Posted on 10/29/2022 7:07:47 AM PDT by SeekAndFind
The decline in the study of undergraduate English proves the proposition that the Left ruins everything it touches There has been a precipitous drop in the number of English majors across the country, and our "progressive" professors have only themselves to blame.
The National Center for Education Statistics publishes its annual Digest of what undergraduates study. In 1970 there were roughly 840,000 undergraduate degrees conferred in the United States. Of these approximately 64,000 were degrees in English Literature and Language. This made it the fourth most popular major across the country.
Since 1970 there has been a vast increase in the number of undergraduate degrees conferred: over two million in 2020. Yet, despite this huge influx of students, the number of degrees in English has dropped to just over 38,000 in 2020.
If confronted with this decline in student interest, the professors would no doubt point to economic and vocational concerns and to our crass American culture. The unstated premise for this rationale, which is ludicrous on its face, would be that there were no economic or vocational concerns then, and that American culture was somehow less crass in 1970. The professors would shrug their shoulders and say, "It's not our fault."
When we were undergraduates at Kenyon College, it had an English Department as formidable as any. The professors were serious about literature, its criticism, and the quality of our written expression. They weren't interested in nurturing resentment, grinding axes, psychotherapy, or the creation of like-minded political cadres. The materials were chosen based on what Mathew Arnold called "the best that has been thought and said in the world." We read the best and worked to understand the authors as they understood themselves. English was a very popular major.
(Excerpt) Read more at americanthinker.com ...
All you have to do is read the blogs. Its as if English was their third language.
By the late 1970s, the barbarians were at the gates in English departments across the country. The invasion of the likes of Jacques Derrida, Michel Foucault, and Paul de Man was well underway. English majors were subjected to mind-numbing theories of literature and criticism such as deconstruction, queer and racial theories, and those have now evolved into the cult of “diversity, equity, and inclusion.”
When choosing the materials to be studied, what now matters most is the race, ethnicity, gender, and gender-bending qualities of the author instead of the quality of the work itself; trendy political points, not beauty and aesthetic accomplishment. You can now get that degree without bothering with the profundities and beauties of the likes of Chaucer, Shakespeare, Twain, or Faulkner.
Here is what now passes as a semester course in English literature (English 214) at Kenyon (Trigger Warning: Take a deep breath.)
“How do you read gender? How do you read sexuality? How and in what ways have gender and sexuality been written and rewritten? This course serves as an introduction to queer and transfeminist theories and practices in gender and sexuality studies. Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus. And yet, the literary, in league with anticolonial, civil rights, and LGBTQ social movements, not only sheds sharp light on how gender and sexuality are regulated and troubled, but also animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise. At once world-building and world-shattering, representations of gender and sexuality can leverage critiques against normativity in the same gesture as they bow to reproducing it.
Taking our transnational cue from subjugated knowledges and intersectional epistemologies, we’ll constellate the diverging genealogies and methodologies that have shaped the politics and aesthetics as well as the ethics and affects (sic) of gender and sexuality. Against the traffic of binary opposition, we’ll index the possibilities of intimacy and performativity that determine desiring subjects and their objects. As a class collective, our aim will be to read and reread as well as write and rewrite texts that interrogate and complicate how gender and sexuality, as contested sites of pleasure and pain, are embodied and experienced.
The geographic and generic focus of this course may vary; for more information, students should contact the instructor. This counts toward the methods requirement for the major and an elective for the women’s and gender studies major. Open only to first-year and sophomore students. Prerequisite: ENGL 103 or 104.”
Moron Snowflakes have changed the meaning of so many words to help those Snowflake drug addicts try to find a way to communicate with one another beside moving their lips and grunting. To “drop” something has a whole new meaning to those morons than the one I had become used to over the past 70 years.
“…animates the liberatory potential of imagining embodied relations otherwise.”
Ah, I think I see why there’s a problem getting majors, not to mention writing the English language.
Back when I SBC (school before college), one of my toughest teachers was the English teacher. Strict and demanding. However, years later when I go to reunions, we all still mention her and admit that she’s the one we most remember and respect. She had standards. Today? Bwahahahahahaha.
I had to stop right there and see if "we" meant one person or several people wrote the article. It's indicative of how much the insane liberals have destroyed the English language when have to check if "we" is singular or plural construction.
I filled out four buzzword bingo cards just in that class description. They could have a course on writing academic jibber jabber.
“Conceptualized through its intersections with race, ethnicity, coloniality, class, and ability, the sex/gender system of oppression has long served as a taxonomizing apparatus.”
Marxist gibberish. I bet many of the students were brought up on a “look say” method of reading, where they would struggle over words like “dog” and “bog” - but they will be experts about the taxonomizing apparatus of a system of oppression.
I think I lost a few brain cells just reading that mess of a course description.
RE: The fifth paragraph in this article about English Literature studies starts with “When we were undergraduates at Kenyon College...”
This article has two authors.
English is not English anymore. It’s courses on the hatred of English and western culture. There is no more appreciation for the language and the literary geniuses that wield and have mastery over the language. Literature is the playground of hate. These profs have lost their love and given themselves over to hate. They perhaps justify it as progress in some distorted way, but many kids know the score. Most things beautiful are useless... but English is not beautiful anymore, and its uselessness have been converted over to useful tactics of propaganda. It has become ugly and deceitful and boring. And kids now say, “Why bother!”
Well after all they demand that you read all those old dead white guys….
If that
Good lord. I’m glad I went to college when I did. We read the classics (which I still reread because they’re good) and wrote about what we read
I’d be booted out the first day of class for overly loud laughing
It’s ok because it’s normative ya know
Reminds me of the infamous Thelma Hill
If you took one of her classes you were never the same
All of the Liberal Arts are this way. Sociology was always crap and Philosophy always useless but History (my major) used to produce good informed citizens who knew their country’s history, world history and gained a lot of insight into human nature by seeing the problems our ancestors faced and the solutions (or failures) they came up with to deal with those problems.
Then in the late 80s/early 90s political correctness came along. The 60s student radicals had started their long march through the institutions and they were now in many cases, the professors. They came up with PC Revisionist reinterpretations of historical events to suit their Leftist politics. It has been a complete takeover since then. None but hardcore Leftists can even get hired in the Liberal Arts in most universities. Where there used to be vigorous debate about how to interpret historical events - just as there is vigorous debate about current politics - now there is a deadening unanimity....Students are presented the Leftist version as if it came from a burning bush. They never even hear that there was another side or a different way of looking at what happened.
That produces students who have been indoctrinated rather than educated. Even though I went to a good school and even though I don’t think my professors - at least most of them - were especially hard Left, I learned a lot more history after college than I learned in college. And I was utterly SHOCKED to when I first learned of different interpretations of history. I had never even heard any of it before. Nobody had ever taught me any of that. I graduated in 1994.
They need to read more CS Lewis
Yes, I saw the two authors, so the “we” is correct English grammar. My point was that, these days, the wokesters so abuse the language that they now use plural construction for singular. I was pleased to see these English majors sticking with the conventional and correct singular / plural construction (but I would have expected nothing less given their ages).
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.