Phillip Roth received his MA in English from Uchicago and briefly taught there. Saul Bellow was a towering figure at Uchicago for years. Uchicago continues to be ranked first in English (together with Berkeley). Can any of the experts out there shed some light on how Uchicago has been able to maintain its preeminence in English (which actually came as a bit of a surprise to me, Roth and Bellow notwithstanding).
RIP Philip Roth. Thanks for articulating your take on life with your many stories, and giving us so much to ponder.
The department has always had eminent profs. There were many such in the sixties when I was a student, including my personal favorite, the legendary Norman Maclean. As well as being a flinty detector of B.S. and a poeticizing fly-fisherman he was one of the “Chicago Critics”. The chief exponent of that school, R.S. Crane, was gone by then and the energy of that approach was waning. It had been Chicago’s answer to the “New Criticism”, which stressed irony and superficial verbal felicities. The Chicago School by contrast was proudly and idiosyncratically neo-Aristotelian and stressed form, genre and structure as the principal levers of literary experience and meaning. I still think it was a solid way of analyzing literature, and it did have later practitioners, such as Wayne Booth. However, it was hardly fashionable. I seriously doubt the English Department of those days would have been ranked as tops in the nation.
I have no insight into the present pre-eminence of the Department. A bit of desultory reading of course descriptions suggests to me little continuity with the old Chicago School and not many courses of the sort I would have recognized, dealing with major authors, genres and periods, as opposed to a chaotic jumble of idiosyncratic thematic or political discourses. Ugh. However, these guys must be doing something right - in the eyes of their peers anyhow.
Bellow was never in the English Department, with which he actually had a somewhat testy relationship. He preferred his perch on the top floor of the Social Sciences Building with the big thinkers in the Committee on Social Thought. He was reported as saying about Maclean that “he has world-class cheekbones”. Correct enough, but unmistakably snarky. Perhaps that was after Maclean turned the neat trick in his old age of writing two beautiful books that Bellow could not have thought the old English Prof had in him.
The University of Chicago’s preeminence in English is of recent vintage. Norman Maclean was a legendary teacher of undergraduates, but far from a legendary scholar. His literary reputation is based on journalism he did quite late in life. As noted, in the past generation, Chicago’s most influential figures in the world of literary studies tended to reside outside the English Department – not merely Bellow, but notably Allan Bloom, Paul Ricoeur, Mark Strand, Herman Sinaiko. David Bevington in the English Department was a first-rank Shakespeare scholar. The large humanities terminal masters program also touched a number of future stars like Roth.
Its current high standing, I believe, is due essentially to being super-hip and having successfully caught some of the major waves in literary studies fashion. Chicago’s English Department seems strongest – and perhaps stronger than anyone else’s department – in gender and sexuality studies, led by Lauren Berlant and Deborah Nelson. It also has strength in media studies. Like any good department, it has a very solid array of literary historians of the 17th-19th Centuries and a lot of people covering issues of race, colonialism, and third-world literature, as well as people working across disciplines (lots of history and politics). It gets a huge boost in attracting faculty and top grad students by being in a major city where it’s interesting to live and spouses can maybe get jobs.
I like what Oates supposedly said about Roth: “Kafka interpreted by Lenny Bruce”.
@JHS , I would add the name of Michael Murrin to that of Bevington as really important scholars in the English Department in the period just preceding the present one (and both are still going strong with new publications). I would quibble about Herman Sinaiko’s eminence: though a legendary undergraduate teacher, I do not believe he was an influential scholar, and certainly not in literary studies. I have read that he was considered a lightweight by the heavyweights in the Committee on Social Thought and was not immediately admitted to the club. His buddy James Redfield, who still occasionally leads alumni tour groups, did not have that trouble.
You’re certainly right about Maclean: Other than his contributions to “Critics and Criticism” he had no publications whatever to his credit other than a manual he prepared for the U.S. Army in the Second World War on, I believe, map-reading, until he broke loose after retirement with “A River Runs Through It” and “Young Men and Fire.” The first of these is a collection of stories and the second a multi-faceted account of a famous Montana brush fire that killed nine young “smoke Jumpers”. He also always planned to write an account of Custer’s Last Stand and did in fact produce several very interesting chapters but not a finished work. I think of the second book and these Custer pieces as being something more than journalism. He had a very literary sensibility, and that made him a wonderful teacher and led ultimately to the writing of those two beautiful books.
You’re right on both counts, @marlowe1 . Sinaiko really belongs in the category of legendary teacher (but he was a legendary teacher). I wasn’t familiar with Murrin, but his work looks interesting, and he seems to have been very successful in making the fashionable pivot from literary theory early in his career to literary history in his (and its) prime.
Separately, Roth has been a really important figure for me, and not for purely literary reasons. He and my father grew up in the same community – for a while even on the same block – at the same time. They went to the same schools. He was a few years younger than my father, and my father never knew him, but Roth’s father was my grandfather’s insurance broker and friend. My father did remember him. Roth’s mother, at least as portrayed in his fiction, was nearly interchangeable with my grandmother.
The rabbis, community figures, and temptresses that appeared in Roth’s stories about his youth were also the dramatis personae of my father’s psyche. When Portnoy’s Complaint came out, and most of the world was tut-tutting and gnashing its teeth, my Dad brought a copy home and started reading it to us at the dinner table. (Not those parts, though.) I remember his gleefully performing his high-school football cheer, which I’m sure many people thought was a product of Roth’s imagination:
Ikey, Mikey, Jake, and Sam
We’re the boys who eat no ham
We play football, we play soccer
We keep matzahs in our locker
Ay, ay, ay, Weequaic High
Perhaps the present emphasis of the Department, as described by JHS above, is reflected in the “Open Letter” on the Department’s web page immediately preceding its description of both its Undergraduate Program and Graduate Program. The letter, which is signed by just about every member of the Department (it would be interesting to know why some didn’t sign it) refers to a “recent online dispute concerning white-nationalist appropriation of medieval symbols” and a particular threat made by someone (but whom?) at the University (or in the Department?) against “an untenured scholar of color”. It continues for some length stating unexceptionable truths about listening carefully and respecting the views of others and decries “bullying, racially charged attacks and the glorification of violence against those with whom one differs”. All well and good, but what exactly are they talking about at the University of Chicago? One has to wonder what event could have provoked such a solemn statement of what hardly needs stating. And is Chaucer now such a fraught subject that Chaucerians are called upon to demonstrate innocence of retrograde views? The last sentence needed a red pencil: “It is our responsibility as scholars not only to condemn and repudiate hatred expressed in speech and other forms of action, but to model forms of discussion that manage criticality in a spirit of open inquiry, committed to acknowledging and thinking through the difficult histories and difficult present in which we are all embedded.” More specificity, please. And is that the mission of scholarship? It’s an unexamined assumption that requires argument. Finally: avoid “criticality” at all costs.
@marlowe1 : I bet it has been a while since you have read any academic work on literature. The sentence you quote – while amply deserving your criticism – is practically a model of simplicity, concision, and intelligibility within the standards of the profession.
Here’s something yanked off the web that implicitly demonstrates the usefulness of “criticality”:
I like what Oates supposedly said about Roth: “Kafka interpreted by Lenny Bruce”.
An actual answer.
“These are the number of schools with doctoral programs surveyed in fall 2016: economics (138); English (155); history (151); political science (120); psychology (255); and sociology (118). And these were the response rates: economics (23 percent), English (14 percent), history (15 percent), political science (24 percent), psychology (14 percent) and sociology (33 percent).”
@Marlowe1 The controversy that is referenced in that letter is due to some obnoxious things written and done by UChicago assistant professor Rachel Fulton Brown. To make a long story short, a professor at Vassar wrote something about how white supremicists were appropriating medieval symbolism to support their causes (this is accurate by the way - The internet is full of neo-nazi posts about the Knights Templar and Cursaders and so on, and of course Hitler did the same thing). The professor advocated for medieval studies teachers to affirmatively reject purported connection in their classroom teaching.
Anyhow, Rachel Fulton Brown publically disagreed in a strange (and vulgar) manner. Then, when she got some push back from the Vassar prof and others in the medieval studies academic world, Brown got angry and got personal, She started posting personal attacks and even pictures of the people disagreeing with her, focusing for some reason on one pf the rare African Americans in the field.
Then it got worse, because Brown used Facebook to get in contact with famous alt-right provocateur Milo Yiannopoulos, and that jerk started posting his own stories about the controversy, hoping to get his followers to harass the Vassar professor and others. To no one’s surprise, that is exactly what happened next - hate mail and phone calls for everyone! Brown knows Milo because she has written pieces for Breitbart herself, and Milo used to be there before he got sacked for being too controversial even for them.
Anyhow, that’s the controversy. Brown disagreed with a fellow academic, and decided the best way to deal with it was to stir up far-right social media to get at her opponents. Pretty ugly.
Thanks for that help, @ThankYouforHelp . With your nudge I googled and got some further information on this swashbuckling Rachel Fulton Brown and her spat with the Vassar Assistant Prof. Over-the-topness seems to be what Brown is all about, but the Vassar Prof was to my mind saying some pretty crazy things as well, and they both got in their punches there. It doesn’t seem likely that the younger scholar was harmed by any of this - quite the contrary. Although it’s no way for academics to conduct themselves, I can’t see why the English Department should have made such a big deal of it or even taken note at all. Yet passions run high in common rooms as in board rooms.
The History Department seems to be standing by Brown, so does that mean there’s bad blood between the Departments? Brown is a full-blown Christian believer. English Lit Medievalists used to be like that. At Chicago Jeremy Taylor - before moving to Notre Dame - was cut from that cloth. Or think of C.S. Lewis wearing his hat as learned academic - author of “The Allegory of Love”. Maybe English Departments have moved with the po-mo times, whereas History is stuck still in the Middle Ages, as it were. This is from the description of the basic course in Medieval English Literature: “The course examines the relations among psychology, ethics, and social theory in 14th Century English Literature. We pay particular attention to three central preoccupations of the period: sex, the human body, and the ambition of ethical perfection.” Sounds a bit like Hamlet without the Prince - a study of the literature of the quintessential Christian Era without reference to Christianity (except as whittled down to a dubious “ambition of ethical perfection”). That’s criticality, I reckon, and should be sufficient to repel the neo-Nazis.
Rachel Fulton Browne is not an ass’t prof; she is a tenured associate professor of History who helped re-design and update the Western Civ. sequence (now called European Civ. One section of Western continues as long as Katie Weintraub continues to teach it). Brown is a bit weird but you really have to read the entire “spat” to understand what was going on there. It really seemed to be more ways to shut down speech than anything else. And if anyone thinks this little tiff at all resembles some of the monster (and monstrous) methodological battles that “The Chicago School” used to fight - well, you need to read more about UChicago. NO ONE is more petty than an insulted academic.
@marlowe1 - the History dept. did a similar, albeit more toned down, statement that was prepared within the context of the university’s free speech policy (which it referenced indirectly) - and that now seems to have been moved to a less prominent part of their website or removed altogether. Also, it was a statement only on behalf of “senior” members and certainly not all of them at that (Boyer’s signature, for instance, was notably absent). Perhaps the History dept. was being careful to avoid the appearance of having pressured untenured members to sign on, even if they didn’t agree with the statement. It is to be hoped that the English dept. conducted itself similarly. Senior faculty are pretty much free to say anything, as Prof. Brown has demonstrated.
There are some in the English dept. who also teach history courses/seminars (Eric Slauter, for instance), and so there’s hopefully no “bad blood” other than the standard methodological tug-of-war or department jockeying.
@marlowe1 The Department is “standing by” Brown because she is tenured.
Whatever you may think of Brown’s views on the historical issues, I don’t think there is any way to avoid the fact that her vulgar attacks on her opponents, the posting of personal identification to “doxx” them, and the deliberate recruitment of Milo Yiannoupolous to make the whole thing an alt-right cause celebre is all seriously crappy behavior unworthy of the U of C. It’s not about scholarship. You seem to think that the letter posted by her fellow profs after her offensive behavior is the problem, but that is conflating intellectual disagreement with disagreement over inappropriate behavior.
@ThankYouforHelp , when I said the History Department “seems to be standing by Brown” I was referring only to the absence of a denunciatory statement on their webpage, as against the very prominent and portentous Open Letter at the very front of the English Department webpage for both graduate and undergraduate studies. I hadn’t noticed what @JBStillFlying with her sharp eyes had noticed - that there is or was a statement, apparently a less denunciatory one, also issued and somewhere to be found for the History Department. I retract “standing by” and replace that phrase with “not unqualifiedly condemning”. It still seems odd that English saw the need to intervene gratuitously in terms so much more emphatic than History, which would seem the appropriate place for comment on a dispute between members of respective History Departments.
You’re right in suggesting that I may be conflating my dislike of the way English is being done nowadays at the U of C with both the content and style of the Open Letter. But surely you would agree that the pedagogical and scholarly perspective of the English Department is closer to that of the Vassar Prof than to Brown. It is hard for me not to think that that animus wasn’t operative in this unreserved condemnation of Brown.
I didn’t have the scholarly chops to try to figure out precisely what happened between the two profs. Correct me if I’m wrong in what follows. It looked like the Vassar prof was asserting that medievalists were presumptively to be considered suspect of alt-right or neo-Nazi sympathies, of which they needed to affirmatively clear themselves by demonstrating a critical and unsympathetic attitude to the ideals of the period. She made an exception for herself as a same-sex person of color who ipso facto could not be capable of such a retrograde perspective.
Whatever you think of the merits of this, it is certainly inflammatory. Brown responded in kind, from the perspective of a very emotional Christian believer of the scholarly vintage. The Vassar Prof (Brown says) then attacked her by name on social media. This in turn led to Brown’s naming the prof in her own blog (where she seems not to have been known at that time as a Chicago Prof). Brown has a big crush on Milo Yannopoulos, so no doubt there are alt-righters who know about her blog and who then chimed in from wherever they lurk in the non-academic world. This must have led to ugly email or postings directed at the Vassar Prof. I don’t doubt that Brown has gotten her own share of ugly mail and postings from the other side. She certainly got that broadside from the English Deparment, which must have been much more to the point. Did any of this do damage to the Vassar Prof? Well, certainly not in the eyes of the Chicago English Department. I have my doubts that she was harmed at all in the only world that must matter to her - the world of the Vassar or any other Department of History.
As a non-academic I always enjoy dustups of this sort. Real passions and ideologies are at stake in this dispute. I like to see that. We occasionally have that sort of thing here on cc.
Perhaps we could revert to the original purpose of my post: exploring how / why UChicago and Berkeley have for some time now been the two preeminent English departments in the nations.
The statement “UChicago and Berkeley have for some time now been the two preeminent English departments in the nations [sic]” is fundamentally inaccurate, especially in the case of Chicago. They are no doubt two of the preeminent English departments in the world (the “world,” for English departments, consisting essentially of the US, UK, Ireland, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, and some islands in the Caribbean), but it’s not as if they tower over the other six or seven top departments, or even that there’s broad consensus on how to rank the top departments. Berkeley is a perennial in the top group, at least for the past 3-4 generations. Chicago’s high status is much more recent. (40 years ago when I was interested in graduate work in literature, Berkeley was a preeminent program and Chicago wasn’t even quite second rank, unless you were interested in Latin, Ancient Greek, or something like Akkadian.)
The 2010 National Research Council complex data-based rankings of U.S. programs put Chicago well down in the pack in every criterion, and were wildly inconsistent as to Berkeley (with some methodologies, it was top-6; with others it was barely top-50). The methodology that most reflected conventional wisdom had Berkeley at #6, behind (in various orders) Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, and Yale, with Chicago toward the bottom of the top 20. Had foreign programs been considered, Cambridge would definitely have been in the top group as well, and maybe Oxford too. Some departments showed up at or near the top of the heap no matter which criteria were used – Harvard, Stanford, Princeton, Columbia, Wisconsin, Cornell.
I would say that, at the level of academic folklore, traditionally Yale and Berkeley have been considered the preeminent English Departments, at least for the past 60 years or so. 50 years ago, Yale was head and shoulders above everyone else, but that hasn’t been true since the 1980s. Harvard tends to have very strong, prominent senior faculty that it recruits from elsewhere, but that need to be replaced constantly. Stanford has been increasingly strong for decades. Columbia is traditionally very strong, but had the worst ideological rifts of any department, and had to be placed effectively in receivership by the university for awhile. Cornell, Hopkins, Michigan, UCLA are all generally strong programs, too.
Chicago has gotten a great boost from, as I said, its having caught a few waves of academic fashion just right. But I don’t think its placement results for recent degree recipients is consistent with being anything like “the” preeminent department, or even one of two (or five) of them. And in the end, that’s what matters most – attracting the best students, polishing them so they shine, and generating so much light with your own faculty that some of it reflects off their advisees and everyone wants a piece of that.
^^ Is 2010 the last time the PhD programs were ranked by NRC?
It was a huge project that cost a lot to carry out, and I think it was not seen as especially successful or useful.