“’…A year spent around a seminar table where the literary contributions of women, people of color, and queer folk are absent actively harms all students, regardless of their identity,’ the petition reads. ‘The Major English Poets sequences creates a culture that is especially hostile to students of color. When students are made to feel so alienated that they get up and leave the room, or get up and leave the major, something is wrong.’" …
Yes, there is a student who is polling students of color in the English Department regarding the curriculum. I don’t think it is as negative as it seems on the face of it. My D who is an AA Literature major is happy with the curriculum but will be talking with the person who is doing the study as they reached out to alumni and current students of color directly via social media.
My daughter, who just graduated with an English degree, feels that the complaints in the petition really suggest turning the English major into a literature major–which already exists. It is regrettable that the fundamental historical building blocks of English literature (and poetry in particular) were written by white men, but that is the reality. You can’t study the female or non-white contemporaries of Chaucer, Spenser, Milton, or Shakespeare, and you can’t deny the importance of studying the contribution of those white male writers.
@Hunt - I totally agree and that is why I think my kid does not have a problem with the curriculum in the English/Literature departments. They could just add some extra classes that focus on or deal with the contrasts between the old English masters and current literature icons of color.
Perhaps my biggest curricular regret about my time at Yale was not taking English 125/126. I was in Directed Studies as a freshman, and took the DS Literature class, which was probably the only really uninteresting class I had at Yale. (I think that course was dropped from DS years ago, and rightly so.) It was nowhere near the quality of 125/126, which people really loved, and which was taught by some of the best teachers, too. I completely agree with Professor Nicholson, quoted in the article to the effect that close reading and analysis are tools of liberation, not oppression, and I think that at least to the point of the generation of female, non-white, and queer writers in English now passing on, the Major Poets were pretty much how they learned those tools, too. I don’t think you can really read them without understanding the literary universe in which they were inserting themselves. When Adrienne Rich was “Diving Into The Wreck,” the wreck into which she was diving was Major Poets, and unless you are sensitive to all of their echoes you are not adequately reading her poem.
So, at some level, I want to say “Bosh!” to this student petition, and cluck at the apparent inability of today’s youth to go deeper than the skin.
Then, however, I took a look at the course description. And . . . I’m a little sympathetic. The taste it reflects is that of the 1940s and 50s, and a hyper-conservative version of that taste, to boot. And it takes the word “English” in a surprisingly literal way. I don’t know that anyone could or should argue with spending a lot of time on Chaucer, Spenser, Shakespeare, Donne, and Milton. But then come Pope, Wordsworth, and Eliot, and, you know what?, I can think of lots of better ways to spend time.
Pope was the greatest English poet of a period without a lot of great English poetry. (The real indispensable poets of that era were writing prose and plays, both of which were more lucrative.) He is enormously entertaining, and has little or no apparent influence on anyone born more than 50 years after him. I think he’s in the curriculum because at one point the 150 years between Milton and Wordsworth looked like a gap that deserved filling and because reading Pope helps you understand why Wordsworth was a big deal. Wordsworth absolutely was a big deal, and a massive stylistic innovator, but the ratio of quality to quantity in his oeuvre is appallingly low compared to the others. He deserves attention, but not necessarily so much as to crowd out everyone else in a 200-year span. And Eliot . . . Eliot was already becoming obsolete as a major poet when I was in college in the 1970s, and his popularity has not much revived since then.
Meanwhile, if you accept that Americans write in English, too (besides Eliot, who moved to London in his 20s), there are some poets with huge, high-quality oeuvres that are universally regarded as extremely important and influential – including beyond the English-speaking world – and who happen not to be quite as straight-male as the other Majors: Emily Dickinson and Walt Whitman. Maybe Allen Ginsberg, too. (White is still kind of an issue.) I think you can be an educated person today, even in literary circles, and not have read much Pope, or more than Prufrock and The Waste Land of Eliot. But I don’t think you could claim to be educated in English-language literature without spending real time with Dickinson and Whitman. I am kind of shocked that they haven’t muscled their way into English 126 already.
@JHS I agree. The Intensive Literature major (which my daughter decided to do) requires that you become fluent in two languages so that you can read literature, including poetry, in its original form. So, if a student wanted to read works in different cultures, that may be the way to go. My D is now fluent in German (after freshman year and a summer abroad in Berlin) and took Korean sophomore year and is in Korea for 3 months this summer immersing herself in the language. Thinking about language number 3 for junior year. She took a high level German poetry/history class and loved it second semester sophomore year. I think this route gives a student the ability to read books that are cut from a different cloth.
Safe spaces, empty heads.