“Once, in college, you might have studied Mansfield Park by looking closely at its form, references, style, and special marks of authorial genius—the way Vladimir Nabokov famously taught the novel, and an intensification of the way a reader on the subway experiences the book. Now you might write a paper about how the text enacts a tension by both constructing and subtly undermining the imperial patriarchy through its descriptions of landscape. What does this have to do with how most humans read? “
“The Death of the English Major” by Nathan Heller (you can read the entire article here) was published in The New Yorker February 27, 2023 issue. I read it and have considered Heller’s analysis–and there’s a lot of it!–for six weeks. Heller cites plenty of statistics to support his case that English departments face a death-spiral as students chose STEM majors instead of humanities majors. Right now, only 7% of college students chose to be English majors.
I graduated as an English Major (and a Political Science and Philosophy Major; Journalism and Education minors) in 1971. When I started working on my PhD. in English in 1991, I realized a lot of change had occurred in the focus of English Departments in 20 years. Jacques Derrida (1930–2004), the founder of “deconstruction,” a way of criticizing not only both literary and philosophical texts but society dominated the approach to teaching…and learning. Other literary theorists like de Man, Foucault, John Searle, Willard Van Orman Quine, Peter Kreeft, and Jürgen Habermas changed the analysis of literary texts to applications of conceptual apparatus.
Here’s a sample of Derrida’s prose: “The enterprise of returning ‘strategically’, ‘ideally’, to an origin or to a priority thought to be simple, intact, normal, pure, standard, self-identical, in order then to think in terms of derivation, complication, deterioration, accident, etc. All metaphysicians, from Plato to Rousseau, Descartes to Husserl, have proceeded in this way, conceiving good to be before evil, the positive before the negative, the pure before the impure, the simple before the complex, the essential before the accidental, the imitated before the imitation, etc. And this is not just one metaphysical gesture among others, it is the metaphysical exigency, that which has been the most constant, most profound and most potent.” My eyes glaze over quickly when reading this style of writing.
Back in the 1970s, my English courses required term papers that centered on the novel or poem or essay with a large dollop of the concerns of the author mixed in. The intent was to help the students learn to write better and explore aspects of the literary work. In the 1990s, the term papers now danced with notions of gender identity, power relationships, and political/legal entanglements.
Most of the students in my Business Administration classes had one goal: learn skills and knowledge that would lead to a well paying job. I suspect most students view the contemporary English Departments with their abstract view of literature and writing to be a non-starter in their job search. Were you an English Major? Did you enjoy your English classes? GRADE: A
