary canon. Students should read them, and they do. But I don’t agree that they’re the best insight into human nature - they’re one of many takes, funneled through the perspective of the worldview of a particular person. The whole point of the humanities is that there are MANY ways to take insight into human nature and a mosaic of writings is the best way to understand people, not one singular body of work by one person.
Very few modern-language literatures have a single author as overwhelmingly omnipresent, as inescapable as Shakespeare. Goethe used to fill that role in German, but I’m not certain he does anymore. Dante, maybe, in Italian, but his work is nowhere near as broad as Shakespeare’s. Shakespeare really transcends literature – he’s so infused in the culture and language that you would really miss things if you didn’t have really quite a lot of familiarity with his work. And “quite a lot of familiarity with his work” seems to be the product of a college preparatory education in high school.
I, too, love that quote about Derek Walcott, but it’s hokum. Shakespeare doesn’t need Walcott to prove his works continue to have value. (I’ve read Walcott plenty. You don’t have to.)
I think what matter more is not how great Shakespeare is but what it gives to us. If it doesn’t help us enough to understand human nature and society, like for example, Luise Rinser or Albert Camus do, then I think we should reduce focus on Shakespeare and increase on more substantial stuffs. Personally, Romeo and Hamlet just don’t feel substantial enough, no matter how aesthetic they are.
Luise Rinser? Are you kidding? (I shouldn’t say that. I have a reputation for being pretty well-read, but I’ve never gotten around to Rinser. Then again, I’ve never had anyone suggest to me that I should plan on getting around to Rinser some day. So for all I know, Rinser is a transcendent author . . . it’s just that hardly anyone has noticed, and she gets pigeonholed as sort of third string for the German post-war left.)
Meanwhile, Hamlet doesn’t feel substantial? Forget the fact that practically the whole play, chopped up into little segments, is included in Bartlett’s Famous Quotations, that many of its original figures of speech have become part of standard English, and that references to even minor characters pervade modern non-literary discourse. It’s pretty much the first – and still among the most powerful – representation of modern consciousness, character. It’s a play much less about what anyone does than about what the protagonist thinks, and the non-linear relationship between his thought and his actions. It’s at the very wellspring of what we still generally think self and character are. And it also finds a way to embed Hamlet’s self-reflection into the structure of the work itself, with a good deal of the play devoted to production of a play – a technique invented by an Elizabethan contemporary and seized on by Shakespeare – the relationship of that fictional play to the (fictional) reality in its frame, and the political effect of its production. Those ideas and structures are still integral to what we think about contemporary art across all media. It’s not too much to say that Hamlet is the origin of modern art and the modern sense of individual psychology.
Even though the boyfriend dumped me on Christmas Eve one year, I’m thankful that I had the chance to know his family.