Emeritus English professor Sanford Pinsker poses the question: "Does it matter if English majors read Ulysses?" The ensuing column raises a number of related questions: Does it matter if there are no faculty members who can teach Ulysses? What does it mean when a major literary work--or a major author--begins to disappear from college reading lists and graduation requirements? Are there some authors, and some texts, that we can all agree should not be allowed to drop away? Or should the English major of today be more focussed on skills and issues--"critical thinking," race, class, gender, power, sexuality, and so on--than on literary forms and literary content?

Several of those questions are more mine than Pinsker's; his piece resonates with concerns that are pretty chronically in the forefront of my mind. He doesn't have answers. But here's what he says:

If the question, "Does it matter if English majors read Ulysses?", had been posed to me a decade or two ago I would have responded with a rousing, unqualified "Yes!" "Yes!," readers of Ulysses will know, is the final word of James Joyce's epical 1922 novel, and represents Molly's acceptance of Leopold Bloom's proposal of marriage as well as an affirming word, for Joyce, that characterized the human spirit at its best.

It will probably surprise nobody who kept even a half-eye on academic politics over the last few years to learn that I was largely in the minority about the importance of reading Ulysses -- and I'm not talking about all-college curriculum committees but about my colleagues in the English department. Since I've retired, things, alas, have grown worse on the Ulysses front: none of my former colleagues teach Ulysses because none of them have read it, nor do any of them plan to pick up Joyce's bulky tome any time soon.

As they were quick to tell me years ago, our English majors can live productive, happy lives without wracking their brains over Joyce's multi-leveled puns and his nasty habit of drawing from languages of Europe: French, German, Italian, and others.

I don't apologize for my days as a high culture warrior or for asking, as gently as I could, if the newest course being proposed meets the warranty of an eight-speed blender test -- namely, will the books we're assigning our English majors still be read eight years from now? In retrospect, I can see how some of my colleagues got mighty tired of crying (usually without success) that it's high time our majors were exposed to a wider range of long-silenced multicultural voices.

In roughly the same way that political correctness was a juggernaut that swept through most English departments (including mine), multiculturalism was the trump card that no elitist work could bet -- not Ulysses, not Faulkner's Absalom, Absalom!, not Bellow's The Adventures of Augie March.

[...]

I am told that current students at my old college cannot take a course in Ulysses because no current professor wants to teach it for the simple (?) reason that no current professor has read it. No matter, our majors can take a course in "The Male Body Image" and read "novels" by and about weight lifters, or a new course in body variations that includes discussions of body piercing and tattooing.

What can I say to my former colleagues? People teach their passions, and if that means body piercing instead of Ulysses, so be it. But just don't tell people you turn out serious English majors because alumnae who know better will laugh you out of town.

I'm curious to know what readers think. What constitutes a "serious" English major today? What constitutes professional competence when it comes to teaching college English? And where--if anywhere--do we go from here?

I think the "problem" is exaggerated a bit; however, the problem of the canon is serious and that's why people tend to exaggerate. To say studying Shakespeare is "almost always" optional without offering quantitative evidence sounds a bit alarmist. I do agree that the "multicultural" trend tends to force out canonical works---the real question ought to be "Are multicultural works worth teaching and if so which ones do we inlcude and what do we sacrifice by doing so?"
One option is to increase the graduation requirements for english majors. Require a stronger background in classics, but then again which ones? The canon is huge--even if we avoid the multicultural stuff. (does anyone else find the desire to dismiss it disturbing?)
In addition, I would say that "critical thinking" and "literary forms and content" training are not mutually exclusive. Are you calling for a return to text and text only formalism along with a "classic" canon? Don't some canonical works cover "race, class, gender, power, sexuality and so on"? Should we just avoid those issues because some people don't like them?
Shouldn't a literary education give students a view of major movements and trends?
Note that in Pinsker's complaint he doesn't actually explain why reading _Ulysses_ is so important (I'm sure he could). Perhaps that's a failure of HIS generation: if the new profs aren't teaching the great works maybe their teachers failed to relay the importance of the "great" works--relying on tradition to do the work (I'm only semi-serious here).
Regardless, what to teach in a semester is a difficult question. Erin, you teach Victorian novel courses. How many can you teach in a semester, and don't you wish you had room for a few more? I think the issue is a bit more complicated than Pinsker makes it.

"Or should the English major of today be more focussed on skills and issues--"critical thinking," race, class, gender, power, sexuality, and so on--than on literary forms and literary content?"

Why would a professor of English have any more expertise in critical thinking than would, say, a professor of Latin or a professor of electrical engineering?

I agree with David--critical thinking should be a component of most college learning; it's not a skill that is unique to the field of literary studies. One needs the skill to read and interpret Henry James and to solve integrals in calculus. The English prof should be able to help a student approach James (or Joyce).

The problem with most "multicultural" texts is that they are singular in theme and focus. They do not provide much to talk about save race and victimization.

Simply put, they lack nuance and the type of universality required to make them classic works of literature.

There are, of course, exceptions, but these are rarely assigned because they are "too difficult."

I realize that this is just a comment thread, but your description of the problem offers no evidence--just a description of the problem that is a generalization, and it's the same generalization that is repeated ad nauseum.

I'll give you an example of a good multicultural text (this was in a criticism class): Chinua Achebe wrote an essay condeming the racism in _The Heart of Darkness_. He did this without going into "victimization"--My class had a discussion about his argument and condemnation of Conrad's book, even reading a rebuttal piece (written by another African). My point: we were talking about race without speaking of victims; we considered whether the subtle racism over-powered the critique of imperialism in the book with most deciding that the book was worthwhile, if flawed. Indeed, the discussion led to a careful consideration of racism itself--the differences between the KKK kind and condesencion towards other races. We were essentially considering the literary merits of the work--weighing its strengths and weaknesses--what's wrong with that?
There's a flawed assumption that any discussion of race must be a discussion of victimization.
Don't we also study many works "singular in theme and focus"?
Is talking about race never appropriate? Should we not read writers that do? No more Huck Finn?
What are the "too difficult" texts that aren't assigned?

Two reports that document shifts in the English major curriculum, with special attention to Shakespeare and other major authors:

ACTA's 1996 The Shakespeare File: What English Majors Are Really Studying (available as .pdf) and NAS' 2000 study, Losing the Big Picture. (full study available as .pdf).

ACTA surveyed 70 universities and found that only 23 required English majors to take Shakespeare. They used a very expansive definition of "required." NAS surveyed elite colleges and found that in 1964-65, 48% of departments required English majors to take a course on Shakespeare; that number had dwindled to 16% by 1998-99. The NAS also found that "between 1964 and 1997 courses dealing with major authors, periods, and genres dropped from 58% to 35% of the total number of courses available" and that "the number of departments requiring a thesis or comprehensive exam was halved between 1964, when twenty did so, and 1997, when only ten did."

I know a Jesuit University that was "required" to hire as Dean of the School of A and S, a gentleman who was the former campaign manager for the newly elected state governor. Both men were Chinese. The first administrative decision was to force multi-cultural issues as the focus of the English department. A wonderful text that also included the opportunity to discuss race--"The Bedford Introduction to Literature", has now been dropped and replaced with a sub standard text. I remember a committee conversation among faculty members as to whether or not it was important to teach writing as a form of critical analysis--it was decided it was not. Finally, the newly liberated women, who had taken over the Fine Arts department were demanding that no art major be required to "write a paper". The reason: "these students express themselves in a different way".
Oh well -- so much for the benefits of using an express elevator for "minorities" to use to geth to the leadership level.

Yet again, a complex issue is reduced to a Coke-Pepsi set of options.

Like some of the commenters above, I'd like to see some actual empirical evidence here. I'm willing to bet that "multicultural" literature has replaced, not *Ulysses* or *King Lear*, but rather Allen Tate and Robert Penn Warren and Bernard Malamud and John Cheever. And you know what? Toni Morrison is a better artist than all of them.

Winston Smith's comments display total ignorance of multicultural literature. You cannot reduce it to issues of race. Toni Morrison's *Beloved* and *Paradise* care very little about race, in fact. The former is a complex meditation on what it means to be free, not just politically, but existentially. The latter is one of the most interesting 20th century literary investigations of violence and spirituality. A work like Ellison's *Invisible Man* is likewise less about "race" and more about the contradictions of life in an undemocratic democracy. White folks tend to imagine that all multicultural literature is about race, which helps them imagine that all multicultural literature is about *them*.

And is any university English program seriously playing the skills versus content game? I thought that was the sophomoric debate of K-12 educators! But a college major *is* about more than purposeless exposure to content. It's about the mastery of professional means of knowledge-production. Canon debates are essentially political debates by other means. Any real scholar of literature knows that one could make a case that there's too much important Renaissance literature to justify teaching the novel; or there's too much important classical literature to justify teaching vernacular traditions. I mean, why read *Ulysses* before one's read Rabelais and Sterne and Wordsworth's *Prelude* and Byron's *Don Juan*? And why read those before one's read the classical satirical and encyclopediac traditions from which Joyce emerged? Or why *Augie March* and not *Gravity's Rainbow*? If the English major was simply about literature appreciation, they'd have a point. But one of the major goals of any English major is to have students master the professional frameworks for understanding the field of literature.

From this perspective, the key might be to have students read major texts in major periods and genres, without worrying about coverage of every "great work of literature." The students would also then need to master the critical traditions that have defined those periods and genres.

Writers like Pinsker fail to consider a major pedagogical question: For what purpose am I teaching X or Y or Z? No doubt, one can be an excellent scholar of literature without reading *Ulysses* (to think otherwise would be, essentially, to think that one couldn't have been an excellent scholar of literature before *Ulysses* was written). No doubt as well, one cannot be an excellent scholar of modernist or postmodernist literature without reading *Ulysses*. But simply reading *Ulysses* won't really help you become an excellent scholar of modernism. (I believe it was Walter Benn Michaels who confessed to never having read *Moby-Dick*, and no one would accuse him of being less than an excellent scholar of American fiction.) Let's also remember that 18th and 19th century education often involved hearing lectures about texts that one would never actually read, and a good deal of art and music criticism used to involve no first-hand experience with major works, but rather attention to sheet music or others' descriptions of artworks. Franco Moretti's idea of "distant reading" returns us to this notion of surveying vast regions of artistic territory rather than focussing for an entire semester on individual works of genius such as *Ulysses*. Some balance between the two approaches would be best.

I wasn't an English major, but before I graduated (1999, so not that long ago) I did read, for class, Spencer's Faerie Queene.

(Fortunately I was never daft enough to take the Chaucer class. I prefer my English post-Middle.)

That's because I took a specialised class in the period, which wouldn't have been required of even an English major.

Requirements shift over time, and I don't think it's inherently bad - though I agree immediately with some of the criticism of specific choices. Toni Morrison simply isn't that important, but By God she gives us multiculturalism points, doesn't she?

(And I don't buy what Alvin says about her, either - indeed, I wrote this part of the comment before I noticed he mentioned her, simply because "multicultural voices" was mentioned.

Read her - wasn't that good. And I was a philosophy major, so it's not that I'm oblivious to meditations on the existential; I just never saw the point to the Morrison hype.

Perhaps I was simply poisoned by the presentation and the to-do about her, and if she'd been introduced as Just Another Author With An Excellent Book, it would have been more effective?

Doubt it.)

Thanks for the numbers, Erin. However, the ACTA study surveyed only 70 colleges and the NAS only looked at 25. The evidence is suggestive, but far from conclusive. I would be interested in stats that are more comprehensive. I wonder if the course offerings at some places have changed because of changing budgets or enrollments (probably not in the NAS survey, since it looked at "elite" colleges--but aren't they a different species from the average state school?)

Of course, to really understand what those studies mean one would have to see what, exactly, the requirements were at those schools that eliminated the Shakespeare course. What courses were students required to take? What electives were available? What did those courses cover? Were students exposed to Shakespeare/canonical writers in other courses? What courses are replacing the ones that disappear? Do those courses have any value? Why did the schools change the requirements--what were their goals?

To really make conclusions based upon the numbers, we need answers to those questions. Numbers mean nothing without a proper comparison.

I'm an English undergrad at an average state school (U of Florida). We are not required to take any particular course at all (besides ENC 1101/2, but most English majors probably passed out of that in high school). There are several "tracks" or "models" for study, but we are not required to select one. We simply need to take 10 upper division English courses, be they film, cultural studies, creative, theoretical, or literary.

Of our 76 upper-division undergraduate course offerings next spring, 16 (or 1/5) are primarily literary. Many more involve reading literature, but the thesis of the course is not literary but cultural/political (such as the course "Empire and Gender"). Many more are film, some are creative writing, and one is purely theoretical.

As an undergrad I have a limited perspective on the issue, but to my mind the problem of the canon arises because no one feels comfortable using words like "aesthetics" anymore. If the canon is to be defended, it must be defended aesthetically rather than with claims like "Tennyson expresses just what it is to be English", because those claims can be countered with claims like, "Morrison expresses just what it is to be a minority."

I understand that aesthetics is historically contingent, but I find it humorous that no professor whom I have ever taken can actually live up to this belief. That is to say, every professor eventually lets slip statements such as, "this work is much better than that"---not to mention that professors edit our essays to cohere to a certain modern prose aesthetic. Even if the philosophical iconclasts like Derrida and Foucault whom we worship in English departments are right, and almost everything we can think of is historically contingent, I don't see how that realization can affect us. It's like being told that we don't have free will---we can only nod, raise our eyebrows, and continue doing exactly what we were doing before. If it's true that our culture effects our love for Shakespeare, then it's also true that we can never step outside our cultural love for Shakespeare. So why not continue loving and teaching Shakespeare, instead of teaching works we all feel are inferior, simply as a sort of lacerating reminder of the historical contingency of all of our beliefs?

I think Alvin makes a good point here: "Writers like Pinsker fail to consider a major pedagogical question: For what purpose am I teaching X or Y or Z?" I find myself asking the same question of cultural-studies courses. Do we teach race-class-gender simply because certain works *discuss* RCG? Or because RCG is important from a moral and political standpoint? But if we affirm the first, why don't we teach psychology or theology or any other of the external "themes" of literature in English classes? And if we affirm the second, why don't we teach RCG in every major in college? Simply because it's morally important doesn't imply that it should be a subject of English.

To my mind, my English department has no idea what it's teaching. When we "study literature", *what are we studying*? Are we studying the literary-ness of literature, or what the literature happens to be talking about? It's evident from my tone that I agree with Northrop Frye in that we ought to study *how* literature means, rather than use it as a springboard to critique politically what it says.

Ulysses is in a different category than Shakespeare and Milton. It is too tough of a nut to crack, and the reward is little. It's just too impenetrable. Not worth the time to read except for the bragging rights. Yes, it's a masterpiece in its own way -- but people have limited time.

..perhaps those with limited time for reading should be studying something other than Eng. Lit.

I just checked - my undergrad university ("elite" by almost any measure) DOES require English majors to take a course in Shakespeare, though not necessarily to read Joyce, Spenser, or Milton [though you would have to try hard to get by without reading at least one of Spenser or Milton.] The core requirements include:

1 course in Poetry and poetics
2 courses in British literature before 1750
2 courses in British literature from 1750-1900 OR American literature before 1900
1 course in Shakespeare
1 course in Critical Methods

Students may then concentrate in a variety of areas - genres, historical periods, creative writing, literature in a specific foreign language, a particular author, an interdisciplinary relationship, or "special topics" (gender, race, etc).

Ryan, I think you've made some interesting comments. However, I have to disagree with you. You write that only 1/5 of the courses at your university are "primarily literary." But one of the questions on the table is this: What does it mean for something to be "primarily literary"? Plato didn't care about poetry's "primarily literary" qualities, while Aristotle was interested in the form of tragic drama insofar as he could connect it to a social function. Horace writes that art must instruct and entertain, and neither of those are distinctly literary qualities. Much of this discourse of literariness is a rather new phenomenon

Secondly, the reason why race or gender or empire become major topics of research and teaching in literature departments is that these topics were more often than not neglected for the past few thousand years of critical attention to literature. So, on the one hand, these topics offer new areas of research; on the other hand, some critics believe that it's morally or politically important to turn critical attention to these issues. No one in English departments is saying that other departments *should not* attend to these issues, and in fact, nearly every discipline outside of certain math and science fields has paid more scholarly attention to race/class/gender over the past 20 years.

At the same time, I think it's simply wrong to suggest that they are the only themes English departments attend to. I recently completed a Ph.D. at an Ivy League English department, and I had courses on jazz, religion and literature, periodizing early modern literature, the idea of representation in Victorian literature, portraiture in poetry, transitions in South African literature, and so on.

Your idea that we should just give in and enjoy our love of Shakespeare uncritically is anti-intellectual. It is always best practice to question one's gut reactions, one's taste, one's appreciations. What are we liking when we like a work of art? I would avoid psychological interpretations of this question and instead consider the historical or social factors, but that's my anti-psychological bias.

I agree with you that English departments have lost a clear sense of purpose, but that's as much a function of the death of the New Critical dominance of English studies as anything else. Catherine Gallagher has written about this quite intelligently, and it has little to do with the actual content of literary studies and more to do with institutional politics. But the idea that the purpose of literature departments should be primarily to discuss "literariness" simply begs the larger question. You delineate the choices quite simplistically as a matter of form versus content. But the best critics today, such as Fredric Jameson, always analyze why a particular content is encoded in a particular form at a particular time, and that's the job of the critic. The question that few literature scholars can answer is this: What's the point of studying literature? But given that few artists, from Bach to Henry James, made art for art's sake, I think it's no surprise that English departments don't attend strictly to aesthetics. I agree that more attention to aesthetics would be a good thing, but to stop at appreciation is anti-intellectual. James Wood is not a better critic than Gayatri Spivak. (Rather, both annoy me about equally.)

Olivia -- of U.S. News & World Report's top 25 universities, only four (Harvard, Stanford, Cal Tech, and UC Berkeley) require undergraduate English majors to take a course in Shakespeare. You are lucky to have gone to Stanford.

Brett -- Ulysses may be a difficult novel, but it is hardly "impenetrable." Any moderately intelligent college student should be able to read it, especially with the help of Gifford's annotations and the many useful structural guides to which earlier readers could not resort. However, Ulysses is ultimately an immature and egotistical experiment, exemplary of Joyce's youthful braggadocio. By contrast, his almost entirely ignored Finnegans Wake is one of the most humane, funny, and -- at times -- movingly beautiful pieces of literature ever written.

It would be really nice if the troll Alvin Lucier would actually read what others say for a change, instead of replying the the straw man he's constructed for himself.

I also worry about his continued presence on both of Erin's blogs--he's beginning to look quite the stalker.

Had he read my post, he might have noticed that what I condemn is the "multicultural" literature that is generally taught--the stuff that plays one note over and over again. Much of the more complex stuff is ignored in favor of works that seek to indoctrinate rather than to explore.

And Toni Morrison is so overrated. How many times has she written the same basic novel? That well has run dry. I'd gladly place Bernard Malamud WELL ahead of her in terms of literary merit.

Alvin, thanks for your reply. I think your criticisms are on the whole quite valid. But let me try to re-express some of what I said earlier.

I have read nothing more enlightening on the current critical scenario than Frye's "Polemical Introduction" to his Anatomy of Criticism, despite its increasing age. In it he compares the current attitude to literature to the "naive induction" of early physics that used "hot" and "cold" as fundamental principles rather than explaining those principles. If I understand you correctly, I think you accuse me of making this mistake: of swallowing Shakespare whole, of using him to define literariness, of begging the question. But this is not what I (am trying to) mean.

Instead, I am trying to accuse an external, thematic approach to literature of this very fallacy. To pluck issues of race, class, gender out of all literary works and study them is, to my mind, like studying all chemicals that are hot instead of studying why those chemicals become hot (sorry.. I'm not a scientist). That is to say, the fact that Conrad does not humanize his natives is certainly important to the subjects of history and race; but it becomes important to literature only when we look at how that characterization works within this particular novel. And this looking at function, turning the work inside and out to see how it works and means, is what I believe the study of literature ought to be---not a cherry-picking of politically interesting themes.

You accuse me of separating form/content, but I never meant to and I apologize if I did. I agree with you: I think one possible definition of "literariness" is, that in which form and content are (especially) inseparable. So when I say that we ought to study how a poem works, that is necessarily also to say that we study what it means. But again, this separation is exactly what I accuse of over-thematization. Poking out Conrad's characterization of the natives in no way depends on the rest of the novel or his impressionistic prose style. It takes what he says, removes it, analyzes it outside of his context and inside our own postmodern one, and (surprise surprise) finds it wanting of postmodern political tact. Is this really the accepted hermeneutical process?

I don't mean to sound anti-intellectual, but I do want to criticize those who seem to think we can step outside of our historically-contingent beliefs. No matter how hard we try, Morrison will never seem better to us than Shakespeare. I argue not that we should accept Shakespeare as a sort of critical origin, but that we ought to study those authors most whose intricacies and aesthetics fascinate us most, to discover why and how they fascinate us so.

I don't think we need to answer the perennial question, What's the point of studying literature? What's the point of studying physics or astronomy or any other intricate system? Since when does academia need to justify itself in terms of political output? The sciences do not subject themself to this, and I am still baffled why the humanities seem to think they need to. If we believe that a work of literature, like a clock, can be studied, then that belief alone constitutes a reason.

I'm sorry if I'm belaboring my point, and I apologize both to you and other commenters.. If you'd like I'd love to carry this conversation over to email.

peace,
Ryan

You're not anti-intellectual, Ryan. You're just anti-ideological. For people like Alvin, those terms are synonymous. People like Alvin are, however, wrong.

Winston, I'm assuming that by "troll" you mean "someone who disagrees with you." As such, I'll gladly be a troll. I suppose you'd like blogs to be echo-chambers of single perspectives. (I also comment at at least four other blogs on a regular basis, under various other names. So no, I'm not stalking anyone. Your baseless accusations reveal your own lack of ethics, good taste, logic, good looks, and overall sex appeal. J'accuse!)

And Winston, I did read your comments. A vague and inarticulate distinction between the multicultural literature "generally taught" and formally or thematically complex multicultural literature is not a meaningful distinction. Care to back it up with any evidence? As an undergraduate and graduate student, I studied Charles Chesnutt, Pauline Hopkins, W.E.B. Du Bois, Alain Locke, Langston Hughes, Zora Neale Huston, Sterling A. Brown, Ralph Ellison, James Baldwin, Ishmael Reed, Amiri Baraka, Rita Dove, Nathaniel Mackey, Harryette Mullen, Percival Everett, Albert Murray, and many other African-American writers of aesthetic and philosophical depth. I write this list not to speak of myself but to question your unsupported claim that such literature is not "generally taught." You are perhaps correct that such literature isn't introduced to high school students, but then again, we've dumbed down the K-12 literature curriculum across the board and not just in multicultural lit.

Ryan, I agree with you that thematic criticism that cherrypicks content is bad criticism. But can you cite major critics of Conrad who are guilty of what you're accusing them of here? Achebe's polemic approaches it, but his is not a piece of literary criticism. It is an accusation of racism, plain and simple. Edward Said has written a subtle and complex analysis of form, style, and representation in *Heart of Darkness* in his book, *Culture and Imperialism*. Frederic Jameson has also written a brilliant study of Conrad's style and its social content in the romance chapter of *The Political Unconscious*. John McClure has a third excellent study of Conrad that bridges form and politics. It's not the fault of race/class/gender critics that there are *bad* critics. There's plenty of terrible formalism that neglects content and context, just as there's plenty of bad thematic or political criticism that neglects formal complexity. Which is to say: there's plenty of second-rate scholarship in every field. That's why it's called second-rate.

I also disagree with Ryan that Morrison will never sound better to us than Shakespeare. I agree that as an overall artist, Shakespeare is light-years beyond Morrison. But thinking of Kant for a moment, I believe that there is an aesthesis of ideas, and the idea of freedom is one of the most affectively powerful ideas in the history of man. Morrison's ability to weave the stuff of slave narrative into an operatic work of terror and beauty on the subject of freedom lends *Beloved* a powerful quality that sets it apart from -- not under or above -- Shakespeare's work. But this is generally why I distrust aesthetics as the basis for rigorous scholarship. Anyone with an ear will tell you that there's a time for The Beatles and there's a time for Bach. And any music program worth its salt is going to offer courses in the songwriting of Lennon and McCartney as well as in the rigors of Baroque counterpoint. In a music program that emphasizes only the value of complexity, Bach will be taught, while the gallant style that CPE Bach followed might be ignored, along with Puccini, Gilbert and Sullivan, and other "pop" figures. But a true music history program will teach The Beatles in a 20th century music history course just as they teach Bach in a Baroque music history course, for The Fab Four changes the face of music since the 1960s far more drastically than Bach changed the music of his time (he was out of style even before he died, and only rediscovered in the 19th century). The point being: the purpose of your discipline will determine the content. If you want to study complex aesthetic forms, that's one thing. If you want to study the history of aesthetic forms, that's another. If you want to study the relationship between politics and aesthetic forms, that's a third. And so on.

And Ryan, I don't believe English needs to justify itself in terms of "political output." I never said such a thing. I simply meant above that disciplines need to have what Thomas Kuhn called a paradigm, or a set of central questions and methods for answering them. In one era, that paradigm was an ethical or moral criticism. In another era, the study of literature preserved culture against barbarity. In India, as Gauri Viswanathan has written, the paradigm of English was about assimilating Indians to English cultural values. In American Studies, American literature was used to define a "national culture." The roots of New Criticism were in the Fugitives' desire to pit culture against industrialization. Today, though, you won't find any clear purpose guiding literature scholars beyond immediate and local professional goals.

Finally, Winston, to return to your pointless comments, nowhere do I claim that literary study needs to be centered on ideology or politics. Instead, I wrote nothing more than that good criticism attends to form and content, and that good criticism attends to both the text and the context. Stop trying to turn me into your straw-man "liberal brainwashing academic." Insofar as such comments suggest that you fail to read my own, you run the risk of sounding like a hypocrite. It's unbecoming.

In the midst of all this pointless debate, no one bothered to question the *truth* of Sanford Pinsker's claims that no one at Franklin & Marshall teaches *Ulysses* because no one has read it.

Now, F&M has a tiny English department with only one professor working on British literature of the 20th century (and no Irish literature scholars). Genevieve Abravanel, their 20th century British scholar, no doubt has read *Ulysses*. She teaches courses in Woolf, and it's not like *Ulysses* is a tougher read than *The Waves*.

I couldn't determine if she's ever taught Joyce, but certainly she's read him.

(F&M also teaches single author courses on Chaucer, Blake, Mark Twain, and others, so I don't think they're doing too bad, canonically speaking, for a small English department. In terms of multicultural lit, they have one professor of African-American literature and one professor of British lit who also teaches the modern Indian novel. They have no experts in Scottish, Irish, Australian, African, Asian-American, Latino-American, or Native American literature, and I see no evidence that anyone teaches this material. So I find it quite odd that Pinsker can seriously argue that multicultural lit has replaced Joyce. If anything, *Ulysses* doesn't get taught as often as it should for the same reason that Pynchon's inferior *The Crying of Lot 49* gets taught over his brilliant *V.*, *Gravity's Rainbow*, and *Mason & Dixon* -- namely, because these huge, complex, deeply allusive novels would take up the majority of an entire semester. In the end, why isn't Pinsker complaining that Richardson's *Clarissa* isn't being taught? In the history of the novel, it's far more important than *Ulysses*.)

As Erin has noted through her link, Sanford Pinsker's essay was published in its entirety on my website The Irascible Professor. It's gratifying to see that there still are people who do care about the content and quality of the undergraduate curriculum, as expressed through the many comments posted here.

Sincerely,

Dr. Mark H. Shapiro
Editor and Publisher
The Irascible Professor
http://irascibleprofessor.com

I couldn't determine if [Genevieve Abravanel has] ever taught Joyce, but certainly she's read him.

Her 2004 dissertation claims to study works by "Virginia Woolf, F. R. Leavis, Evelyn Waugh, Aldous Huxley, Wyndham Lewis, W. H. Auden, T. S. Eliot, Nancy Cunard, Clive Bell, Elizabeth Bowen, Rudyard Kipling, and H. G. Wells." So how can you be so certain that she's read Ulysses?

A more attentive reader might notice that Pinsker retired at the end of the 2004 academic year. Ms. Abravanel received her Ph.D. from Duke University that same year and presumably started working at Franklin and Marshall in the fall, probably as Pinsker's replacement. So when Pinsker writes that "none of my former colleagues teach Ulysses because none of them have read it," his claim is true even if his successor has read it.

Jon Bon, your last paragraph simply leads to the obvious point: if Abravanel is the department's only scholar of 20th century British literature, perhaps none of "his former colleagues" teach the novel because it's outside their fields. When a department, like F&M's, has one medievalist, one Renaissance expert, one Romanticist, and so on, they tend to stick fairly strictly to their specializations (cuz if the Romanticist teaches *Ulysses*, then Pinsker can come along and complain that no one's teaching the Blake course).

And your list of Abravanel's dissertation interests only confirms my suspicion that she's read *Ulysses*. I can't be sure of it; I also can't be sure, as David Hume wrote, that the sun will come up tomorrow. But I'm willing to bet she has.

But my larger, implied, point, was that Pinsker is using an sample space of 1 to make huge claims about how multiculturalism has damaged literary studies, and even his one sample seems to disprove him.

play slots play slots http://www.worldwidecasinofinder.info/play-slots.html

perhaps none of "his former colleagues" teach the novel because it's outside their fields.

As a long-time veteran of Franklin and Marshall, Pinsker surely knows his former colleagues extremely well. And if he's willing to state publicly that none of them has read Ulysses, then I see no reason for doubting the veracity of that statement. I also don't see any of his former colleagues coming forward with allegations of slander.

Pinsker scorns the atomized model of literary specialization you propose above, wherein nobody ever steps beyond the boundaries of his or her "field" and gets mighty fussy if someone else encroaches. Particularly in a small department, it seems essential that each English professor be able to cover the major works in what was once known as the canon, even for reasons of pragmatic necessity. The "medieval scholar" should be able (and should be expected) to teach the Romantic poets if "the Romanticist" is on leave, and so on.

As such, that nobody in this particular department (with the admitted possible exception of one assistant professor) has even read what is arguably the twentieth century's most significant literary work points to a problem. The problem, which Pinsker is trying to get at, is that of English professors who feel entitled under the rubric of multiculturalism and canon dissolution to read or teach only a tiny subset of English literature. Some focus on a single literary genre from an historical period as short as sixty years while others refuse to specialize in literature at all, preferring to profess expertise in "culture," or "gender," or "race," (with token passing references to cherry-picked literary works).

Given your statements above, I suspect you won't have a problem with narrow specialization. But the problem, for anyone who cares, is that English professors are rarely any longer humanists of genuine erudition and breadth of learning. They have become narrow-minded, careerist specialists who have often forgotten why humans started to write and read literature in the first place (i.e., not to provide fodder for MLA panels).

Jon Bon: You've made a bunch of immense claims with absolutely no evidence to support them.

Even *if* no one in the department has read *Ulysses* -- a claim I severely doubt, given my own experience in the field -- that may have nothing to do with academic specialization. The medievalist may very well be able to teach Romanticism, and vice versa, even *if* s/he hasn't read a single Joyce novel.

Why is *Ulysses* the touchstone here? Why not, say, the entire collected works of Aristotle or Aquinas? Why not all of Sophocles? Why not all Trollope? Why not, as I wrote before, *Clarissa*? Why not *The Cantos* (which were more influential than *Ulysses* anyway)?

What Jon Bon doesn't acknowledge in his screed against specialization is that specialization is how you make a curriculum. If the Romanticist teaches a Chaucer class, who's to guarantee that Romanticism is getting taught that semester? And if professors are running single author courses all the time, who's guaranteeing that students are reading Langland (who is at least as important as Chaucer), or Cather (who was doing modernism in the novel before all the boys), or Faulkner, and so on? What Jon Bon also doesn't acknowledge is that anyone with a background in literature can teach it to undergraduates. I specialized fairly strictly in 20th century literature, but I've taught major texts in every genre and every period, from medieval to postmodern. And guess what? I hadn't read all of these works before I put them on my syllabus. But as someone who *has* read *Ulysses* five times, I can tell you why I'd never teach it: it would take up at least four weeks on a syllabus, and I don't think it's important enough to spend a third of a semester on it.

There's a conservative-critique-of-academia Catch-22: if you become an expert in an area of literature, you're accused of narrow-minded specialization. But if you do interdisciplinary work that bridges historical periods and textual genres, you're accused of teaching outside your area of expertise. What critics of specialization fail to mention is the explosion in knowledge about smaller and smaller pieces of academic terrain. So many non-specialists who teach Shakespeare get him wrong, because they are completely ignorant of the history of editorial and manuscript criticism and mostly ignorant of new research in Renaissance culture. (See Harold Bloom's work on Shakespeare for a classic example of getting him wrong.)

To reduce college education to the teaching of individual major works, or even individual authors, is ridiculous. No program can cover all the major texts and authors in four years -- not even "great books" colleges. An English major who has studied Richardson, Defoe, Fielding, Smollet, Scott, Austen, Dickens, and Eliot, but hasn't read *Ulysses*, is not in bad shape. And I bet you as many literature scholars 50 years ago made it out of university without reading Austen as don't read *Ulysses* today.

In the end, we could locate Pinkser's own weak spots. He made a career out of multiculturalism, with the vast majority of his scholarship dealing with Jewish-American fiction. But has he read the Greek novels? Has he read all of *Piers Plowman*? Has he read *Humphrey Clinker*? Maybe: they are pretty major, canonical texts. But I'm sure we could find a gap, and then blame it on his own interest in "ethnic" fiction. I don't buy Jon Bon's defense of Pinkser as the model, broad-minded academic; his own academic work is as specialized as any other's. Or, to put it more accurately: we don't doubt Pinsker's own broad-mindedness despite his own narrow professional specialization. So why does he -- a retired scholar with experience only of a single, tiny, rather unimportant English department -- question the broad-mindedness of all other scholars? Why, when he made a career out of Jewish-American lit at a time when Jewish-American lit was the hot ethnic lit to make a career out of, does he question other's committment to multicultural literature? If he thinks *Ulysses* is more important than, say, Cynthia Ozick, why has he written more about Ozick than Joyce? Why has he written more about race than about Joyce?

Is it too much to ask to see Pinsker's own syllabi, to make sure he never taught a lesser novel when he could have taught *Ulysses*? Or to see if he ever taught *Clarissa*? I mean, what sort of scholar would teach Phillip Roth or Joseph Conrad when his department isn't running a course on Richardson?

Jon Bon: You've made a bunch of immense claims with absolutely no evidence to support them.

You continue to claim, citing such highly credible evidence as "my own experience in the field," that Pinsker is lying when he states that none of his former colleagues had read Ulysses. The simple fact is that you, "Alvin Lucier," self-professed recent Ivy-League Ph.D., know nothing about Franklin and Marshall's English Department -- other than what you have recently read on the Internet. You know nothing about what books its members, none of whom you have ever met, have or have not read. You yourself hold an academic position precisely nowhere. And yet, arrogantly assured that your (probably five- or six-year) "experience in the field" (as a graduate student) trumps the eyewitness account of an established professor who worked in that particular department for decades, you are willing to quibble, pirouette, and nitpick endlessly without any justification. And you accuse me of making "claims with absolutely no evidence to support them"?!

Why not *The Cantos* (which were more influential than *Ulysses* anyway)?

Oh, er, right. The Cantos were so much more influential than Ulysses. That sounds like yet another "immense claim with absolutely no evidence to support [it]."

Langland (who is at least as important as Chaucer)

Right again, "Alvin." Everyone knows that Langland is at least as important (probably more important!) as Chaucer. Or could this be yet another "immense claim with absolutely no evidence to support [it]"?

But as someone who *has* read *Ulysses* five times, I can tell you why I'd never teach it: it would take up at least four weeks on a syllabus, and I don't think it's important enough to spend a third of a semester on it.

Clearly other professors of English -- people who have held their Ph.D.s longer than a few months and may have read Ulysses fifty times -- disagree with your expert appraisal of Joyce's text. Lisa Ruddick, who got her doctorate from Harvard probably while you were still in short trousers, spends an entire quarter at the University of Chicago on the text. I would rather accept the opinion of someone such as Ruddick than that of a graduate student just out of diapers.

So many non-specialists who teach Shakespeare get him wrong, because they are completely ignorant of the history of editorial and manuscript criticism and mostly ignorant of new research in Renaissance culture. (See Harold Bloom's work on Shakespeare for a classic example of getting him wrong.)

Can we assume that Johnson, Coleridge, Goethe, Hazlitt, and other great critics of Shakespeare also "got him wrong" because they were ignorant of "the history of editorial and manuscript criticism" or "new research in Renaissance culture"? Maybe -- just to be safe -- we should assume that everyone (other than Alvin Lucier and his fellow Ivy League Ph.D.s, naturally) have always gotten everything wrong about the Bard. After all, "the history of editorial and manuscript criticism" and "new research in Renaissance culture" were always the most important things about Shakespeare.

To reduce college education to the teaching of individual major works, or even individual authors, is ridiculous.

Let's see -- during my own college education, I spent most of the time studying individual majors works by major authors. And it was hardly ridiculous. In fact, I hardly see how one can not "reduce college education to the teaching of individual major works, or even individual authors." "Okay, everyone, today we're going to discuss -- er -- we're going to discuss.... Culture!"

No program can cover all the major texts and authors in four years -- not even "great books" colleges.

And that is why judicious selection is so important.

An English major who has studied Richardson, Defoe, Fielding, Smollet, Scott, Austen, Dickens, and Eliot, but hasn't read *Ulysses*, is not in bad shape.

I thought someone who spent his time on "individual major works, or even individual authors" was "ridiculous"?

And I bet you as many literature scholars 50 years ago made it out of university without reading Austen as don't read *Ulysses* today.

Can you prove this? Or is it another "immense claim with absolutely no evidence to support [it]"?

Ryan, the humanities' feeling that it necessary to justify their
activities politically has both psychological and philosophical
roots. There was a time when most people believed in some sort of
objective truth, which led them to believe that there was genuinely
right action in each situation and a genuinely right attitude of
human beings toward various aspects of the world. It also meant
that "aesthetics" meant something other than individual taste or
the imposition of elite opinion.

Literature illustrated and examined human feeling, action, and attitude,
and could be studied to refine one's ability to judge these matters.
Grounds other than individual taste or formal excellence on which to say
"this piece is better than that" were available. With the rise of
irrationalism, the basic belief underlying the philosophical yardstick
was lost, and so the yardstick itself was lost. Without it, the only
measure of literary works was aesthetic, which could now only mean
individual taste or the imposition of elite opinion.

At the same time, the natural sciences were rising in importance as
they proved indispensible in medicine and war, and soon eclipsed the
humanities altogether. This produced serious envy in humanities
faculty, adding a purely psychological impetus to the philosophical
disorientation they already felt. A scientist could save lives or
win battles: what could a literary scholar do of similar importance?

Finally, as traditional religion drained away from them the elite
grasped at Marxism or something similar, which gave them the
feeling of purpose they craved. It also helped them to feel that their
studies could be as important as the scientists' after all. Why,
they could change the world, bring about the revolution, implement
Utopia! And wasn't it exciting being a revolutionary! --especially
when no one was actually shooting at you.

(And then the revolutionaries got tenure, joined personnel committees,
and brought in more of their own. There was little room for dissent,
because they were saving the world. Everything for the revolution!
Why bring in a colleague who is unwilling to contribute to The Cause,
when The Cause is the whole reason for the kind of work you do? And
now you know why humanities departments are so politically skewed.)

With a little thought, this perspective makes many recent
developments in your field comprehensible. Derrida's work, for
example, arose from his inability to understand why the West seemed
so stable despite the obvious advantages of Marxism. His
contribution to The Cause was to provide a way, or so he thought,
to interrupt the transmission of the myths which enslaved the minds
of Westerners. (It didn't work, of course.) It was widely admired
not for its innovation or philosophical soundness (!) but for its
possible political impact. In short, it made the study of literature,
and thus literary critics, important.

The person who said without demur that "[c]anon debates are
essentially political debates by other means" is an example of what
this history has produced. He has no idea that literary debates
can even be about something other than politics (oh, there's
aesthetics--but again, that's just code for individual taste or--
politics again--elite imposition.). Like most products of English
graduate programs, he can talk glibly and endlessly about
historical contingency without any serious examination of his own
historical position. But he is, I see, a recent graduate; perhaps
he will come to understanding eventually. I hope so, because he
obviously has a good mind.

Please keep thinking, Ryan. You're doing spectacularly well so far.

Disclaimer: IANAHP (I Am Not A Humanities Professor)

Ryan -- Clem Malborg gives an important history of the woes afflicting the modern department of English, explaining how and why we have fallen so low. If you would like to know more, I recommend checking out Literature Lost: Social Agendas and the Corruption of the Humanities by John M. Ellis, and Tenured Radicals: How Politics has Corrupted our Higher Education by Roger Kimball.

As an addendum to the chronology above, I would call the present era -- from 1995-present -- an "Age of Stagnation." Something significant shifted after the Republicans took Congress in 1994. Precious little innovative work has come out of the English literary studies over the past decade, leaving the leftists endlessly recycling old formulae (race, class, gender, sexuality, power) that seem less radical with every reiteration. Meanwhile, intelligent students such as you -- and some well-meaning scholars, too -- wonder what, if anything, will come to water this Waste Land.

Literature professors no longer proudly incite revolution; they now grow disillusioned teaching students whom they call "conservative," "complacent," and "contented." Women no longer march to the feminist drum; students no longer "Fight the Power"; and they might even vote for Bush behind their professors' backs. The game is up. Professors' failure to incite Vietnam-like student resistance to the war in Iraq is telling. And so the profession has turned inward, writing, preaching, and publishing only for itself. Nobody who is not an English professor or graduate student will ever know or care about a single paper at the upcoming MLA conference.

What you see in Alvin Lucier is a classic pose. In another live, Alvin has the potential to be an affable, interesting young man; but his Ivy League Ph.D. has trained him to scorn simple answers, to believe only in irony; to qualify every assertion; and endlessly to "problematize" a world-structure that has no up, no down, no center, no origin, and no telos. He is, in short, one of those whom T. S. Eliot called the "Hollow Men," and of whom Yeats said that they "lack all conviction." At first glance, they seem erudite, well-read intellectuals, but important elements of their core selves were extinguished long ago. To be crude, they have no balls.

You may have noted the modern academic fascination with adjectives such as "polyvalent," "polysemic," "multifaceted," and "heterogeneous." Such terms feeds their sense that the world up until about 1968 was dominated by stable, simplistic, but illusory metanarratives (God, nation, aesthetics, etc) -- and that now only they, the elect priests of a post-1968 Derridean/Jamesonian/Lacanian cult, are qualified to interpret the world in all its deconstructed chaos. But you will also note that, in reality, they have no insights into anything.

My advice: Ignore them. The Lucier generation cannot fathom literature's affective or aesthetic power (the proposal that one should accord primary significance to "new cultural theories about the Renaissance" when interpreting Shakespeare makes the mind boggle). They will try to deter you from reading as you want to read, steering you instead into the chasm of "Theory." Look for professors who quietly repudiate what Harold Bloom calls the "School of Resentment," and who will admit to you in private that they think it all bull****. Read widely in great literature, and read the older critical masters, such as Frye, Leavis, Cleanth Brooks (there are many others). Hold your head up high when professors scorn you in seminars and when you get poorer grades than you deserve.

More than anything, do not let you thinking be governed by spurious mental patterns that seem appealing -- as does any guide through the wilderness -- but that will make your thinking and reading soft, pliant, and conformist. Despite what the leftists believe, the primary unit of civilization is the individual, not the collective; feed your mind what what you want to feed it, and you will die a happy man.

Liffer, your comments are a hodge-podge of ad hominem attacks and trite cliches. You recommend Clem's comments, but his own ideas about Derrida aren't supported by the facts. For instance, Derrida's work -- to this day -- is anathema to Marxists, like Jameson and Eagleton and Callinicos. His philosophy was not an attempt to justify Marxism, but rather a continuation of Heidegger's revision of Western philosophy. I myself never quite saw the use-value of Derrida for literary studies, but you'll actually have to engage the complexity of Derrida's oeuvre before writing him off. That's what's called intellectual honesty where I come from.

Liffer's disciplinary history is similarly wrong. The humanities professionialized long before it became politicized, and the politicization of disciplines like English was, for better or worse, an attempt to shift scholarly attention away from the academy to the larger issues facing men and women in the streets. New Criticism and the institutional habitus it formed was one of the key players in the turn toward specialization, but 19th and early 20th century fields such as philology and classics have to accept some blame as well. Tellingly, New Criticism started out, in the work of the Fugitives, as an attempt to politicize culture, to turn art against the commodification of culture -- but by the time it shifted from the work of Southern poet-critics to academics, it was fully specialized and removed from any social purpose.

However, I refuse to defend myself against vague ad hominem attacks such as Liffer's name calling -- and all the TS Eliot in the world won't change your "hollow man" comment into anything more than base personal attack. Your advice to Ryan should be seen for what it is: a bitter attack on a straw man version of a discipline, not generous advice for the cultivation of a young scholar's tastes and interests.

Clem's comments are similarly incorrect. When I wrote that canon debates are political debates by other means, I wasn't writing about *all* canon debates throughout history. I was writing about the Allan Bloom/ED Hirsch/Bill "Vegas" Bennett debates of the 80s. It is a truism that people *can* debate the canon for other than political reasons; but it is a fact that the culture wars were less about Culture and more about politics. Clem's comments about disciplinary history will need more empirical evidence to support them. With all the "crisis in the humanities," most evidence I've seen points at a steady rise in enrollment and majors in disciplines like English at American universities since the field began.

Jon Bon is at least on topic and devoid of the almost humorous bitterness displayed by Liffer and Clem. I perhaps didn't make my previous comments to him clear, so I'll try again:

I'm not saying *The Cantos* are more or less important than *Ulysses*, only that an intelligent case could be made for it. But oddly, no one seems bothered that undergrads rarely read more than a Canto or two at most. Pound's work is as important for 20th century poetry as Joyce's is for fiction, but no one is championing *Kultur* or *The Cantos*.

I brought up *The Cantos* and *Clarissa* and *Piers Plowman* not to get into an argument about relative value but to show that any education is going to leave out pivotal texts. Pinsker uses *Ulysses* synecdochally, but I don't think the logic works.

This is why I wrote that English education is about *more* than a list of authors and texts. Nearly every other discipline is organized around methods and key questions, not around required readings. I am not saying we should replace the canon with a "skills" education, but rather than a good education in English will mean that students are prepared to read further, that they know how to interpret literature and research it even if they did not have a chance to read everything that old men think they should have read by the age of 22. And to prepare students, this means that they need to be introduced to major writers and texts as well as to methods for understanding other writers and other texts not immediately covered in the curriculum. We simply cannot judge a discipline by the neglect of one novel at one minor university. We also cannot blame this neglect on multiculturalism when the very critic doing the blaming is himself a professional multiculturalist. If Pinsker can specialize in Jewish-American lit and still know about *Ulysses*, why can't others? And if Pinkser isn't familiar with *Piers Plowman* or *Clarissa* ('tho he might be), why should medievalists and 18th century scholars be familiar with *Ulysses*? I agree that a well-read scholar is the best scholar, but even the best scholars are have giant gaps -- as I wrote before, it wasn't so uncommon 50 years ago for scholars not to know the work of Dickinson or Austen or the Brontes, and no one today would doubt their essential status.

(One brief comment: having an accurate text is all important, even if Jon Bon thinks it's boring and pedantic. Early writing on Dickinson, for example, is often misguided because the texts these scholars read were totally different than Dickinson's actual work. They were providing readings of something, but not Dickinson. This logic doesn't mean that Johnson or Goethe are wrong about Shakespeare, but that's because evaluative writing doesn't rely on the minutiae that is essential to hermeneutics.)

I'm happy to play the role of the pedantic academic, but I'll also pit my aesthetic skills against anyone around this blog.

I'm not saying *The Cantos* are more or less important than *Ulysses*, only that an intelligent case could be made for it.

You do state categorically above that The Cantos "were more influential than *Ulysses*" and that Langland "is at least as important as Chaucer." You made those statements as absolute pronouncements, not as "One could argue that...."-type statements. You can, of course, quibble about the distinction between "important" and "influential"; but what interests me more here is that you're prepared, even eager, to make critical pronouncements of the "X is more important than Y" type. But what is the framework -- and what are the criteria -- for your critical evaluations? And doesn't this trap you into a position of arguing that the acknowledged masterworks of Western literature are far superior -- under any conceivable criterion independent of authorial biology -- than the multicultural works presently being taught in English departments?

But oddly, no one seems bothered that undergrads rarely read more than a Canto or two at most.

To that, I say simply that undergraduates usually don't read what professors don't teach.

Pound's work is as important for 20th century poetry as Joyce's is for fiction, but no one is championing *Kultur* or *The Cantos*.

One could make a strong case for Pound's having been dropped from the curriculum due to liberal professors' distate for his right-wing views. Frankly, if I wanted tenure in an English department, I probably wouldn't champion Pound, either.

And to prepare students, this means that they need to be introduced to major writers and texts as well as to methods for understanding other writers and other texts not immediately covered in the curriculum.

One could argue that reading the greatest writers automatically teaches to students to "understand other writers and other texts not immediately covered in the curriculum." Someone who studied Milton, Shakespeare, Tolstoy, and Joyce probably would not struggle when faced with an African American novel, a volume of women's poetry, or similar.

If Pinsker can specialize in Jewish-American lit and still know about *Ulysses*, why can't others?

Others can. And when they do, I don't have a problem with it. However, many English professors no longer feel obligated to know major works that are not in their fields, citing an atomized model of scholarly professionalism that frees them from such responsibility. How many African Americanists have read Chaucer? How many Asian Americanists have studied Dryden? I don't know the answers, but I'm betting "not very many."

Having an accurate text is all important, even if Jon Bon thinks it's boring and pedantic. Early writing on Dickinson, for example, is often misguided because the texts these scholars read were totally different than Dickinson's actual work.

Now you are resorting to misrepresentation and logical fallacy. I didn't say that having an accurate text is not important. I said that one can teach Shakespeare -- of whom authoritative editions (the Arden, the Oxford, the Riverside, and the Norton, among others) already exist, most edited by preeminent Shakespearean scholars at elite universities -- without knowing one whit about the minutiae of textual scholarship. Yes, we can quibble about whether Hamlet refered to his "too, too solid" or "too, too sullied" flesh, but these are minor issues.

As a counterpoint: foolish academic quibbling over texts of Ulysses has harmed the British public's access to authoritative texts. The debate over Gabler's Ulysses grew so acrimonious, so public, and so exaggerated that many general readers were convinced to boycott the allegedly deplorable text. The Gabler Ulysses was been almost entirely withdrawn from British bookshops, and replaced by a facsimile copy of the 1922 edition, which is riddled with typos and errors. Gabler's edition might have had its problems -- but it is undeniably more accurate than the 1922 edition. And yet none of the pedantic academics attacking Gabler at the time could so much as admit that. For them, anything was better than Gabler.

Alvin, a few responses.

First, Derrida started out writing for a far-left publication (Tel Quel), and remained sympathetic to neo-Marxism through most of his career. As far as I know, it is only the late Derrida that Marxists dislike. (Well, strict constructionists dislike anyone unorthodox.) I must admit that I have not fully "engaged the complexity of his oeuvre." Neither have I "engaged the complexity" of de Sade's oeuvre. In each case it has been easy to gain enough knowledge to dismiss the work as uninteresting without serious study.

As to your remark about canon debates, I guess I just mistook your intention. I went back and looked and I still see no context that would have communicated it, but that is probably my fault.

The real crisis in the humanities is one of purpose, not enrollments.

What's an aesthetic skill, exactly? Do you mean that your taste is as good as anyone's, or that you have learned as perfectly as anyone what the educated elite, eager to retain their superiority, have established as excellence? Or do you mean something else? If so, what?

Finally, under some circumstances I would be tempted to regard "almost humorous" as an argumentum ad hominem, but to be fair, almost any exposure to the talk of literary professionals makes me feel all Spenglerian and not the least humorous. I'm not bitter, though, just sad. My daughter is writing a dissertation in English Literature, preparing to enter a profession I once thought noble. Now I'm afraid she'll spend her career among people who think that French poststructuralists are clever (and that "noble" is a political term). Whom will she talk to?

Pinsker:

I am told that current students at my old college cannot take a course in Ulysses because no current professor wants to teach it for the simple (?) reason that no current professor has read it.

He very well might have been told this. But while I don't know whether or not there is a course dedicated to Ulysses I do know that there is at least one current F&M professor who has read that book and, in fact, teaches parts of it regularly.