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Does English Matter?
A Brown professor for almost three decades warns that the discipline of English is going the way of Latin and Greek. What's needed, he argues, is a new definition of what to read and how to read it.

THE RISE

Once upon a time there was a boy who loved language. He loved it all: nursery rhymes, stories, comic books, plays, movies, advertising, instructions on packages, even school books. What becomes of such a boy? If he is lazy - and lucky - he becomes an English teacher. I was such a boy, and that is what became of me. These pages are part of an attempt to explain - to myself and others - just what has happened to my chosen profession. This is also an attempt to pay back, to a profession that has given me a rewarding life, something of what I have received.
I want to explain, to myself and others, how English came to occupy its present place in our educational system - in colleges, especially - to diagnose the symptoms of an educational illness that I occasionally call "hypocriticism," and to make recommendations, both general and specific, for a change of direction, a reconstruction of the field of English studies as a discipline. But let us begin at the beginning.
In the beginning there were no English professors. In those good old days, there were teachers of oratory and belles lettres who themselves practiced belletristic oratory. They did what they taught and they taught what they did. No wonder they were respected by those who came to learn from them. But history, with its notorious dialectical cunning, was to undo all this. During the nineteenth century, oratory dwindled into rhetoric, and rhetoric gradually lost its oral emphasis, giving way, finally, to the exclusively written focus of English composition. The proud tradition of oratory as a fine art died a century ago at Brown, the old rhetoric department swallowed up by the newly created English department.
In 1905, what had been courses in the composition of speeches became courses in just plain composition. But, without oratory as their subject matter, these new courses floundered. In response, many took their subject matter from literature. This meant that the written texts produced by students were of a vastly different kind from the imaginative texts studied in class. Instead of reading orations and producing oratory, as earlier generations had, students began to read literature and produce criticism - and the stage was set for more recent developments in the field of English. This same process, of course, had transformed the students from producers of work comparable to what they studied into passive consumers of texts they could never hope to emulate. The teacher became a middleman or priestly exegete.
The English department as we know it was in place in the first decade of this century at Brown and many other schools across the country. Its success could be measured in its growth, as former Greek and Latin students joined the former rhetoric students in English courses. Along with growth, however, came increasing specialization and professionalization. Professionalization took curricular form first as philology, with its emphasis on Anglo-Saxon and linguistic history, then as New Criticism, which stressed the close reading of poetical paradoxes and ambiguities, and later as literary and cultural theory.
The change was driven partly by the attempt to be more "scientific" and "Germanic," under the influence of German linguistic scholarship - and this was not without a whiff of Aryan racism. Change was also fueled by the need to compete with the mental rigor of classical studies and the sciences. Both factors added intellectual stiffening to a curriculum that was really based on what we might call the Story of English Literature, a simple chronological tale, broken down into periods. The New Criticism, on the other hand, was an attempt to generate a rigor that was not scientific but distinctly humanistic. Over the decades, the pendulum swung back and forth between these scientific and antiscientific points of view.
When English was at its height as an academic field, English professors believed that the study of literature would help their students (mostly white, Protestant young men and women) become better human beings. Literary studies, they thought, would give students a knowledge of human nature, a sympathy, tolerance, and understanding - and make them an asset in the business world as well. But this comfortable assurance that a richer, fuller humanity would be an asset in business, law, or politics is not so easy to retain in our present world, even if one were certain that the study of literature, as it is presently conducted, would indeed lead to such an enhanced humane culture. To put it simply, that quasi-religious status once accorded English literature by a class of individuals whose background was mainly privileged and Anglo-Germanic is hardly viable any longer. Two world wars and the Holocaust have had something to do with that, demonstrating powerfully that high culture is not necessarily a guarantee of sympathy, tolerance, and understanding. Finally, the rise of a popular culture distributed through the mass media drew public attention away from more traditional literary forms.