I'm an ex-English lit professor, and I think the problem simply is that the vast majority of the field itself is simply too easy. I studied and taught medieval literature; there are many linguistic hurdles (middle English, the heavy French influence, and of course Latin) as well as historical. This meant a lot of training and context was…
I'm an ex-English lit professor, and I think the problem simply is that the vast majority of the field itself is simply too easy. I studied and taught medieval literature; there are many linguistic hurdles (middle English, the heavy French influence, and of course Latin) as well as historical. This meant a lot of training and context was needed even to start.
But, like, Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre...that's not hard. Anyone who speaks English can jump in and know what's going on, which then leads to the question, "well, what makes someone an expert in this and what are the barriers to entry?" In the past (i.e. pre-Leavis), the barrier was that of the critic; a good critic was one who studied the history, the language, and the context of the book and then used his/her judgment to declare it good or bad. In the pomo world of individual aesthetics, the critic is out of a job. So this was replaced by politics.
It didn't have to be. The New Historicists, while certainly politically motivated, did suggest an empirical and materialist approach using cultural history as the anchor to analysis. That is hard, however. Being a political firebrand is easy; plus, it feels good and there's a low barrier of entry for students. So, in theory, everyone wins.
At least inside the walled garden of academia. The problem is four years of applying critical theory to Jane Austen has a very, very low economic value (and this is coming from a medievalist!). So English departments saw a massive attrition of students, first in 2008 when economic concerns slapped everyone in the face, and then steadily over time due to brain drain from the field both at the teacher and student levels.
Which I'm fine with. They're reaping what they sow. Not like we need English literature departments anyway.
Yeah, don't even get me started about academia! There's a weird courtesy among academics to treat all subjects as equally demanding in rigor when that's really not the case. Things like the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy are genuinely hard in a way that something like art history really isn't. And I'm certainly not saying people shouldn't study art history!
I agree with almost all of what you say, including the relative difficulty of medieval studies. (The difficulty, coupled with its uncool reputation, hurts recruitment into courses and the subfield, alas. I think many English-dept medievalists know they owe the few students they have to Tolkien's continued following.)
I used to work as a contingent faculty member in an English dept in which the chair and tenure-track faculty all agreed that the post-2008 attrition of English students was inevitable. As someone who had attended an undergrad institution at which fully 10% of our students were English majors or minors AND many pre-med and other majors fulfilled their humanities requirements via English courses, I deeply disagreed. We should have been fighting to be the second major for the >50% of students at our institution who double majored, and we should have been recruiting every non-major to our courses that fulfilled elective/breadth/humanities requirements. We had another contingent faculty member who proved you could do this by offering a "baseball literature" course that was fully enrolled with non-majors who'd otherwise never have set foot in our dept. But our chair didn't want to hear from non-tenure-track faculty, so the dept threw up its hands and let itself shrink.
On the necessity of English depts: It surprises me that we've failed to show the relevance of studying English in a world in which jobs increasingly require email and other writing abilities. I think both English and rhet/comp ceded a lot of our claims to relevance when we leaned into teaching Foucault and doing "discourse analysis" instead of doing the unsexy work of teaching students to write clear sentences and read with care and charity.
The medieval Lit course I studied at the time the Lord of the Rings films were in the cinema has subsequently been rebranded to reference Tolkien. It’s all the same stuff - they just made the explicit connections in the course description that we would mention in seminars as an amusing side-point.
Yep, when I was on the job market, a lot of people were trying to use Game of Thrones connections as a selling point. One interviewer told me that my list of courses taught stood out by not having a Game of Thrones connection!
Whatever gets the students into the course, I say. I am partial to Tolkien, a very serious medievalist who made what is still considered THE huge intervention in Beowulf scholarship: insisting that we should read it as literature and not just mine it for historical and philological tidbits.
It’s a shame because Studying medieval lit is brilliant preparation for many careers though - the rigour and discipline you need to apply really transfers well to other disciplines in the workplace. It’s just good brain training.
I'm an ex-English lit professor, and I think the problem simply is that the vast majority of the field itself is simply too easy. I studied and taught medieval literature; there are many linguistic hurdles (middle English, the heavy French influence, and of course Latin) as well as historical. This meant a lot of training and context was needed even to start.
But, like, Robinson Crusoe or Jane Eyre...that's not hard. Anyone who speaks English can jump in and know what's going on, which then leads to the question, "well, what makes someone an expert in this and what are the barriers to entry?" In the past (i.e. pre-Leavis), the barrier was that of the critic; a good critic was one who studied the history, the language, and the context of the book and then used his/her judgment to declare it good or bad. In the pomo world of individual aesthetics, the critic is out of a job. So this was replaced by politics.
It didn't have to be. The New Historicists, while certainly politically motivated, did suggest an empirical and materialist approach using cultural history as the anchor to analysis. That is hard, however. Being a political firebrand is easy; plus, it feels good and there's a low barrier of entry for students. So, in theory, everyone wins.
At least inside the walled garden of academia. The problem is four years of applying critical theory to Jane Austen has a very, very low economic value (and this is coming from a medievalist!). So English departments saw a massive attrition of students, first in 2008 when economic concerns slapped everyone in the face, and then steadily over time due to brain drain from the field both at the teacher and student levels.
Which I'm fine with. They're reaping what they sow. Not like we need English literature departments anyway.
Yeah, don't even get me started about academia! There's a weird courtesy among academics to treat all subjects as equally demanding in rigor when that's really not the case. Things like the sciences, mathematics, and philosophy are genuinely hard in a way that something like art history really isn't. And I'm certainly not saying people shouldn't study art history!
I agree with almost all of what you say, including the relative difficulty of medieval studies. (The difficulty, coupled with its uncool reputation, hurts recruitment into courses and the subfield, alas. I think many English-dept medievalists know they owe the few students they have to Tolkien's continued following.)
I used to work as a contingent faculty member in an English dept in which the chair and tenure-track faculty all agreed that the post-2008 attrition of English students was inevitable. As someone who had attended an undergrad institution at which fully 10% of our students were English majors or minors AND many pre-med and other majors fulfilled their humanities requirements via English courses, I deeply disagreed. We should have been fighting to be the second major for the >50% of students at our institution who double majored, and we should have been recruiting every non-major to our courses that fulfilled elective/breadth/humanities requirements. We had another contingent faculty member who proved you could do this by offering a "baseball literature" course that was fully enrolled with non-majors who'd otherwise never have set foot in our dept. But our chair didn't want to hear from non-tenure-track faculty, so the dept threw up its hands and let itself shrink.
On the necessity of English depts: It surprises me that we've failed to show the relevance of studying English in a world in which jobs increasingly require email and other writing abilities. I think both English and rhet/comp ceded a lot of our claims to relevance when we leaned into teaching Foucault and doing "discourse analysis" instead of doing the unsexy work of teaching students to write clear sentences and read with care and charity.
The medieval Lit course I studied at the time the Lord of the Rings films were in the cinema has subsequently been rebranded to reference Tolkien. It’s all the same stuff - they just made the explicit connections in the course description that we would mention in seminars as an amusing side-point.
Yep, when I was on the job market, a lot of people were trying to use Game of Thrones connections as a selling point. One interviewer told me that my list of courses taught stood out by not having a Game of Thrones connection!
Whatever gets the students into the course, I say. I am partial to Tolkien, a very serious medievalist who made what is still considered THE huge intervention in Beowulf scholarship: insisting that we should read it as literature and not just mine it for historical and philological tidbits.
It’s a shame because Studying medieval lit is brilliant preparation for many careers though - the rigour and discipline you need to apply really transfers well to other disciplines in the workplace. It’s just good brain training.