More Ado (Yawn) About Great Books

By EMILY EAKIN

NY Times April 8, 2001

To a small but powerful faction of disgruntled Americans, I could be a symbol of much that is wrong with higher education. I graduated not so long ago from a university filled with world-renowned experts on Shakespeare, Milton and the ancient Greeks. But I never attended their classes. I didn't have to. They weren't required.

I was a literature major: forward thinking, theory-armed, cutting edge. Literature majors were the humanities' Green Berets, an elite corps trained on a rarefied diet of semiotics and deconstruction - the latest French imports - to expose the contradictions, inconsistencies and general sloppiness that had infected not just literature and criticism but all of Western thought since, well, Aristotle at least. A relatively recent addition to the curriculum, the literature major was conceived as a junior version of the university's graduate program in comparative literature. Unlike English majors, we were required to take classes in a foreign literature and expected to think about big questions - like "What is literature?" - from a comparative perspective.

While my roommates, English majors both, slogged their way through "The Norton Anthology of English Literature" - "Beowulf" to Virginia Woolf - I was breaking new ground. I read Jacques Derrida and Paul de Man, Mikhail Bakhtin and Walter Benjamin. Not that I read only theory. These were literature courses, after all. I read lots of novels, too - Thomas Pynchon's "Crying of Lot 49," GŸnter Grass's "Tin Drum" and "Les Gu*rrill*res," a lyrical fantasy about a society without men by the French radical lesbian Monique Wittig.

I met my degree requirements by taking "Feminist Literary Criticisms" and "Women and the Avant-Garde," as well as two courses devoted principally to film, and a seminar on Beckett and Nabokov. For my thesis, I wrote on novels by Marguerite Duras, Milan Kundera and Toni Morrison, all of them published within the last 30 years. I graduated without having read for credit "The Odyssey," "Paradise Lost," a single play by Shakespeare or a single novel by Jane Austen, George Eliot or Henry James.

To groups like the American Council of Trustees and Alumni and the National Association of Scholars, I am an object lesson in miseducation. My college career is precisely the kind of scandal they have vowed to eradicate.

If you thought the culture wars were over, you're not alone. After more than a decade of highly publicized skirmishes, the alternately entertaining and exasperating verbal slugfest between left and right - much of it over the proper role and content of something called the Western Canon in the education of America's college students - seemed lately to have faded from view. By the end of the 1990's, the torrent of righteous polemic ignited by Allan Bloom's "Closing of the American Mind" in 1987 had slowed to a trickle. The culture wars were routinely summed up in a few stock phrases - political correctness, multiculturalism, the Great Books and dead white men - whose ability to summon outrage had been severely diminished by overuse. In her new book, "Academic Instincts," Marjorie Garber, a Harvard English professor and leading Shakespeare scholar, writes of the culture wars in the past tense, as a "formulation that was always more hype or buzz than pedagogical reality."

But Ms. Garber may have spoken too soon. With a conservative administration in the White House and a president whose thoughts about education can be boiled down to the word "standards," the advocacy groups founded to save the classics are enjoying a second wind.

"The culture wars seem to be over because people opposed to the classics have won so complete a victory at so many colleges," says Jerry Martin, the president of the American Council of Trustees and Alumni. "But there are real signs of renewal of interest in Great Books."

Dedicated to preserving traditional core curriculums from the predations of multicultural-minded leftists, the council must have been one of the only ideological organizations in America watching the presidential race with something close to indifference. "No matter which party wins, so does the council," The New York Times reported last August, noting that Lynne Cheney and Joseph I. Lieberman were founding members and that Mrs. Cheney at the time was the group's chairwoman.

Since 1996, when Georgetown University announced that courses in Chaucer, Milton and Shakespeare, once required of English majors, would henceforth be electives, the council has been quietly racking up victories on behalf of the Great Books. After the announcement, the council commissioned a study of English literature programs at 70 major colleges and universities. "The abandonment of Shakespeare requirements is not merely a trend; it is now the norm," the group's report declared. "Of the 70 universities, only 23 now require English majors to take a course in Shakespeare."

The report went on to explain why Americans should care: "It matters to us all if Shakespeare and other great authors are allowed to languish. This country cannot expect a generation raised on gangster films and sex studies to maintain its leadership in the world." In other words, the culture wars aren't some obscure academic debate. Shakespeare's demise in the classroom is a matter of national security.

The council's rhetoric has proved persuasive. In 1997, the group led a successful campaign to squelch a proposed curriculum overhaul at Brooklyn College. The administration scaled down its plans after receiving a letter from the council signed by 15 prominent Brooklyn College alumni, including the historians Eugene Genovese, Gertrude Himmelfarb and Donald Kagan, attacking the plan as a threat to the college's traditional core curriculum.

Two years later, the council claimed another victory, this time at the University of Chicago, a traditional home of top-ranked conservative scholars (including Allan Bloom, until his death in 1992) and an institution famous for its rigorous Western Civilization curriculum. After the university decided to reduce the number of required core courses from 21 to 18, the council orchestrated a letter-writing campaign featuring famous alumni as signatories. Although the course reduction went into effect as scheduled, the university's embattled president ultimately stepped down. "We formed a committee of alumni and former faculty and carried on a controversy in the press that resulted in the president's resignation," Mr. Martin explained.

At the same time that the council was busy recruiting alumni to defend the Great Books, the National Association of Scholars was busy compiling new evidence of their neglect. Founded in 1987 and advised by a group of disaffected traditionalists, including the Columbia historian Jacques Barzun, the Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson and the neoconservative Irving Kristol, the association bills itself as "the only academic organization dedicated to the restoration of intellectual substance, individual merit and academic freedom in the university." To that end, the association last year published "Losing the Big Picture: The Fragmentation of the English Major Since 1964."

An analysis of the course offerings and degree requirements for English majors at 25 top liberal arts colleges, the 50-page study, replete with pie charts, bar graphs and tables of statistics, is predictably grim. Among its findings: Only 4 of the 25 colleges require a survey course of major English writers, down from 13 in 1964; likewise, only 4 still have a Shakespeare requirement, down from 12 in 1964. Just about every institution was found to have an unhealthy "preoccupation with the arcane and ideological," exemplified by courses like Amherst's "Black Gay Fiction" and Swarthmore's "Illicit Desires in Literature," which examines "some differences that race and gender have made in the literary expression of a range of sexual desires."

One table quantified the rise of "postmodern terminology" in catalog course descriptions: up 0.4 percent since 1989. An accompanying "Postmodern Word List" enumerated the telltale terms, including "AIDS," "bodies," "cinema," "color," "consciousness," "Foucault," "Freud" and "Marxism."

But by far the greatest change since 1964, the association discovered, was the de-emphasis of classic British and Irish authors, once the backbone of the undergraduate syllabus. Chaucer, Milton, Keats, Donne, Byron and Pope, all had seen their market shares plummet by 50 percent or more. "The only highly rated white-male author to register a gain was James Joyce," the association reported.

Equally disturbing to the organization was the evidence of who had edged out the dead white men. "As far as citations can attest," the study reported, "Toni Morrison is now considered - by English professors at least - to be the sixth most important author in the history of the language." At least Toni Morrison was a Nobel laureate, the authors pointed out with some relief. But how, they wondered, do you account for Zora Neale Hurston, now more widely taught than Twain, Fielding, Poe, Dryden, Pope and Swift, or Aphra Behn, an obscure 17th-century playwright who is currently more popular than Pound, Beckett or Nabokov? Evidently, the study's authors concluded, English has become a field where "championing causes" like race, gender and popular culture counts more than artistic achievement.

"Literature programs provide the intellectual capital that future authors, poets and scholars will live off their entire careers," says the association's president, Stephen H. Balch. "Do we want this to consist of the screenplays of sitcoms or the works of classic writers like Milton, Whitman and Joyce, who have explored the furthest limits of our language's power?"

The answer, of course, is obvious. And as long as groups like the National Association of Scholars and the American Council of Trustees and Alumni continue to portray the English department as a place where lax standards, trendiness and politics have all but crowded out good literature, they are guaranteed a sympathetic public hearing and, in all likelihood, more victories on the curricular front. What parent - Republican or Democrat - wants to shell out $32,400 for a year at Amherst so that his child can watch sitcoms for credit? What parent wants her child to take a course in the Victorian novel and come home knowing more about conditions in the 19th-century British poorhouses than the plot of "Jane Eyre"? No wonder conservative colleges have taken to running ads in mainstream publications. One for St. John's College in The New Yorker reads: "Plato, Shakespeare, Nietzsche, Darwin: Still Teaching at St. John's along with 50 other great book authors." Applications at St. John's are up 36 percent over the last two years.

But what if the Association of Scholars is wrong? For all its statistical analysis of degree requirements, course catalog descriptions and author citations, what if "Losing the Big Picture" amounts to a misleading and incomplete picture of what's happening in literary studies?

"The N.A.S. is as usual beating several dead horses," says Patrick Brantlinger, an English professor at Indiana University and the author of the forthcoming "Who Killed Shakespeare? What's Happened to English Since the Radical 60's." "First, all disciplines change necessarily - English is no different from physics or biology in that regard. Second, Shakespeare is not about to disappear - so much so that many English departments do not now and have never felt the need to make a Shakespeare course a requirement. Third, does the N.A.S. really believe that English departments have no responsibility for including and teaching new writing?"

It's true that tampering with the canon is actually nothing new. "The canon was never at any point fixed but was always the result of a process of modernization of the curriculum," says John Guillory, an English professor at New York University and the author of "Cultural Capital, the Problem of Literary Canon Formation." "If you go back to the 1930's, 1940's and 1950's, you have intense arguments about allowing writers still living to be talked about. You have a revolution in the curriculum as momentous as the one that occurred in the 60's."

A 1991 survey of college English programs conducted by the Modern Language Association bears out this point. The survey cites a late-19th-century debate over a proposed curricular reform that would replace ancient Greek and Roman writers with such newfangled moderns as Dante, Machiavelli, Montaigne, Bacon and Shakespeare. In 1890, the association's president, James Russell Lowell, fired this salvo at the resisters: "And shall we say that the literature of the last three centuries is incompetent to put a healthy strain upon the more strenuous faculties of the mind?" He added, "Is it less instructive to study the growth of modern ideas than of ancient?"

The survey goes on to describe a similar debate in the 1920's and 1930's, this one over whether American literature was worthy of inclusion in the English curriculum. (The Modern Language Association, by the way, found that in the courses it surveyed, "major authors and works of literature" remained "pre-eminent.")

Moreover, say the conservative groups' critics, it's unfair to judge a course's literary seriousness on the basis of title and catalog description alone. "Take ÔTextuality,' one of my courses," says Mich*le Barale, chairwoman of Amherst's English department. "I'm looking at texts in order to talk about the history of 20th-century sexuality. I know that sounds utterly ridiculous to someone whose life and training have been mainly in the 1950's and 1960's. There would be some fear I'm teaching some cruddy little piece of literature in place of ÔMoby- Dick,' but you better sit in my classroom before you pass judgment."

Professor Barale explains that her syllabus includes Ger- trude Stein's "Three Lives," Djuna Barnes's "Nightwood" and Plato's "Symposium."

"This is not lightweight stuff," she says.

But the bigger point many English professors make is that to focus on the canon is to miss the real issue facing literary studies: disciplinary relevance. "The much more urgent question is about literature in relation to other media," John Guillory says. "You can conceive of a curriculum producing the same cognitive skills that doesn't use literature at all but opts for connecting with the media tastes of the day - film, video, TV, etc. It's no longer clear why we need to teach literature at all."

Louis Menand, an English professor at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York, makes a similar observation. The range of texts and media to which literature students are now regularly exposed, he argues, suggests that the underlying rationale for studying literature is changing. He cites Amherst, a college where English majors have virtually no required courses. "At Amherst, they would probably say the purpose of this degree is to develop this faculty known as critical thinking. It doesn't matter what you read as long as you're thinking critically. To graduate with a degree in English means you can think critically about almost anything. Paul de Man is in a certain sense as good as Milton."

Given how I spent my four years in college, I find this line of reasoning reassuring. I may not have read many Great Books, but I'd like to believe I acquired just as many critical thinking skills reading French theory and contemporary novels instead.

I'd like to believe my friend and fellow literature major Mark McGurl, now an English professor at the University of California at Los Angeles, when he says, "You may feel a little deficient now for not having read Milton, but your thinking about Derrida was likely far more profound than that surrounding the apparently only vestigial study of Milton and Shakespeare by college kids in the U.S." He adds, "Putting Great Books on the syllabus does not magically produce educated and thoughtful students."

Surely, the conservative organizations know this, too. And while their motives may be partly political - controlling the curriculum is a way to ensure that students aren't brainwashed by Marxist professors - ideology is likely not the only reason these groups exist. A more meaningful way to understand them might be as symptoms of the disciplinary crisis Mr. Guillory and Mr. Menand talk about. In this context, the groups' campaign for the classics looks like a desperate but futile attempt to restore cultural authority to a field that no longer has much claim to distinction.

The truth is that a fluency with the Great Books is no longer a prerequisite for professional or social success. Critical thinking skills arguably are.

But those, some English professors are willing to admit, can be honed just as well through considerations of "Sex and the City" as "Middlemarch." This may be lamentable, but it's a social reality nonetheless.

In the end, I'm inclined to agree with Mark McGurl, who says, "If you think you are a poster child for poor education, you are truly in the grips of, dare I say, ideology."