For the 2021-2022 graduate admissions cycle, the University of Chicago English Department is accepting only applicants planning to focus on British, American, and/or Anglophone texts and archives produced between the Middle Ages and the year 1900. The department understands its current areas of strength and interest in these fields to include the study of race, migration, empire and colonialism, intercultural exchange, the history of science and philosophy, longue-durée conceptual history, performance studies, and the body or embodiment (encompassing discourses of race, gender, sex, species, or ability). Comparative and multilingual approaches to literature are welcome, as are students from international and diverse backgrounds.
Good-bye Beowulf and Bede; so long Eliot, Dreiser, and Bellow.
Harriet Munro, founder of “Poetry” and publisher of Prufrock, gave her archives to the Modern Poetry Reading Room once housed at the pinnacle of Harper’s western tower, a place for contemplation and intellectual adventure. Now that collection crumbles to dust in an unvisited corner of the stacks. No scholars will ever come to it again. All the modernist poets have gone into that good night.
Chaucer remains. If Grendel is a tad too “long-duree” and Portnoy much too “short-duree”, the Wife of Bath, the Goldilocks of duration, has got it just right. Moby, thou survivest all our cuts because thou art supremely a “discourse on species”. As the Whale of Infinitudes of Meaning thou has spouted thy last spout, taken thy last dive. The Prince of Denmark persists in his nutshell of a brain, brimming with the complexities of self and universe: his ticket to ride is “intercultural exchange.” Walt, rough fellow of the barbaric yawp and the open shirt, the demotic and democratic road of your imagining leads no longer to Yeats or Pound or even to Ginsberg and Kerouac but into an ambiguous interrogatory wilderness. As for Emily, tut tut, those cries from the heart, that wildness in the soul, were so embarrassing; they cannot go uncorralled and untamed; let them speak only of gender, empire, and colonialism.
Beauty, truth, form, expressiveness - RIP. In the U of C English Department these are the values that dare not speak their names.
I’m no scholar of English. But from reading the entire web page, it appears that they are pursuing a radical re-interpretation of pre-1900 literatures. Critical Theory meets Shakespeare, etc. What I have no knowledge about is whether the application of Critical Theory to historical works of literature renders anything useful or insightful, as opposed to just being an avenue for multiple interpretations that have more to do with the scholar’s ethnic/racial/gender/political background than their ground-breaking scholarship. ETA: this is in response to @hamlet7478
OK I’m going to agree with this application of “animal studies” to Melville’s Moby Dick. What in the world - is this what the study of English Language and Literature has come to? However, I disagree that Beowulf and Eliot are being passed over. Apparently, the department of English is taking a long walk through the centuries-long stack of literary works and re-imagining (re-interpretation just seems too rigorous an approach) all of them using the lens of race, gender, political ideology, power, etc. I suspect that once they have completed their re-work of Medieval, Rennaissance, 18th/19th century British and American genres, they will turn to Beowulf. I’m surprised that Eliot hasn’t been worked over yet, although perhaps they are saving early 20th century for last. Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Faulkner, Woolf, Joyce, and other modernists will surely get their turn. IMO, it can only help with Gertrude Stein.
As the spouse of a humanities, tenured professor in a department with a Ph.D. program, I can say that his department has shifted to only admitting Ph.D. students interested in working in a subject matter area where there is demand for new hires. There is such an oversupply of Ph.Ds without full time employment, especially in the humanities, that limiting new Ph.D.s to those areas likely to get a job makes sense, although it does have real impact on the future of scholarship. Alternatively, Chicago could be doing this is to align with its current faculty expertise and to avoid bringing in students who would be “orphaned” without a strong dissertation advisor whose support would help them get a job. I don’t know anything about Chicago’s department, and find it hard to believe that its active, tenured faculty primarily work only in those subject areas. Still, this narrowing could reflect a decision about the focus of the department going forward. The broader impact on scholarship etc. would be real, but I suspect my faculty spouse would say it is a kindness to only admit people who can get a job rather than keep them optimistic for 6-8 years only to find they are unemployed.
Agree that they should admit with a view to employability - that also suggests not admitting too many in the program to begin with, but relevance of research area is surely crucial. Last year the English department only admitted those expressing an interest in Black Studies - and they got a lot of blow-back as a result. The president had to come out and make a statement. So this year’s focus is apparently Anglo and/or American literature with time period ranging from Medieval to 1900. Next year perhaps may be something else. Are they carefully regulating the diversity of scholarship among their graduate students so as to secure a wide variety of talent and maximize academic employability? Or is this new focus a strategic decision based on what happened last year? No one’s going to complain that the English Dept is actually focusing on English and American literature.
(1) They tried this last year in an even woke-er direction and got a lot of pushback.
(2) The hot job market for humanities PhDs is reinterpreting the classics through the lens of grievance studies. They may be doing their students a favor.
(3) Sometimes student interests gets out of balance with faculty interests, and one prof ends up with a bunch of students and another with none. Future classes are admitted with an eye towards better balance. This isn’t just English. What’s unusual is that they are telling the students up front what they are looking for. More traditionally, it’s left as a surprise.
I agree – it feels very “flip-floppy” – last year we are only doing X and this year we are only doing not-X. Not reassuring that there is a lot of intentional, strategic decision-making going on there.
In terms of the bigger picture, I agree that explicitly saying “we are only taking students doing Y” is helpful to applicants, so they don’t waste energy applying places that are simply not interested in supporting their proposed research. I will say, my husband’s department has, in practice, started limiting new grad students to specific areas, but no one would ever know that looking at the department web page. So prospective grad students are better served by the Chicago-style full disclosure (without the Chicago-style “we blow whichever way the wind blows” ).
Just wondering how such a focus will impact course selections at the undergraduate level. The major has seen declining numbers for the past several years - from a recent high in the mid 70s for graduating class of 2016 to fewer than 50 for the graduating class of '21. This, despite increased enrollment in the College. In Spring of 2015, there were over 200 total declared majors in English (1st, 2nd, etc). This spring, a little over 150. So English is seen as an increasingly unpopular major - again, despite increased enrollment in the College and ever-more targeted admissions strategies.
Here’s a look at which courses are “popular” at this point for undergraduate students wishing to take an English course. Some students of English may register under another section so this isn’t 100% accurate, but it does give a snapshot on what students of English literature wish to take. Lists are from undergraduate English sections only:
Courses More Than 50% Full:
20th Century Short Fiction
History of the Novel
Making Progress with the Victorian Novel
Chaucer: The Canterbury Tales
Modern Love
Contemporary Climate Fictions
Shakespeare I: Histories and Comedies
Nineties Feminisms
Emancipation in Literature and History
Gender Capital and Desire: Jane Austen and Critical Interpretation
Girlhood
Post-Colonial England
Gothic Fiction and Architecture
The Stage and City: Performance and Daily Life in Renaissance London
Joyce’s Ulysses: An Introduction
Global Horrors: Film, Literature, Theory
American Hustle: Conning, Scamming and Hoaxing in America
Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa
Courses Less Than 50% Full:
Introduction to Film Analysis
Introduction to Latinx Literature
Critical Videogame Studies
Camp: Notes on a Queer Sensibility
Contemporary Poetry by the Press
Theories of Sexuality and Gender
21st Century Ethnic American Literature
Languages of Migration: Literature, Law and Language Justice
Queering the American Family Drama
20th Century American Drama
Literary Biography
Eccentric Moderns
Sensing the Anthropocene
Post-Colonial Openings: World Literature after 1955
History of International Cinema I: Silent Era
Metapictures
Interesting, JB. I see a pattern. Shakespeare and Chaucer are big as ever. Joyce always interests. Jane Austen is perennial. Fiction of all eras has its fans (though the popularity of “Clarissa” comes as a surprise). But where is Milton, where are Donne, Swift, Pope, Johnson? The Romantic poets? Indeed, where is a single course devoted to poetry (excluding Shakespeare and Chaucer)?
Some of these are taught in other quarters and it’s possible that courses not referencing a particular author in the course title will include them as part of the theme or topic. The course descriptions will include that information.
Spring '21: Milton (under 50%), TS Eliot (over 50%), Poetry for the People: Global Black Politics and Culture in the Age of Marcus Garvey (way under 50%).
Winter '21: Romanticism (over 50%), How to Read Difficult Poems (under 50%), Battle of the Genres in Long 18th-Century British Literature (under 50%), Mythologies of America: 19th Century Novels (under 50%)
Aside from that, I am sorry, but the moaning, the wailing, and the gnashing of the teeth over a bunch of, I am sorry, Old White Dudes, always amazes me.
Ezra Pound was a Anti-Semitic, Hitler-Loving giant piece of stinking excrement. He should not be taught is school, he should not be treated with anything but contempt. He really should be relegated to well-deserved oblivion.
Years ago, I interviewed a student for MIT, and he was telling me how he was a big fan of poetry in general and Hughes in particular. I told him Caribbean Sunset (God having a hemorrhage/Blood coughed across the sky/Staining the dark sea red/That is sunset in the Caribbean.) was one of my favorites, and what was his?
It turned out that precisely one of us had ever read any of Hughes.
@MWolf , if you want to start banning writers because of their moral failures you won’t have many left in your curriculum - and most of the ones left will be dull dogs. It is making a category error to evaluate literature as if it were scripture and writers as if they were saints. Great writing is not an equal opportunity employer. I don’t like Pound much as a poet, but he’s the quintessential modernist and worth studying as an extreme example of that esthetic. Certainly he inspired many, including Louis Zukofsky and Robert Creeley, who were entirely untainted by his crazy theories and prejudices. Zukofsky was of course Jewish. And Richard Stern, who taught Creative Writing at Chicago in my day, became a great friend of Pound and even wrote a novel based on that friendship (“Stitch”). He could do that at the same time as he could deplore the unhinged ravings of Pound before and during the war. It was his wish, he said, to co-teach a class on the Cantos in which Milton Friedman would join him to explicate the economic thought in that work. Apparently Friedman admired that thought. Literature, like life, is full of paradoxes.
University of Chicago isn’t really known for banning authors. That lack of censorship has gotten them into trouble a few times, as mentioned previously on this forum. In general, faculty will teach to their field of research or study, so if Pound is part of someone’s research, he’ll be included as well. As well, the courses are anything but a veneration of this or that author or their work. When it comes to critical inquiry, nothing will be off the table.
I think that lending public support to a genocide goes far beyond “moral failures”.
He broadcast virulent anti-Semitic filth from Italy as the Nazis were marching through East Europe, marching Jews out into the fields, having them dig their own graves, and shooting them. At the same time Pound was praising the Nazis and calling Jews “filth”. When Nazis occupied Northern Italy and started deporting Jews to death camps, he called the area “Republic of Utopia”.
This isn’t a “moral failure”. He didn’t post a poem which could be construed as antisemitic. He joyfully and enthusiastically supported the murder of 6 million Jews.
Just because Zukofsky, Stern, and others could deal with the cognitive dissonance by pretending that Pound was somehow unhinged from the time that the Nazi rose to power, and was suddenly and miraculously cured the moment he was in the hands of the the USA. I, however, cannot.
I also lack the background of Jews who grew up in a USA where antisemitism was rife and widespread, and who learned to tolerate antisemitism from the leading literary lights of the day. I was lucky enough to grow up as part of the majority, and have never learned to accept antisemitism as “the way things are”.
So I have the luxury to be able to say “I do not have to accept and forgive antisemitism, no matter how great a person is perceived to be”.
Also, not one of those people you mentioned has the right to forgive Pound for me.
