English Department Limits Graduate Admission to Pre-1900's Focus

@JBStillFlying , I doubt whether Pound would be taught even at the U of C these days given the shift in the zeitgeist over the last couple of decades. The egregiousness of Pound’s particular case comes as close as any could to justifying this. And there is more to that case than simply the wartime broadcasts from Fascist Italy: There are parts of the Cantos infected by this vile stuff. However, that is not the only thing to be said about Pound and his work. It is nonsense to dismiss the nuanced views of Stern, Zukofsky and Friedman as @MWolf does because they as American Jewish intellectuals “had learned to accept antisemitism as ‘the way things are’.” Does that sound like a description of Friedman? It certainly does not describe Stern, whom I knew.

Stern’s admiration of Pound’s literary methods was central to his famous course in Poetry Writing. “Hugh Selwyn Mauberley” was his prime instance of a well-crafted poem, which he thought all aspiring poets could learn something from by a close reading. But it wasn’t merely Pound’s craft that Stern admired. The sentiments in that poem - a devastating satirical takedown of the Victorian/Edwardian literary-political establishment and the pious overstuffed writing it spawned - was very congenial to his own satirical take on life in late 20th century America. Pound was in Stern’s conception first and foremost the savage critic of the recently concluded First World War, which he saw as not only catastrophic in its effects on civilization but as the logical product of the foolish and corrupt political and cultural establishment that created it. One particularly bitter passage culminates in a brutal line about Victoria offered more as a description of the culture she presided over than of the woman herself: “an old ■■■■■ gone in the teeth.” I have never been able to get that line out of my head when I think of the Victorians.

There is an irony here: Pound’s take-no-prisoners spirit of moral certainty is very much that of today’s intellectuals. He too saw himself as a powerless outsider (he was from a small town in Idaho). He too believed he had to amplify his voice and opinions with a megaphone in order to be heard. That attitude may have given rise to some memorable lines, but it was a bad habit even then, and it became on evil one when wedded to his later hero-worship of Mussolini, the man he believed could sweep away the prevarications and compromises of the old dishonest culture that had brought on the war.

Stern, a very conscious political liberal, could hold in his mind at the same time the enormous evil of Pound’s broadcasts and the trenchant beauty of his best work. And there were other dimensions to Pound’s personality than either these political or artistic ones: he was unfailingly generous in promoting the work of other writers and artists of all stripes, finding patrons for them, even advancing loans of his own. He essentially re-wrote “The Wasteland” for Eliot without ever claiming credit for that feat. Stern, who was very fond of gossip about writers and knew the gory details in the lives of many of them, always spoke of the essential kindliness of Pound. There is a disconnect between the bien pensant public personas of many writers and the bad conduct of their private lives. With Pound the current between goodness and evil went entirely the opposite direction. This excuses nothing but is only to say that all parts of a life are important.

While I myself believe Stern’s was a larger and more humane way to consider the life of Pound or of any person, especially a person of accomplishment, I quite understand that the intellectual world has moved on. I wouldn’t attempt to argue anyone out of convictions as strong as yours, @MWolf . I say only that something is lost when those convictions are brought to the consideration of literature. You say that Pound is a special case, but a moral lens brought to bear on the arts isn’t very good at making distinctions and drawing lines as to degrees of moral deviation. Is Pound the only great writer you would ban? How do you stand on Eliot, Yeats, Lawrence, and many another compromised figure of that era? How do you stand on Brecht and Sartre, who did more than flirt with Stalinism? How about Picasso’s attitude toward women? How about Faulkner on race questions? Once the guillotine claims its first head others will surely roll. That’s the temper of our times, but our times will pass - and they aren’t the best of times.

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Can’t speak for currently because that would require a deep dive into the course schedule and syllabi. However, as recently as a few years ago Pound’s work was indeed included in at least one English department offering:

26715 Movement in Modernist Poetry

This course examines the relationship between mobility, spatial politics, and poetic form in modernism. From vers libre to Surrealist dérives, modernist literature draws strongly on the political, ethical, and imaginative significance of movement, fundamentally connecting mobility to notions of freedom, progress, and change. Moreover, the explosion of modernist art and literature in France and Britain in the late 19th and early 20th centuries took place in a social context of radical changes in forms of individual and collective movement. Technologies like the subway, the automobile, the plane, and the bicycle altered notions of space and time, while women exercised new forms of autonomy of movement and transgressed gendered notions of public space. In the same decades, two World Wars reshaped Europe’s borders, passports were introduced, and waves of refugees fleeing religious persecution and war heightened xenophobic desires for closed borders and regulation—desires reaching their height in the trains, ghettos, and death camps of the Holocaust. In readings extending from the flâneur poems of Charles Baudelaire to the Pisan Cantos of Ezra Pound, we will investigate the spatial poetics—and politics—of writers like Stéphane Mallarmé, Hope Mirrlees, T. S. Eliot, and the Surrealists, and consider the connections between the poetic line and spatial movement, along with concepts like transport, crossing, passage, progress, flight, etc. French readings will be provided in English. (C, G, H)
Rachel Kyne
2017-2018 Winter

ETA: Looks like Pound will show up this year as well. Per the English course catalog for 2021-22, he’s included in a graduate version of “Modernist Poetry” offered in Winter quarter, and an Autumn quarter creative writing course offered during the London Study Abroad program that satisfies the Arts Core. The London course is entitled “London vs. Nature: Writing Utopia and Dystopia in the Urban Landscape.”

Is “Lolita” banned these days? Would be surprised to find it wasn’t, given that Humbert Humbert is essentially a pedo. And yet here is a course from last spring. It’s been decades since I read this novel, but I recall well its distinct narrative voice so this sounds like quite an interesting course for those wishing to explore the use of language in the novel.

Nabokov: Lolita

ENGL 28916/1 [51755] - LEC Remote Closed

Lecture

Section Enrollment: 68/120

Total Enrollment: 125/120

Lolita, light of my life, fire of my loins. My sin, my soul, Lolita: the tip of the tongue taking a trip of three steps down the palate, to tap at three on the teeth." Popular as Nabokov’s “all-American” novel is, it is rarely discussed beyond its psychosexual profile. This intensive text-centered and discussion-based course attempts to supersede the univocal obsession with the novel’s pedophiliac plot as such by concerning itself above all with the novel’s language: language as failure, as mania, and as conjuration.

The course was over-enrolled in total, and over 50% signed on as students taking an English course (the remaining would be other majors cross-registered such as Fundamentals, Gender/Sexuality studies, etc).

@JBStillFlying , you are beginning to give me hope that the English Department isn’t the entirely lost cause I had begun to take it for. The author of that course description of Lolita sounds like he or she gets the Nabokovian word-magic. I like the swearing off of “univocal” interpretations. Still, one would expect a quite spirited discussion of this text, including the “problematizing” of its transgressive aspects as much as its felicities of language. That sort of discussion is of course precisely what a university - and especially this one - should be about. No wonder it is heavily enrolled.

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Probably not the best example, as the course is a cross-listed class, but offered by the Slavic department

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Touche, @skieurope . Back on the endangered list the English Department goes. Perhaps Slavic is where the action is these days.

Over 50% of the enrollees were students who enrolled as an English course, and it clearly satisfies requirements for the major. I wonder if this is some sort of “compromise” to offer a literary analysis of this American novel via another department, but I doubt it. The prof (who is in the Dept. of Slavic languages and literatures) may be the best-suited to offer the course, given the specialities listed on her CV: https://humanities-web.s3.us-east-2.amazonaws.com/slavic/prod/2019-10/Malynne%20Sternstein%20CV.pdf My impression about the College is that 1) many courses in the humanities are cross listed with one another and often with the history department as well; and 2) profs teach what they are interested in. Most likely, the English department is fine both with Nabokov and with Prof. Sternstein’s course. I should probably add: 3) faculty in a busier department will nearly always allow someone else to run their undergraduate courses for them.

My son just added history as his second major and has yet to take a course from a professor in the history department. His current history course that starts today is co-taught by profs in the Div School and Classics department. They will be employing historical methods in the course, however, so it’s definitely a history course (even if cross-listed with 11 other majors and graduate programs!).

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Perhaps the English dept needs to focus on how to graduate folks a little faster; over 9 years should not be acceptable. (I had assumed that was just a blip due to covid, but then randomly looked up 3 other departments, and their time to degree was not higher.)

https://provost.uchicago.edu/initiatives/phd-program-data

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Not so easy. Humanities faculty positions are very competitive and a year less in grad school is two fewer courses taught (plus less publishing). Chicago doesn’t want its alums uncompetitive.

Where this runs into trouble is chasing hot topics. It may be that today a dissertation on Henry IV being a polemic allegory against trans-exclusionary lesbians will be the ticket to a faculty job, who’s to say that it will still be in 2030?

yeah, I get that is their argument, but how can Chicago’s English competition such as Harvard, Yale and Stanford graduate PhDs in less time? Or, is Chicago suggesting that those HYS grads are less competitive than Chicago grads because Chicago grads take significantly longer?

They do though! Certain of UChicago’s humanities and social sciences PhD programs have been capped as a result until they can get their students through more quickly. That was instituted by Kai Yee Lee’s predecessor Dan Diermeier (now chancelor of Vandy).

Bottom line, the old curriculum of “Old White Dudes Talking About Old White Dude Experiences” may not be speaking to a younger, more diverse audience, and kids for whom “Culture” does not mean “Western Christian-based Culture”.

He would be at the top of my list, yes.

“Flirt with Stalinism” isn’t the same as “Justify genocide publicly and loudly on a weekly radio show”.

I have been putting my family’s genealogy together, and have been reading about what the Nazis did to them. It was horrific, and as it was happening, this “kind man” was broadcasting how wonderful the Nazis were, and how the Jews deserved to be murdered.

I am sure that some of the guards at Auschwitz who ran the gas chambers acted kindly to people back in their home town. Does that mean that we should think of them as “essentially kind people”?

I really don’t care what Stern thought. Again, Jewish intellectuals of his generation had been accepting antisemitism as a fact of life for decades. They stayed friends with people who often despised them in secret, because these people were, essentially, “the only game in town”.

As I wrote, I have a very unique experience of growing up as a Jew both in the USA, and in Israel. The difference between American Jews and Israeli Jews regarding their Jewish identity is deep and profound. It can be summarized as the difference between “I am Jewish, but”, versus “I am Jewish, and”.

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I quite understand your attitude to Pound, @MWolf . You are not making a literary judgment of his work, and that’s fair enough. You don’t care about his literary importance, much less whatever beauties his writing might have. There’s a big world with lots of writing ancient and modern out there, and there’s no reason you should want to read stuff written by a writer who said the things he said. Others may want to read Pound despite all this, however, not because they have any sympathy for the views of Pound the anti-Semite but because they are interested in his role in the modernist movement or they admire the qualities of his work more generally. Perhaps there are even some anti-Semites and Fascist-inclined types who read him for those reasons. (It is hard to know what those types would make of The Cantos or “Hugh Selwyn Mauberly”!) Thus we are only in disagreement here to the extent you are advocating a ban. When you say that he is at the top of your list, you do certain imply that there are many others on your list. Shudder.

Sure, flirting with communism isn’t so bad - God knows many writers have done so. Sartre, as I said, did “more than flirt.” He was a pretty constant apologist for the enormities taking place in the Soviet Union and the Eastern Bloc throughout a long period during which those enormities were well known to him. It was part of his philosophy that the Soviet Union could not be criticized on existential grounds - or something like that. In any event, even as late as 1973, long after the death of Stalin, he was arguing that “revolutionary authority always needs to get rid of some people that threaten it, and death is the only way.” (Per the Wikipedia piece on Sartre) Does that make him as wicked as Pound? Not in my book, though still sufficiently wicked. Mostly simply a useful idiot. And I don’t want to ban him. (Just don’t make me read him!)

I’m not so sure that Chicago undergrads are uninterested in the books written by those “old white dudes,” however much some of the faculty might like that. The kids seem to be voting with their feet: the most fully subscribed courses feature those old dudes. There may be a reason for this, you know - they’re damned good.

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Knowing nothing about these areas, what are the big companies hiring these types of graduates?

This thought contradicts the interest level at least of the undergraduates at UChicago, and I suspect elsewhere (ETA that marlowe just pointed out the same). Not sure about those pursuing PhD’s in English - and of course English departments train those grad students to become future faculty (who will then teach their interests and research to a future generation) . . .

There has been a noticeable inverse correlation between the eschewing of “old white dudes” (there are a few white dudettes in there too, let’s remember!) and the drop in numbers of English majors, pretty much everywhere. An academic department actually does depend on the number of majors it attracts - that statistic will oftentimes drive the funding received from the undergraduate division, and will also impact the relative ability to higher more faculty, expand its course offerings, etc. PhD students may flock to the program because of reputation, but they are a drain on the financial resources with an unknown value on the academic market. Departments wish to admit a critical number of PhD’s so as to be assured of a few hits every year. PhD funding will also depend on the number of majors and relative popularity of the department.

Why would the numbers drop? Well, it could be due to student lack of interest in the newer and more diverse scope of literary sources required in the major nowadays, but I’m not sure that’s it. Most top departments at least will still offer an assortment of “old” along with the “new.” I’m wondering if it’s the perception that students graduating with a degree in English simply don’t have marketable skills once they graduate. It’s not always necessary to understand how to code or put together a financial model or accounting spread sheet for an employer - but one at least has to be able to think critically and write intelligibly. For some reason, critical reasoning and writing are no longer generally associated with the English major by employers, parents and even prospective students themselves - and that’s a shame. So I’m wondering if, along with the newer text sources, undergraduate English majors are now being held to lower standards of scholarship.

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Many of these PhDs are hoping for academic careers.

A problem with this is that a professor graduates N students over her career, only one of whom is needed to replace her. So the market is very competitive. The humanities are different than the physical sciences, where industrial positions abound.

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Perhaps it is more like “For some reason, critical reasoning and writing are no longer generally associated with the English [literature] major more than other majors by employers, parents and even prospective students themselves.”

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Exactly. In any case, literary importance is determined by English professors in universities, high school teachers, and the famous e]writers of the day. It is like classical music. Europe had its own musical traditions, China had its own musical traditions, and India had its own musical traditions. They are very different. Each believes that it is the pinnacle of beauty, even though they are radically different, and the initial response of each culture to another culture’s music was “what is this godawful noise?”.

Most Americans will still find Chinese, Arab, and other music to be jarring, because it is on a different scale than the one that they are used to, and this scale does not fit with the Europeans concept of what is beautiful.

We determine beauty of writing based on standards of beauty that we have learned in school and as part of the culture. Much of the reason that you, and many others, consider Pound to be writing beautifully because of the standards of beauty that you have learned through K-16 education.

For me, his actions are enough to remove any appreciation that I would have had for his writing. It ceases to be beautiful. Much like you would no longer find your favorite music piece to be beautiful if it because associated with a terrible thing that happened to you.

Wagner is not permitted to be played by any Israeli orchestra or on the radio. It is mostly because of the association that the music had for holocaust survivors, and, consequently, their descendants. It was actually played by Jews pretty commonly until 1938.

While beauty is not entirely subjective, much of it is.

Ban, no, stop teaching in schools and intro courses, yes. Something taught in advanced colleges courses to English Majors.

That would imply that employers increasingly value data and science thinking skills and surely that’s true. However, English is typically listed as one of the worst ROI majors, as well as one of the easiest - even in comparison with some other non-stem subjects. Not sure whether that’s a fair comparison at UChicago, however.

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I wasn’t aware of the ban in Israel. Of course in the US it’s a different story. The Lyric in Chicago had a planned 2020 production of the Ring Cycle that was 10 years in the making but had to be cancelled due to Covid. My husband (a huge opera fan) said it was undoubtedly sold out. The Met offered the full Ring Cycle in 2019. My son’s elite high school youth symphony performed part of Gotterdammerung along with vocal accompaniment. Wagner remains popular here despite his own anti-semitism and/or the use of his music for purposes of propaganda or even hate-crimes.

But for purposes of musical study those cultures are often included in the curriculum at any university, and the courses well-attended.

This suggests a subjectivity that I’m not sure is present in most college classrooms. Pound is still included in the curricula at the University of Chicago not because his writing is “beautiful” but because he was a noted and influential writer who fits the theme or time period in discussion. Same with Marx (not for his literary style, obviously, but for his socio-political influence). It is crucial not to shy away from texts because we don’t like the author or even because the subject work might be dangerous. True inquiry oftentimes means studying work that we find uncomfortable or even objectionable.