The National Alumni Forum recently released a study of 70 top colleges and universities in the country. The study found that one third of these universities no longer require their English majors to take a course on William Shakespeare’s works. The report criticized these universities, claiming they neglected to foster excellence in students by permitting them to substitute courses in popular culture, sexuality, and multi-culturalism in place of Shakespeare.

The Forum’s report reminds us of the changes occuring in humanities curriculums as cultural studies gains more favor among students and faculty. Endeavors’ Julia Bryan talked to English professors John McGowan and Joseph Wittig about changes in humanities research.

Putting the text back into context.

John McGowan

In research there’s been an explosion of diversity and plurality. It’s not just that people are doing a lot of literary research on works that no one has paid attention to in the past, such as works by women authors and minority authors. There’s been a big interest in popular works as well - the work that was thought beneath the dignity of people to study before.

More and different books are being read and researched, but there’s also been a change in the kind of research that is going on. Even when we study the traditional authors - and many people still do study Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton - the kinds of things that we study are different.

Along with the traditional interpretation of a text or literary study of the author’s biography, we’re now doing a lot of work on reception study. We study how Shakespeare was received in his own time, how he has been studied, how he’s been taught, what he stood for in different times and places. So someone might look at Henry V and see how Olivier uses the play as patriotic propaganda in WWII and how that’s different from the way Kenneth Branagh uses it when he remakes the film in 1993. The range of things to be done with a literary text has expanded at the same time as the range of text.

I think this is a good thing, because we used to approach literary works as if we pulled them out of their social contexts and hung them on a wall in a museum and somehow thought that in the frames of these works we could get everything we needed to know. But literature is much more alive in relation to how it is used by people in everyday, concrete circumstances, so I think it’s much better to put the work back into the context in which it was written, read, and has been read over the years.

To me, a successful English department gathers the smartest and most enthusiastic people, lets them work on what they find interesting, and lets them teach that to students. Some people are doing great work on Shakespeare, and some people are doing great work on an 18th century poet you and I have never heard of. And the students understand why a certain topic or a certain author is exciting and interesting and valuable because they have a professor who demonstrates that it is exciting, and interesting, and valuable.

I don’t think you can preserve a culture by force. At that point it is not a living culture. So if it came down to the fact that the only people who ever read or studied Shakespeare were people required to do it in colleges, then I think we’ve lost him. But this is where the National Alumni Forum is wrong. From what I know, at any school that has dropped Shakespeare as a requirement, students still take him anyway. Because they want to take Shakespeare; they think he’s neat. He’s one reason they became English majors.

All texts are not created equal.

Joseph Wittig

Why are we so concerned about the cultural context of a work of art? Why, for instance, do we obsess over the cleaning bills of some poet no one’s even heard of? I’m supposed to say that we know more, and therefore there’s more to teach, and there’s more to acquire in order to prepare to add to the body of knowledge and skill in any specialty. I suspect there’s truth to that. But I sometimes think we’re spinning our wheels into deeper and narrower ruts. There’s a lot of rubbish generated by the pressure to produce publications. Publishing keeps people off the streets and it’s passive solar and not very polluting, but my ideal is that research should stay disinterested. Young men or women have to do what it takes to get published, even if it affects the conclusions that they draw in order to make their work palatable. I think this stinks, but it’s a fact, and it is especially a fact since we have these various warring attitudes about what it is textual studies should be accomplishing.

Some of the people who advocate studying literature as a political and economical artifact are in a radical way trying to democratize it, sometimes from a rather Marxist perspective. They’re trying to talk about what literature means for most people. But a lot of this takes the guise of very abstruse language, language that doesn’t talk to the common folk at all - it talks to other people doing the same kinds of work. I don’t do that kind of writing, and I don’t encourage it in my students. I’ve heard of undergraduates leaving here and going off to grad school, and they drop out and say that academics is totally dull - it’s not about literature. I’ve heard that an English professor at Duke walked into class last semester and said, basically, that it was time to start enjoying literature again, and if you don’t enjoy reading, get out. I agree with him - I think it’s a shame to totally lose an aesthetic perspective on literature.

In The Aesthetics of Literary Criticism, C.S. Lewis talks about what makes literature different. He argues that a piece of art is not merely something to acquire - it’s there to be contemplated, it’s there to be experienced. If you see a stunning picture in a museum, your reaction shouldn’t just be, “I want to get that to my house.” You should have an appreciation that’s not primarily political or acquisitive or practical. I think this is a response to literature that is in danger of disappearing.

Not all texts are equally interesting and not all texts are created equal. Some texts are inherently more subtle, more nuanced, more deft with language. They are more interesting. I believe students benefit from being exposed to that kind of (I will use an old-fashioned word) excellence. I think this is awfully important. I don’t object to studying Tarzan or Star Wars in a context that’s meant to evaluate these works in relation to other things. I would, however, be really unhappy if MTV became substituted for Shakespeare, or for Chaucer for that matter. I think Chaucer and Shakespeare set themselves off by their quality and establish standards which are useful for people to have in order to evaluate other work. I never tell my students that they have to love Chaucer - that’s up to them - but I want them to encounter him in the presence of someone very empathetic to him, to at least be encouraged to listen to someone enthuising about him and trying to show what’s good and what’s loveable about him. And then let them go and make up their own minds.