I thought I'd wrap up my ongoing blog about junk English today by looking at some course descriptions from top-ranked English departments across the country. This will be a quick look, and it won't cover all there is to be said about the role of English departments in junking English, but it will be a start. I'll return to the issue in future blogs, and over time I trust a colorful picture will emerge of just what English departments are up to, and what the costs of their activities might be, for the future of the language, the future of literature, and the future of English departments themselves.

A couple of caveats before I begin. I take for granted, and expect you will soon see why, that all these issues are connected. And I take for granted, too, that it is an act of good faith to try to lay them out as honestly as I can in the public forum of this blog. There is a clubby sort of insularity in English--one that owes as much to its quarter century of beleaguered ineffectual leftism as to its longer tradition of tweedy politesse--that says it is a consummate betrayal of the field to discuss or even acknowledge its troubles and failures beyond the confines of the field itself. Such behavior is usually reviled as "airing one's dirty laundry" or "giving ammunition to the (reactionary and ignorant) enemy." I disagree. English professors are--or ought to be--public servants. They are--or ought to be--the custodians of the language and the literary tradition that arises from skilled, artistic use of that language. And as such they are--or ought to be--accountable to the public.

This means that English professors betray themselves, their students, and their field when they refuse to respond to legitimate, if painful, criticism from outside. It also means that they have an obligation to explain themselves--in clear, comprehensible language--to parents, students, and the educated reading public. It also means that they have an obligation to think a little harder about the social, and even civic, goals of their work, and to consider very seriously the proposition that the decline in English majors, and the growing economic difficulties of the field, may have as much, if not more, to do with how English comports itself than with "the corporatization of the university," the "commodification of education," and the shallow materialism of American culture. There is a lot of blame to be passed around, and a number of prominent English professors are actively engaged in pointing their postmodern fingers at the whipping boys I listed above. But, true to the reflexive victimhood of identity politics, few have been willing to suggest that English may be playing some sort of role in its own decline.

But as I have intimated at numerous points in this blog, and will continue to intimate in future blogs, English has a lot to answer for, and is often its own worst press.

Exhibit A: the illiterate course description. There are so very many of these on the web that I cannot do justice to them. So for today, I'll just cover two.

Next fall, Princeton will be offering English 212, "Black Bohemia: Racial Authenticity in Post Civil Rights Music and Literature." You may be shocked to see such lackadaisical punctuation coming from a top English department. But the missing en-dash in "Post Civil Rights" is the least of this course description's problems. According to the professor, "This course examines the ways in which class, gender, region, sexuality and various socio-economic shifts in the African-American communities of the 1970s, 80s, and 90s have shaped and informed contemporary black literature and music." Translation: this is a course about how black literature and music have been affected by absolutely everything. How, you ask, can one little course possibly handle such a huge project? The obliging professor offers an answer in the very next sentence: "An emphasis on exploring the cross-pollination of themes and aesthetic forms in contemporary literature and popular music will be stressed." Never mind the non-sequitur between the two sentences (it is not clear how an aesthetic focus on theme and style will answer the essentially sociological concerns of the course). What I want to know is, how do you stress an emphasis? Do you have to warm up first?

Princeton is not alone, though. You can do just as well at UCLA, which offers the intriguingly titled Remagined Archives: Critical Collage/Poetry Writng Seminar. Perhaps the two missing "i"'s in the course title are meant to remind us of the analytical gaze that is necessary for all critical writing and reimagining? Or, perhaps, they symbolize the blind leap of faith that is required to assume a course so advertised could be competently taught. Let's assume the latter and dive in.

The description is as follows: "One of the distinguishing characteristics of certain major works of modernist literature is the use of techniques of context-leaping association and fragmentation, such as collage, for the purposes of both aesthetic renovation and social and ideological critique. These techniques require the discovery and use of often copious amounts of material drawn from both obscure archives and the flux of contemporary culture, whether ancient, esoteric texts or mass media imagery. It should be no surprise, then, that ground-breaking works of Asian American literature from the 1930s onward also experiement with forms of rapid juxtaposition of images and language from diverse sources, as a way both to create a distinctly experienced text and transform their racialized or ethnicized relation to pre-existing social and cultural contexts. In this course, we shall study some of these innovative works and their intertextual sources, and then use various related techniques in our own exploration of archives, whether personal (e.g. family photographs) or institutionalized (e.g. library holdings), and their reanimation in new intermedia, genre/language/history-crossing works that revise extant representations of Asian American life."

It's just possible that this is a performative course description--one that seeks to embody in its syntax the "techniques of context-leaping association and fragmentation" with which the course itself is concerned. But somehow I just know that the convoluted agonies of this prose are not the result of "experiement"--racialized, ethnicized, or otherwise--so much as they are the sad proof of their author's extraordinarily tenuous grasp of English. A major contention of mine is that the ability to think clearly and the ability to write clearly are closely, inextricably tied. So you'll know what I think about this prof's ability to teach a course he can't even describe.

You will say I am picky. Hell yes, I'm picky. There is no excuse for stuff like this. Illiterate course descriptions speak as poorly for the department that puts them on its web site as they do of the teachers who write them. As such, they speak to the profession's widespread lack of interest in the details of language and its sorry failure to value the craft of clear expression. Illiterate course descriptions also display a contempt for students, who are expected not to notice that their professors can't write to save their lives, and they display the peculiar self-loathing--or is it incompetence?--of English departments themselves, which cannot be bothered to proofread the prose in which they present themselves to the world. Is it any wonder that we aren't taken seriously? Not at all. The wonder is that we do nothing to stop embarrassing ourselves in such devastating, predictable, and entirely preventable ways.