... newspapers were in trouble: Professing Literature in 2008. (Hat tip, Dave Lull.)
"Asian American literature, cultural theory, or visual/performance studies"; "literature of the immigrant experience, environmental writing/ecocriticism, literature and technology, and material culture"; "visual culture; cultural studies and theory; writing and writing across the curriculum; ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies."
Small wonder "the number of students studying English literature appears to be in a steep, prolonged and apparently irreversible decline."
However bitter the ideological battles Graff described, they were driven by the profession's internal dynamics, not by what our students wanted, or what they thought they wanted, or what we thought they thought they wanted. If grade schools behaved like this, every subject would be recess, and lunch would consist of chocolate cake.
Not necessarily. Serious students want to be taught serious subjects seriously, not trendy hogwash, however much driven by "the profession's internal dynamics."
I teach adult undergraduates, and I am always pleased to see that my students have deliberately bypassed more trendy offerings to take my medieval and Renaissance lit courses. In many cases, they've waited decades to return to college and they're paying their own ways. They see these older, canonical subjects as more challenging, more substantive, and a better way to spend their tuition.
ReplyDeleteA decade ago, the administrator who hired me laughed at the idea that students would want more than one medieval literature course. I now teach four.
That's the best news on the literature front that I've heard in some time, Jeff.
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