For Persuasion, I wrote about the recent brouhaha over the Princeton English syllabus. Yes, the syllabus has a lot of socialism, but the real problem, to my rather antiquated mind, is what it doesn’t have. The trend in so many places now is to require English majors to take only a single course pre-1700. So almost everything from Beowulf to Absalom and Achitophel becomes optional.
The problem with the Princeton syllabus is not the individual courses. Fine, study socialism and Sondheim! The problem is the overall balance. These courses are all held in equal regard. The problem is the lack of insistence upon the canonical works of English. The problem is contemporary fiction instead of Shakespeare, dolls instead of George Eliot. Of the twelve courses you take as an English major, none is obliged to be on Shakespeare, Chaucer, Milton, Wordsworth—authors our grandmothers might have read as school-leavers. Yes, the syllabus is ideological, but it is also just lame.
You will see that I am not making the “classics should be on the syllabus” argument but the slightly more grouchy claim that “the long stretch of English literature should be required.” One counterargument is that the real problem is to do with the administrative structure of the university. Sure. But if it changes, it needs to be changed with an aim in mind. I am arguing for an aim.
My piece is explicitly addressed to students, since the colleges won’t always make the case for the requirements to run from Beowulf to Virginia Woolf. So many pieces about the English syllabus don’t address them directly.
You are only young once, and you should make sure by hook or by crook that you spend your youth on the best books, the best writing, the work that is going to be most strongly felt in the blood and the heart. You should not meekly accept the patronizing and ideological manner in which a vast and ancient tradition has been condensed into a series of courses about gender, race, and Theory with no requirement for you to do battle with many a quaint and curious volume of forgotten lore.
And I use Woolf and Derrida to make my case.
There was a time when this was so obvious it didn’t need saying. There was a time when everyone who read Virginia Woolf’s extraordinary essays (she was the best critic of the twentieth century, bar none: you can keep your Empsons, your Trillings, your Vendlers—Woolf is the one) knew that the access she so rightfully demanded was access to the tradition. The author of A Room of One’s Own was a great reader of the tradition: as a teenager she was knocking on her father’s study to borrow Gibbon and Cowper. She wrote for the future, but she read from the past. It would have been unthinkable to her not to have read Chaucer and Browne and Defoe and Keats. To follow her example would be to read with abandon in the old ways.
This is what I want to tell young people now—don’t listen to the discourse, don’t pay attention to the think pieces and the debates. That will all be gone with the wind tomorrow and tomorrow and tomorrow. If you really want to read English, read the way Virginia Woolf read. Read, for that matter, the way Derrida read—as deeply as possible in the great works of the past from Plato to Rousseau to Conrad. Don’t accept courses in literary criticism that begin—begin!—with Hegel and pass through Marx and Judith Butler.
This is not just a piece on on side of the debate about “woke” departments or whatever. I also make the case that the scholarship of English departments is better than the critics will admit. No, it is not all Marxist waffle. There’s a great deal of excellent work being produced, but the critics don’t read it, so they don’t know.
I spend a reasonable amount of time reading academic literary scholarship. It’s true: A lot of it is dross. It is quite acceptable to make boldly personal, left-wing statements that misrepresent the view of “neo-liberal thinkers” without even so much as a footnote. If the people who criticized the English department read the work, they would have many of their suspicions confirmed.
But that is only half the story. In the last few years, I have read really excellent scholarly books from people like Debra Gettelman, Rhodri Lewis, Hollis Robbins, James Bednarz and Gregg Hecimovich, covering Shakespeare, the nineteenth-century novel, and African American poetry. There are also major projects underway publishing the letters of Samuel Richardson, the complete works of Francis Bacon, the complete works of Henry James. This is just a small sample, based on my own selective reading. If the people who criticized the English department read the work, they would realize things are better than they think.
I am less interested in the discourse than this piece might make it seem. All I care about is the English syllabus which, as C.S. Lewis said, is practically given to us by nature. If young people cannot get that at colleges they should either demand better or do it on their own. You get one life: don’t spend it in a degree that won’t make you study the most worthwhile authors!
If the problem is that people don’t read enough, that schools are getting worse, then—take your life into your own hands! Do the reading yourself! Don’t let the culture drag you down! If you don’t know what it’s like to memorize Keats and Shakespeare because your school has let you down, then go out and get it for yourself. And then demand it from your college.
Read the whole thing here. Perhaps I will write separately about “my idea of an English syllabus.”
A long time ago, when I was applying to university, I was quite random about it. The basic criteria was that the university be a long way from home, which was London. I didn’t really look at the modules or courses very much, and I ended up at Aberdeen. In the first year, we pretty much read a book a week from the canon. Because I’d always been a reader, and English rather than Scottish, doing A levels rather than Highers, I discovered I’d read virtually all of the books on the list. The challenge came in the second year, which was the year that decided whether you were eligible to take English honours. The courses in Anglo-Saxon and Scottish Renaissance poets were compulsory, and they both opened up new worlds for me. I loathed the mechanics of learning Anglo-Saxon but the verse was a wonder.
As a teacher, when I’ve had the freedom, I’ve tried to introduce younger students to the canon - Heaney’s translation of Beowulf, a wonderful drama adaptation of Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, and exposure to at least one Shakespeare play each year, Rime of the Ancient Mariner, some Thomas Mallory to go with Kevin Crossley Holland’s books based on Arthurian legends - there are many ways to do this. One of the concerns I have is the serious underestimation of children’s reading power. You can build it up early and give them plenty of depth, and make sure that they engage, however briefly, with complex language as early as possible. Although I have been without faith for most of my life, the years of school prayers and readings from book of Common Prayer and King James Bible have built up both my listening and comprehension muscles. There are secular pathways to building that knowledge and understanding of rich, complex language, but it would require a concerted campaign to work out how to do it. I recently read a novel from the 1950s where a wide frame of reference of novels and poems was clearly standard, and that now seems like a lost world.
"You should make sure by hook or by crook that you spend your youth on the best books" should become a saying for literature students. Or for anyone for that matter.