I started my morning by reading a post at Slate about why Yale students should not call for the abolition of the two-semester pre-requisite for English majors. This freshman seminar in Major English Poets, is a sequence that includes the writing of the following eight poets: Chaucer, Shakespeare, Spenser and Donne in the fall and Milton, Pope, Wordsworth and Eliot in the spring. Yale describes this English poets seminar as a unique and definitive element of their curriculum. Certainly, I can imagine that many students appreciate spending an entire year reading the work of these poets, but I can also imagine exactly what the students behind the petition describe, that many students find the course to be an alienating entry-level course for a major in English literature. Two professors who teach the course have agreed with the students and say they would welcome an opportunity to rethink the curriculum in a story about the petition in the Yale Daily News.
Katy Waldman, the Slate writer whose piece is linked above takes students to task for what she sees as a "stay in your own lane" approach to literature that narrowly rejects the capacity of writers to empathize and describe universal truths about the human condition. But despite the calls for abolishing a course focused on "dead white men" this is not about students failing to appreciate Shakespeare or Milton's impact on literature, or trying to erase history by replacing the past with a fantasy of diversity and inclusion. It's a failure of empathy on Waldman's part to refuse to acknowledge what the students, and the supporting faculty are saying about the impact of a remarkably narrow core curriculum on beginning students who want to declare an academic major.
This argument about literature's capacity to reveal universal truth also misunderstands the historical nature of literary canons and their relationship to national identity. I am ambivalent about calls for inclusion in core curricula, which can be merely additive and often are based on ahistorical representations of people in the past (Chaucer was not "white"). On the other hand, canons of national literature exist to celebrate a particular vision of what "culture" is and can serve to extract literature from any historical or cultural context. On the question of the historical and political context of literary production, I still find Edward Said indispensable. On canons more generally, people who care about debates like this should review the arguments made when this was a hot subject twenty years ago, by John Guillory in Cultural Capital: the Problem of Literary Canon Formation. They might also be interested in this book: From Outlaw to Classic, about canon formation in American literature that was published a few years ago.As the Yale Daily News has reported:
English Professor and Associate Director of Undergraduate Students Jill Richards said she is proud of these student activists and hopes their demands for a diversified curriculum are heard in the wider English department.“It is unacceptable that the two semester requirement for all majors routinely covers the work of eight white, male poets,” Richards said.She added that although the later half of the series allows professors to choose one additional poet, who might contribute to the diversity of the course, this elective addition is not always taken, nor does it necessarily depart from the entirely white male tradition that came before.
Yale has a number of courses representing global literature in English, including American literature, and many of those faculty would probably also welcome the opportunity to revise the curriculum to be more global and less Anglo-centric.
The current English curriculum treats all of these courses essentially as electives. According to the department website: the major includes the two semester poetry sequence (or four other courses on English poets) + 2 other introductory English classes. After that, they must take an additional three courses in pre-1800 English literature, one in pre-1900 English literature, and one American literature course, and two additional seminars, which may or may not be on pre-20th century literature. That leaves them with six additional English courses to play with. It's not nothing, but as the students say, the core of the program emphasizes English literature from England, and requires much early coursework in pre-20th century literature.
For those who are writing about the students need for empathy, it seems patently clear that they cannot themselves imagine for even a second what it feels like to sit in a room where the national culture of a people who have colonized your people is celebrated and honored as the origin of all civilized thinking, universal human truth, and linguistic innovation.
What else could Yale do? If they must stick with a two-semester poetry sequence, there's quite a bit, particularly in the second semester.
The early period is a tough one. Chaucer, lived from around 1343-1400. It's not a period when there was mechanized printing or from which we have a huge number of extant works written in English that were influential on other writers. However, there are two significant literary works from this period: Sir Gawain and the Green Knight, a precursor to Arthurian legend and the Irish Kildare poems, which include the Land of Cokaygne, a satirical commentary on wealth and power that is also at the root of a radical tradition of historical significance. This is not to say that Chaucer is some establishment figure, but to recognize that the 14th century was not just a vacuum in which only one writer existed, and to acknowledge that students might relate to reading poems from folk traditions that have also had great impact on the history of literature (the Utopian imagination, and the entire genre of fantasy as influenced by Arthurian legend).
The bulk of the work taught in the first semester comes from the 16th-17th centuries. Edmund Spenser lived from 1553 to 1599, Shakespeare from 1564 until 1614., John Donne from 1572-1631 and Milton from 1608-to 1674. There was a huge burst of creative energy during this period, and there are indeed other poets who wrote in English. However, it would not be so bad, in my view, if one semester of a course like this focused on these poets.
The second semester is much less defensible. It includes, in addition to Milton, the following writers: Pope (1688-1744); Wordsworth (1770-1850) and T.S. Eliot (1888-1965), the only American in the group, and the only representative of 20th century literature. I understand that it may be impossible to get students to read pre-20th century literature without requiring it. However, it's not as if there aren't other major poets writing in English during this time period. Pope, Wordsworth and Eliot are not just "dead, white men" they are dead white men with notably conservative responses to the movements and great historic transformations wrought in their own times. Milton was at least opposed to monarchy.
Why teach Wordsworth - but not William Blake? or Shelley, Burns, the Brownings or anyone else from the more democratic or radical political tradition in English Romanticism? These are hardly marginal figures.
And as for the only representative of 20th century poetry, or American poetry being T.S. Eliot, there really is no excuse.
Why teach the American, T. S. Eliot, but not the Nobel-Prize winning subject of the British empire, Rabindranath Tagore?
Another more British contemporary of Eliot was the great Dylan Thomas
Or the former British subject, Claude McKay, who had a shorter career, but was remarkably influential on a whole generation of writers.
Or, since Eliot was American, it goes without saying, the incredibly influential poet, Langston Hughes?
As for women poets, there have been many. English literature is global, as the editors of the Norton Anthology of Poetry figured out a long time ago.
