That is the question. When English departments can't articulate a coherent mission (have a look at the web pages of the top English programs in the country, and you'll see that those that attempt to state a mission--and many don't--concentrate on skills [you'll write a lot! you'll practice close reading!] and variety [you'll cover lots of ground! you'll be exposed to a great deal!] ), and when they are increasingly loathe to hold majors to any but the most vague requirements (these tend to be of the "two courses in English literature written before 1800" variety), one does wonder what the rationale for majoring in English really is. Departments that approach the major in the nonspecific manner sketched out here aren't trying either to recruit majors or to frame the major as a cogent course of study with a solid, shared curriculum that will train students in literary history, genre formation, or major works by major authors. They are doing a very different kind of work indeed, and undergrads instinctively know this.

Consider this only somewhat tongue-in-cheek op-ed by a Bryn Mawr student:

In the life of a college student, declaring a major is like becoming engaged. It is pledging your love and devotion to one subject for the REST OF YOUR LIFE. Or at least until you graduate and get a job with a dot com corporation. I declared my major today. I joined the ranks of lovers of literature, pupils of poetry, and countless other Mawrters who decide that pre-med is too hard and major in English because "they like to read." So I'm an English major. And I feel good.

I'm curious to know about other campuses where the basic equation offered by both the Bryn Mawr op-ed and the Penn ad hold--and I'm curious to know, too, what readers make of the cynicism that is operative in both. More particularly, I'm interested to know how readers would refract the discussion in this thread through the issues raised in this one.

Oh, my—I think you take Hesse too literally. Your taking her saying that she majored in English because she loved reading as evidence of Bryn Mawr's leavening of English would be like taking Eleanor Dickey's assurance that she was becoming a Classicist because she just loved dead languages (she and I knew each other as undergraduates) as evidence that Bryn Mawr was obviously lowering its standards in the mid-80s. I don't know what the Bryn Mawr English major requirements are right now, but I doubt it's a "gut" major. Undergraduate workaholics are allowed a sense of humor.

Sherman,

Bryn Mawr majors design their own courses of study. The major description emphasizes skills ("The department stresses critical thinking, incisive written and oral analysis of texts, and the integration of imaginative, critical, and theoretical approaches") and variety ("Our students engage with a rich variety of forms and media, from medieval manuscripts, to print, to modern forms such as film and contemporary digital media"). You can graduate with an English major at Bryn Mawr after taking eleven courses toward it -- an introductory methods course, a thesis preparation course, a thesis-writing course, and eight electives. Students are encouraged to choose courses that will give them historical depth, breadth of knowledge about genres and cultural traditions, theoretical variety, and a sense of coherence -- but there are no requirements for historical, major author, or genre-based content at all. Course offerings themselves are fairly scattershot--currently on offer, there are more courses on film than anything else, and there are huge gaps in period coverage, with the bulk of courses centered on twentieth-century niche issues. I'd call this a gut major.

A few things:

I think English courses (at Penn and elsewhere) are largely perceived as "vacation" from real work because reading literature is presented as a leisure activity everywhere--in and outside the classroom. In high school English courses, reading literature is only one of many activities done--at the college level, there are no vocabulary quizzes, grammar exercises or sentences to parse. The focus of English courses in college is mostly the pleasure of the text. I know I (and most of my fellow majors) chose it as a discipline because college presented us with the opportunity to eat, sleep, breathe and live books--one imagines most English majors as the type of people who hid novels in between the covers of their math textbooks (I know I was.) For such a person, becoming wholly engaged with literature is the only sensible way to spend time--why wouldn't you choose to do professionally what gave you the most pleasure anyway? Maybe the same can be said of Econ majors--maybe some of them really do sets of problems for fun--but I'm willing to bet it's a far smaller number.

That said, however, I think the way many English curricula are structured--and perceived of by students--influences this attitude that English is "easy." At Penn, there are very few prerequisites for taking specific courses. There are loose requirements for majors, and some upper-level seminar courses require the instructor's permission or more involvement on the part of the students--but it's mostly a free-for-all. Since everyone can read (one would hope), everyone can take any course. This is not true in math--one needs to know the fundamentals of pre-calculus and calculus before taking multi-variable calculus or linear algebra. Applying the same standards to English is problematic. Take that into account along with the subjectivity of grading in English (and humanities courses) versus that of math, science or economics, and the attitude that "English is fun and easy" arises.

English courses can indeed be hard work. For someone who likes to read, though, putting in the time and effort to do well on a paper or really understand a piece of literature does not seem like an onus. I know from personal experience that, while equally equipped to get an A on a paper and on biology exams, I liked writing and hated memorizing parts of cells. The time I spent doing the former wasn't "work" because I liked it. See how that can be reduced to "English=easy, Biology=hard?"

So what should be done? Stricter prerequisites and requirements may do the trick, more frequent and longer writing assignments may do it. Maybe exams like the ones that Vladimir Nabokov gave his students in "Lectures on Literature" (I never had an exam like that in an English course) would do it. If one assumes that there are certain fundamental skills an English major would need to really be taken seriously as a practitioner of a discipline, then perhaps it would cease to be seen as a "gut" major.

(A note on Ulysses: one of the best classes I ever took at Penn was the "Homer and Joyce" class, which focused almost exclusively on "Ulysses" and "The Odyssey," with supplemental readings and commentaries. I don't know if it made me a better or more serious English major, but I really believe that becoming captive to "Ulysses" ultimately made me a better person.)

Erin,

I don’t mean this as a tu quoque moment or anything, but I’m curious to hear your answer to the question. Why do you study English, and why do you continue to teach it as a tenured member of one the best English departments in the country? Surely, there must be something about the profession that transcends the petty politics and copious bullshit you post about on this blog, otherwise why not just abandon it all to the wolves?

Now, I’ve certainly encountered phonies and dilettantes in the profession. I’ve met people who haven’t read Ulysses, and I’ve run into cultural warriors like John Streamas, but -— and here’s the important part -— these people have not been representative of the profession as a whole. For example, when I read your blog, I see extremes and outliers. When I read this blog –- http://long18th.blogspot.com/ -- which is, admittedly, probably rather boring and probably pedantic to those not interested in 18th cent. literature –- I see an accurate picture of the profession I encounter day to day. If I were surrounded by lunatic ideologues and idiot philistines all the time, I would have left the profession long ago. But I’m not, and so I soldier on.

I should put my cards on the table, though, and note that, although I’ve never bothered to work out my own “mission statement” concerning the field, I would contend that one of the reasons I study literature is because, in the most unreflected-upon and general terms, I think literature provides us with knowledge that other things —- say, historical facts or scientific data —- cannot. It’s difficult to say exactly what that knowledge is or does, but I suspect it has something to do with the fact that literature tends to make us appreciate how language means as opposed to simply what it means. Again, this is all very general and not thought through, and I realize that, in making this claim, I’m opening myself up to attacks from people who think only things with direct use value ought to be taught in universities, as well as people who think literature, by definition, can only be appreciated in purely aesthetic or sensuous terms.

Both sides, I think, are wrong.

But it is worth noting that the mission statements, articles, and advertisements you’ve posted here are a reaction to the pressures exerted by just these groups of people. In universities where engineering and business degrees are in the greatest demand, English must present itself as practical, and in fact close reading really is a good way to work on your prose. Likewise, for those who want to escape the pressures of the real world and cozy up with a book, the rhetoric about the “easiness” of English is, I suspect, appealing.

At my liberal arts undergraduate institution (Trinity in San Antonio, TX), majoring in English was definitely not for the intellectually lightweight. (I was a business major, so that claim wasn't all about my own self-interest and pride!) My friends who were English majors all ended up with great jobs (after the usual year or two of struggle). They have been more successful in the "real world" of business than many of my friends who were business majors. After all, the need for people skilled at both analysis and expression remains strong. The tech types can blow lots of bells and whistles, but at the end of the day, the content enhanced with all the bells and whistles still needs to be interesting and coherent.

At the university where I teach, there is a fairly obvious heirarchy to the quality of students in different majors. Most students start out in engineering or science. If you can't hack it there, you transfer to business. If you can't hack it in business, you transfer to liberal arts. But this is partly a function of our unique setup. Our engineering and science programs are top level research programs, with the resources and teaching load that go along with that. The other schools are solid second tier programs, with higher teaching loads. Research expectations also decline, but not as much as the teaching loads increase. Making university level tenure committees extra fun, I suspect!

So much of the problem of "the English major" has to do with its historic lack of definition. I highly recommend two essays:

Parker, W. R. (1967) Where do English departments come from? *College English*, 28(5), 339-351.

Miller, T. (1990) Where did college English studies come from? *Rhetoric Review*, 9(1), 50-69.

Parker writes about the messy development of English departments, as they subsumed bits and pieces of other departments: rhetoric, elocution, philology, linguistics, composition -- and today, we might include philosophical hermeneutics and aesthetics, history, and social science. A "major" in English, since the start of English departments, was not as definite or set a pursuit as in other disciplines. In fact, most early English professors were meant to teach rhetoric and composition, not literary history or The Canon, and following in the tradition begun by Hugh Blair, many late 19th century English profs had backgrounds in preaching.

I also recommend a look at James Moffett's *Teaching the Universe of Discourse*, in which he argues:

"...English, mathematics, and foreign languages are not *about* anything in the same sense that historym, biology, physics, and other primarily empirical subjects are about something. English, French, and mathematics are *symbol systems*, into which the phenomenal data of empirical subjects are cast and by means of which we think about them. Symbol systems are not primarily about themselves; they are about other subjects. When a student 'learns' one of these systems, he *learns how* to operate it. The main point is to think and talk about other things by means of this system."

This is perhaps why the English major is vague -- but it's not a defense of this vagueness. The point is that an English major is someone who is studying how to master the use of the symbol system. The student who wishes to study how particular people mastered the symbol system in particular ways for particular purposes at particular times -- say, great poets or great novelists -- are a subset of the larger English major.

That is to say, the person studying English *literature* is studying what, historically, was only one small subsection of the larger English major. Which is why many universities have different English "tracks" -- the grad school track, the education track, the law school track, the business/publishing track, the creative writing track, and so on. As far as I can determine, it was the New Critics who defined "English studies" as the study of anglophone literature. But even at Harvard in the 50s (see the poet Frank O'Hara's transcripts), the English major spent about half of his major coursework *not* studying literature (instead studying composition, rhetoric, history of the language, and so on as well).

For me, then, the question of what the English major should look like depends on the students' purposes in studying English. For the education track student, broad historical literature surveys might be more useful than single author courses; and in place of those single author courses, courses in historical grammar, rhetoric and comp, and elocution even might be more useful.

I personally became an English major because I wanted to write poetry for a living! I was an English major on a creative writing track, but I basically completed the grad school track as well because my poetry teacher emphasized the writer's need to read everything out there. By then end of my undergraduate years, I turned away from poetry writing and became more interested in issues like the one expressed above by Moffett: namely, how do humans use writing to think? How are the genres ways of knowing the world?

So I went to grad school to study these issues. I ended up taking a lot of courses with professors of African and African-American literature, mostly because they were sane. Our major 18th century scholar would use his seminars to rant about how women and darkies were ruining literature, while our main 19th century scholar would tell us how she, as a true feminist, defends the canon while these new lesbian feminists are ruining everything. (We don't here much about such crazy reactionary rants around these parts, 'tho they are common among elder professors.) I knew before I even started the dissertation that I didn't want to pursue an academic career, because I felt that college-level English was reduced to literature scholarship, not to rigorous analysis of the use of language. But when I taught some middle school and high school, I realized that here was a place where English studies as "the study of the English language" was still alive, if only buried under decades of sediment, reified curricular bullshit, institutional politics, and other fun stuff. So now, after completing the Ph.D., I'm getting my secondary ed certifications. The end.

Forgive the countless typos above. O the hypocrisy of attending to the English language while abusing it . . .

There are a LOT of English majors at the SLAC I attended as an undergraduate. There was also a long-running joke about why that was. It went something like,

"The typical student looks at the course catalog, looking for a major, and says "I speak English!""

Alvin - not to mention that every high schooler that reads "The Highwayman" is encountering it for the first time. You can let the poem work its magic without feeling pressure to come up with SOMETHING new to say about it, however obscure. I can well believe that for people who love literature, middle and high school English classes are where it's at.