[Academiadotorg]

If you love literature, don't major in it--

[ken5050]

Who cares about a bunch of old dead white guys...

[TBP]

Some of these electives are not bad as electives. The Southern literary movement is worth studying, as is any aspect of Renaissance lit. But so are writers like Eliot (a personal favorite), Chaucer, and so many others. There are some great modern writers too. If you also want to study “Southern Women Writers”, go for it.

I was an English major and learned about all kinds of literature. We also had to take writing courses. And structure courses. (8 AM. Ugh.)

I had to do a senior thesis and oral panels on a completely different writer.

But understanding the Western literary tradition, especially the Anglo-American literary tradition, might inculcate the traditions of the American experience in particular and the Anglosphere in general into students, and then they won’t be good little robots.

[max americana]

“Four specific literature courses were mandatory prior to graduation”

I hated that nonsense, except the number of cute chicks increased at each class. Damn mandatory too for 16 credits. Until now, I had no clue how Rudyard Kipling was related to my Business major unless he wrote a poem on financial analytics.

[Stosh]

The latest fad - especially at the most elite of these institutions - is the abolition of freshman English, along with college-level instruction in grammar and composition. Instead, entering students take “freshman seminars” (or, excuse me, “first-year seminars”), taught mostly by non-English Department faculty, including large numbers in math, the sciences, the arts, and the social sciences - as part of this approach, these folks are supposed to insure that freshman develop college level writing skills.

This frees up the English faculty to focus their attention on their professional studies, on things like the travails of the post-colonial transgendered in the clutches of an uncaring patriarchy.

[Scrambler Bob]

English Department —

Sounds like MicroAgression

[Snickering Hound]

If you're taking on $50,000 a year of student debt, you better be majoring in something other than English...

[dfwgator]

Email. Thornton: What's your favorite subject?

Bubbles: Poetry.

Thornton: Really? Well, maybe you can help me straighten out my Longfellow.

[fungoking]

Son, how can you fail English? You've been speaking it your entire life.

[jobim]

Derrida (French), DeMan (Belgian), Foucoult (French) in the middle of the 20th century developed DECONSTRUCTION, which broke down two things: one, that there is a hierarchy of literary worth, and two, that an author's meaning can be grasped. In undercutting both of those, all writing became a free-for-all, with every writer, every professor now free to make a canon of literature, and to interpret as suited one's own tastes.