The blog has been quiet for a while, and our Blog Queen is preoccupied this weekend celebrating her graduation (Congratulations, Trish!), so I thought I'd suggest a thread. I was just reading an online article on the changing canons of American Literature.
(http://www.theamericanscholar.org/archives/wi07/goingnative-dickstein.html)
The author talks about what he read as an undergrad and compares that list of authors and titles to what's being read in colleges and universities today. He also talks about how much earlier on, no American literature was read in universities, including American ones, because it was felt to be provincial and not serious. Of course, if you go even further back, and hop over to England, you find that even English literature used to be excluded from university study. It wasn't as serious as classical literature, and didn't really need to be taught.
So, here are my questions for you. Do you think there are certain works that OUGHT to be read by everyone (inside or outside university)? Is it important, say, that you know Hamlet, Paradise Lost, Middlemarch, Leaves of Grass, Moby Dick, The Waste Land, (etc. etc. -- the list is up for debate)? Or should we just pick and choose what suits our taste? Another way of putting this, I suppose, is to ask whether what we read is just our own way of passing the time, something we enjoy in leisure hours, or whether it is part of some common culture, something that connects us? Or, turning toward the OSU-M curriculum, should English courses be more structured, introducing certain great books and writers, major periods and movements and so on, or should they aim to offer as much variety as possible, letting students develop their own areas of focus?
This is all VERY complex, and there are loads of ways of plunging into this debate, but take your pick. I'm interested to hear your thoughts, and I bet your colleagues are too!
Posted by hhamlin at April 15, 2007 12:51 PMWhy do we study literature at the university level? What purpose is at its core? Is it to learn as much as we can about as much as we can in the limited amount of time we can spend in undergrad literature courses? Should we offer such great variety so as to get a feel for the myriad aspects of literature into which we could more deeply delve? Or do we choose the several venues time allows and find a solid grasp of their mechanisms? Which arms us better to tackle that which we would pursue beyond our classrooms and without the guidance of our professors?
It is complex. Upon reflection of my experiences as a student, I feel more enriched by the "mind on" structures involved in digging deeper into a limited number of works or movements, etc. Just to see how literature can work in the hands of those who present it in the most meaningful manner, seems superior to me than merely to be able to converse casually about a bunch of stuff.
For my major, which involved preparation for English Education, I was required to take a great number of varied literature courses, many of which seemed to want to cover as many representative works as possible in a ten week course. Apparently this is what Ohio wants from its teachers, and it left little room for anything else, such as more courses in English language studies or in compositon and/or rhetoric. I ended up knowing a little about a lot, which I guess is hopefully a step ahead of high school students.
What has helped me the most has been the deeper study of Shakespeare, Dickens, and so forth. These classes encouraged us to think and to look for and see that which we might never have thought to look. These are keys to understanding and unlocking many other works I might choose to appreciate and study on my own.
I find it helpful to study the writing of the skilled in order to discover and contemplate those universal somethings that each of us encounters in some regard along the way. It's easy to ignore what people tell us about the world and the human condition much in the same way it is difficult to ignore what we have read about the world and the human condition through the voices of gifted thinkers and word crafters.
If I have a point, it is that teachers should emphasize the learning of a skill and mind set that allows for deeper personal reading of any texts a student is likely to encounter. To do this best, I assume, the teacher should use those texts that best allow her to successfully guide students to those sets and to give them the vocabulary for discussion. This seems the best route for the chance of passing on the passion of the exploration of literature. Okay, I'll stop.
Posted by: Jim at April 15, 2007 06:58 PMTo be more specific, I think the study of Shakespeare is vital to anyone alive today. Otherwise, we wouldn't even get half of the jokes made during The Simpsons.
Oh, and I'm sure there are some other reasons too.
Posted by: Danger Haynes at April 15, 2007 10:04 PMAfter watching Idiocracy, I get the feeling we are moving away from an understanding of The Simpsons, let alone Shakespeare.
Posted by: Jim at April 16, 2007 07:27 AMEven though there isn't as much interest in this forum as there once was, I hope it doesn't disappear after Dr. Hamlin leaves us.
Posted by: Jim at April 20, 2007 10:03 AM