[Editors' Note: We put to our five participants the following question: "In 800 words or less, give us your critical appraisal of our current curriculum in English. How well do our major and minor programs reflect state of the art practices across America? Are new approaches and goals needed? Are the constituent fields of “English”—Rhetoric, literary studies, creative writing, etc.—properly served at EIU? How well do these programs serve the needs of our students? What problems, if any, do you see? What changes, if any, would you advocate? Strong opinion and clarity appreciated." No one had an advance peek at the responses of the others before writing his or her own reply. Before reading the fascinating range of opinions that resulted, you may want to refresh your knowledge of the curriculum by consulting the table at the end of this page, which lists requirements for the Major and the two Minors.—JDK, JZG, MLS.]

• • •

A Few Thoughts With Respect
to Our Curriculum

I recognize the eccentricity of this statement. Curriculum is a dull word, redolent of old-fashioned constraint. A curriculum may be broad, chaotic, arcane, open, restrictive, intelligently designed . . . spectacular might seem more suggestive of fireworks or a novel. There is a point, though, in laying one's cards on the table, and in this context spectacular displays mine. Our curriculum is not merely serviceable. It is as good as it gets.

In these melancholy days, when in colleges and universities across our nation delicious full-bodied immersion in the steamy hot-tub of literature has been challenged—and often replaced—by soggy, mildewed dampening in amorphous, content-deficient sociologically driven pseudo-curriculums, our department continues to instruct students in the arts of language. We read splendid poetry (and novels, plays, and aesthetically pleasing essays), and we teach our students to appreciate the beauty of well-chosen words. We read glorious old books (and wondrous newer ones), and we teach our students to encounter cultural distance through the splendors of artistic language, unmediated by the drab commentaries of musty pedantry. Dickens might have found so sensible a pedagogy unsuitable for satire, but I am pleased to imagine that Homer would have lauded us for our courage, Dante would have exalted us for our reason, Marx would have admired us for our revolutionary zeal, and Austen would have praised us for our character.

Our curriculum enables this. Let us look together at its logic.

Sophomores are required to take two courses - Backgrounds of Western Literature and Introduction to Literary Studies - which set the literary table with minimalist brilliance. BWL proclaims that fantastic books have been around for ages and that exceptional minds build on those that have preceded them. ILS maps out ways in which a reader can realize intellectual stimulation along with the pleasure of a good story. Together, these classes enable students to determine if they wish to feast on words, and, if so, how they may go about doing it. Meanwhile, a spicy dollop from Group 2 may set a student to salivating for more exotic delicacies

Juniors luxuriate in the banquet, gorging on dishes with myriad savors and textures. Students cannot know the range of books they will relish until they have read broadly, and our curriculum allows for the development of a palate with expansive tastes. Required groups and electives keep students from specializing until they have seen their options, but offer enough overlap for students to focus when they are ready to. Single-author courses balance period surveys as both types of organization suggest how contextualization enhances appreciation. The techniques learned as sophomores are put into increasingly skilled practice as a developing thirst for instruction in language is satiated by the Sauternes of Advanced Comp and the Pouilly-Fuissé of Structure of English, Language and Linguistics, or History of the English Language (wherefore we counsel students to go to SE, LL, or HEL).

Seniors take our most demanding courses, and as they accomplish their complex tasks they close the feast satiated and content. Literary History takes the telescopic view, training students to arrange spatially and chronologically divergent treats on the table of the broad literary universe. Senior Seminar offers the sweet indulgence of a microscopic focus, as participants join to pursue one subject in depth. Both classes afford the ample helpings appropriate to capstone study.

Along with these requirements, additional plates and bowls may be filled according to each student's individual taste. Our electives allow that no student need leave the feast unsatisfied . . .and very, very few do.

The effect of our curriculum is to offer students a supervised choice among courses that span the space and time of literature written in and translated into English. We acknowledge the value of culturally diverse offerings without sacrificing an education into the traditions of literary dependency and growth. Majors generally enter our program having read very little and done even less serious writing. They leave with as broad a knowledge as they can handle and abundant practical experience. Our graduates are ready to teach, to pursue advance study, or simply to go on with their lives as literate citizens. Our curriculum offers a model other schools should emulate. It is, in a word, spectacular.

As to the editors' secondary questions:

Does our curriculum reflect current state of the art practices?
Yes, as refracted in a mirror that improves upon them.

Are new approaches and goals needed?
No.

Are the constituent fields of "English"—Rhetoric, literary studies, creative writing, etc.—properly served?
Yes.

How well do these programs serve our students?
Very well.

What problems, if any, do you see?
A recent erosion of British Lit instruction in favor of methods in our teacher education curriculum.

What changes, if any, would you advocate?
A two-semester Shakespeare class.

top | E-mail the author
Agora Home Page | Contents Page | EIU Home Page
English Dept. Home Page | Past Issues

The Best That Has Been          
Western, White, and Male 

Indeed, how would our students know, having attended American high schools and, in particular, courses in our department? Americans are notorious the world over for their provincialism, and a look at the requirements for our English majors and minors shows that so far, at least on the face of things, we don't offer enough to help dispel such narrow conceptions of literary value. When it comes to curricular requirements, surface appearances do matter, because of the power that major and minor requirements can have in fostering general estimates of artistic merit. In general, our requirements for English majors and minors and the groupings in which they are arranged continue to overemphasize a variably Eurocentric and Anglocentric notion of which authors and literatures are important. Our curriculum has certainly changed for the better in this regard, as "world" literatures and "minority" literatures have become somewhat more prominently available (if not yet required, except in the newly revised English Ed minor), but they remain too marginally positioned for our students to see them as anything other than, well, marginal. What are English majors to think about whose literature is important when the British literature requirements continue to outweigh the American ones, by a two-to-one ratio? What impression do we create by requiring a Eurocentric introductory course like "Backgrounds of Western Literature," but no corresponding course in world or minority literatures?

I recognize that the debate over just how central or marginal world and minority literatures should be in an English department's offerings is by no means settled, but I'll have to leave that debate aside in my limited space here, trusting (or at least hoping) that the number of faculty on the "pro-diversity/global-awareness" side of the table constitutes a continually increasing majority. So how would I like to see us continuing to correct our curriculum's Eurocentric and Anglocentric biases? I'll start by applauding the upcoming changes in titles for the American literature courses listed in Group 5. The course currently known as "Colonial American Literature" will soon be "American Literature: 1450 to 1800," and "American Romanticism" will change to "American Literature: 1800 to Mid-19th Century." Even if, beneath the surface of the former titles, American Lit instructors have been including works written by authors who wrote within "Other" literary traditions, the general impression English majors no doubt received from the former titles was that the standard, Euro-American authors in each period were the central, real, "great" ones. The new, strictly chronological course titles in Group 5 will counter this reductive tendency by prodding both teachers and students toward a more inclusive and equitable conception of this land's varied literary traditions.

In these terms, Group 2, "Literary/Cultural Studies," is of course a salutary presence, as it alerts students to the cultural, historical, and sociological influences on literary production, a general approach to literature that has of course become pervasive. While there is obvious value in requiring such a course, the problem I see with such a grouping is that as a separate group, the literatures within it, and particularly the American ones, become "ghettoized," burdened with associations of a vaguely disfavored difference from some posited and preferable norm. When our English majors look over their course requirements in search of American literature, that norm exists over in Group 5, "American Literature." The problem is that even with the new, more generic course titles, the American norm remains an implicitly racialized norm. This is because Group 2, "Literary/Cultural Studies," includes "African-American Literature" and "American Multicultural Literature," but nothing like "Anglo-American" or "European-American Literature." As Toni Morrison pointed out a decade ago, there is a way in which the word "American" still means "white," a way in which white people and their supposed mores, values, behaviors, expectations and so on occupy the naturalized norm in our collective cultural imaginary. However, as Morrison herself demonstrated so ably in Playing in the Dark: Whiteness and the Literary Imagination, enlightening consideration of the racial status of authors and characters need not be limited, as it usually is, to those of people of color. As the recent, burgeoning rise of Whiteness Studies has demonstrated, the historical and racial specificity of white cultural production is just as delineable as that of other racial traditions; accordingly, I recommend a course in Group 2 that acknowledges this overlooked specificity, something along the lines of "English 3706: European American Literature." It may be that the readings in Group 5's standard American courses will continue to contain works written mostly by white authors, and in the eyes of some that would seem to render a separate course in European American literature redundant. However, literature by white authors in the standard courses is rarely studied in cultural and sociohistorical terms as white literature—as work produced by various ethnic and non-ethnic groups whose racial and ethnic positionings have been traceable influences on their cultural productions—while it would be studied in this light in the "Literary/Cultural Studies" 3706 course that I am positing here. Again, a larger value of such a course would be its countering of the erroneous implication of our current groupings that cultural and sociological content is available in Group 2, while literary merit resides in Group 5.

Another upcoming change that I'd like to applaud is our decision this year to hire a world literature specialist. Because EIU lacks a Department of Comparative Literature that would offer courses in world literature, the task of somehow immersing students in those vast oceans of available reading becomes ours by default. However, from the very start of their major course work, with the required courses in Group 1, English majors are taught that it is the "Backgrounds of Western Literature" (English 2601) that count. So, in order to decentralize Western literature from the outset, why not take one course worth of required credits from Groups 3 and 4, "British Literature," and create a second required course in Group 1, "English 2602: Backgrounds of Minority and World Literatures in English"? Such a change in Group 1 would alert students early on to the existence—and significance—of world and minority literatures, and imply as well that our department recognizes and values them as much as it recognizes and values Western literature.

The final flaw that I see is the preponderance among our requirements of British offerings. After the required courses in Group 1, our majors must select four British courses, and only two American ones. The offerings include Great Author courses that each forefront a British male (Chaucer, Shakespeare, and Milton), while no Americans, male or female, are similarly vaunted. Why, in the wake of so much recognition in the Humanities of "Other" artistic traditions, and of their attendant, differing aesthetic principles, do we continue to imply that the highest quality, most relevant writings spring most eternally from the great male minds of England? If we want our requirements to generally reflect the ongoing cultural centrality of a variably Eurocentric and Anglocentric whiteness, then so be it. But if not, then we should work toward collapsing the two British groupings into one, and require just two courses from that one group. Dispersing the other two courses anywhere in Groups 2 and/or 5 (or using one for the new World/Minority literature course proposed above) would help to dislodge British literature from its obdurate and outmoded occupancy on center stage.

I offer the above in response to the question (among others), "How well do our major and minor programs reflect the state of the art practices across America?" I haven't had time in the few short, busy weeks since receiving that question to conduct some sort of detailed survey of our profession's state of the art practices, and anyway, I don't believe that such an assessment would prompt me to adjust much what I've had to say here. I'm sure that as a relative newcomer I'm rehashing one side of some well-rehearsed arguments, as well as overlooking a practical matter here or there. Still, based on my sense of the general drift in our profession, and in our world, I stand by my claim that our major and minor requirements are simply, archaically, and unreasonably Eurocentric in some ways, and Anglocentric in others, much to the detriment of our students, whom we teach to find literary merit primarily within excessively narrow confines.

top | E-mail the author
Agora Home Page | Contents Page | EIU Home Page |
English Dept. Home Page | Past Issues


•• ••

Toward the University of McGregor

m not quite sure why John wanted to have our pictures included with these responses, but I suspect it's so that hastily hired hitmen will bump off the right target. Or maybe that's a little self-important…. But since I do recognize that curriculum discussions are inevitably a bit, well, sensitive, I'm going to jump in quickly so I can hop out and leave town.

I'll just say first that I am, of course, fairly new to the department and so look at the curriculum with only a rudimentary sense of its history and with no experience watching students begin and complete their degrees in English. But it's clear from our course offerings that English majors graduate with a strong background in British and American literature, and that they've had a fair amount of room to pursue their interests through our broad range of electives. In short, I think they graduate with a degree they can be proud of. There are, though, two components of our curriculum that I hope we can discuss. One is our lack of a course in Literary and Critical Theory, and the second, I think more important, is the "hybridity" of Group 2, "Literary /Cultural Studies." I'll begin with the latter.

Group 2, "Literary/Cultural Studies"

This group seems to have served its purpose, which I assume was to find a place for the new courses we develop as the department keeps up with changes in English studies. The major problem I see is the inclusion of "African-American Literature" and "American Multicultural Literature" in what looks like a special interest ghetto. If 2705 and 3705 are, as their titles suggest, courses on American literature, it seems to me that they belong in Group 5, "American Literature." Leaving them where they are is rather like exhibiting Native American life in the Museum of Natural History.

Moving those two brings into relief a different emphasis for Group 2, which now seems to be World Literatures (2602/2692, "World Literature Since the Renaissance"; 2850, "Post-Colonial Literature"; 3009G/3099G, "Myth and Culture"). To these choices we could add 2601, "Backgrounds of Western Literature," and possibly the cultural foundations courses, or versions of them. (I'm avoiding the issue of what to do with 3903, "Women, Literature, and Language," because at this point, I simply don't know)

Group 1, "Required Classes"

I would vote to remove 3001, "Advanced Composition," from this group and instead make 2205, "Introduction to Literary Studies," a writing centered course. Bonnie first suggested doing this with 2205, and I balked since 2205 is already trying to do so much (developing students' skills in reading literature and essays on literature, giving them a sense of literary history, introducing them to literary and critical theory, teaching them to write essays about literature). But if we had a separate course in Literary and Critical Theory, we would have more time in 2205 to concentrate on writing and turn what is already writing intensive + into the writing centered course it aspires to be.

On Literary and Critical Theory

My final point is this: we have to have a course in Literary/Critical Theory if we want a contemporary department and students who needn't be afraid of graduate school. At the University of McGregor, it would be a required course, but I'd settle for seeing it among the electives. Like many of you, I incorporate critical theory in the literature courses I teach, but I simply don't have time to pause and have my students read the theoretical texts that inform my teaching of Chaucer. This problem will be resolved once we have a Group 7, "Chaucer," which will include courses such as "Chaucer and Feminist Theory"; "Chaucer and Post-structuralism"; "Chaucer and Psychoanalysis"; "Chaucer and/as Empire." But until then, I really believe we're doing our students a disservice by not making available a course in Literary/Critical Theory as a standard part of the curriculum.

At the risk of moving from suggestion to rant, I'll just tell this brief story. A faculty member (who shall remain nameless) recently suggested to one of our graduate students (a luminary) that she read an essay by Foucault, one that addressed, and provided a vocabulary for discussing, one of the issues she was interested in. She replied, (and she seemed to be serious because she never did read Foucault),"I try to avoid reading authors whose names I can't pronounce." Not the most thoughtful rejection of a theorist, and one I'd be embarrassed to have her repeat at another institution.

I didn't actually intend my response to be a proposal, but since it is, this is how the requirements I'm suggesting break down.

Students would take 51 hours (as they do now):

Group 1: 4 courses
Group 2: World Literature, 1-2 courses
Group 3: English Lit before 1660, 2 courses
Group 4: English Lit after 1660, 2 courses
Group 5: American Literature, 2-3 courses
Group 6: Electives, 4-5 courses

top | E-mail the author
Agora Home Page | Contents Page | EIU Home Page |
English Dept. Home Page | Past Issues

•• ••

Student Choice

hat should an English Major know? What is the crux of our discipline? What is the core expertise all our students must have?

These are honest questions, but to a great extent they are, I think, simply the wrong questions. Too much insisted upon, they will take us, not to the promised land of coherence and clarity and usefulness, but the alkali flats of dilettantism, uniformity, and tedium.

During its relatively brief career as a serious discipline—roughly a century—"English" has become an astonishingly huge, mixed bag of things: literature and writing, scientific linguistics and old-fashioned prescriptive grammar, British literature and American, critical theory and creative writing, historical surveys and great author courses, popular culture and classicism, Beowulf and Salman Rushdie, elocution and technical writing, ESL and play writing, rhetoric and aesthetics, comparative literature, genre courses, theme courses, film history, gender and minority studies, and on and on. Students can find many fine, startling, life-changing things in this bag, but a single unifying order is not one. There is no fundamental theory, no consistent methodology, no widely accepted terminology, no finite content that anyone can reach the end of. To the extent that anything holds the grand congeries together, it is an emphasis on critical thinking and clear writing, yet even these are only partial shibboleths: think of creative writing classes, where students may be urged not to think critically, or of critical theory courses, where they may learn to affect a jargon that sounds like sheer double-talk to outsiders.

What, then, shall we say about our present major curriculum, with its six required Group 1 courses, its one required Group 2 course that turns out to be Myth and Culture eighty percent of the time, its four required courses in British Literature, its two required period courses in American Literature, its four electives that become, for Teacher Certification students, just two, and finally its long list of phantom Group 6 courses that sound terribly exciting but are almost never offered?

What I say about it is, this is one darned fine way to major in English: but why are we insisting on just the one?

The present scheme, contrived in the mid-seventies in the wake of a disastrous fall-off in major numbers (with a few relatively minor refinements to come later), has served us remarkably well for a long time. In many ways it seems an ingenious balancing act as it addresses competing demands for historical coherence, theoretical and methodological coherence, genre study, canon study, canon busting, contemporaneity, rhetoric, pedagogy, and writing instruction. Even creative writing, ever the unwanted guest at the academic table, comes off rather well, given that up to five courses from the major (theoretically—I have never actually seen this) can be double-counted into the minor it has all to itself. It is decidedly a major for generalists, not specialists, and the whole looks a shade too traditional—Eurocentric, Anglophilic, canon-besotted, period-preoccupied—but the rich diversity of courses in Groups 2 and 6 would, if only they were actually taught, adequately exorcise the ghosts of Leavis and Eliot. Given the premise that we must have a one-size-fits-all curriculum, this is about the best we can expect to do.

It is that premise, though, that we need to question. Arguments over curriculum get so bitter not just because the stakes are high but because the issues are so imponderable. Is Chaucer more important than Twain? Than Toni Morrison? Why? Do canons form chiefly on the basis of power relationships, and if so, what is the role and nature of literary excellence? What is the relation between a clear conceptual understanding of language and performative fluency? We will never resolve such arguments, so the obvious recourse, the liberal thing, the democratic thing, the professional thing, is to let the students decide. They, after all, are the ones who pay the bills and have the most at stake here. No one can tell you for sure whether Whitman is a better poet than Keats, but anyone can decide his or her own preference. We should quit prescribing so much (and feuding over what to prescribe), admit that there are many good ways to be an English major, quit trying to "cover everything," and offer a curriculum that permits much more choice and (as a direct result) more opportunity for truly advanced study.

Concretely, what I would propose is a major in which a lean and hungry core—just three or four courses, arrived at no doubt after prolonged, desperate, wounding debate—is combined with a six- or seven-course concentration in one of several areas: Literary History, Cultural Studies, Rhetoric and Professional Writing, Creative Writing, or Teacher Certification—then topped off with a layer of six or seven electives. Each concentration would double as a minor, open to non-majors, and students could if they wished complete a second concentration in the course of satisfying their "required electives," receiving the minor as well as the major on their transcripts. All this could be done within the bounds of our present 51 hours (Teacher Certification probably excepted), and without too much redesign of existing courses, though certain flashpoints (2901, 3001, 4300, 4950) would have to be revisited. The result, if it is all done right, ought to be much greater coherence and integration among courses, improved motivation among students now freer to pursue their own interests, greater sophistication within admittedly smaller areas, and the return from the dead of many fine courses that presently exist only in the catalog. It also seems quite possible that a curriculum with fewer strict requirements, but capable of addressing a greater range of more tightly defined interests, would draw more majors—perhaps quite a few more.

Thus my vision of curricular Nirvana. How we can get there I don't know, and probably we never will, since every curriculum is based on institutional politics and history as well as Platonic analyses of The Good. Recently, in our revision of the Teacher Education curriculum that affects most of our majors, we have taken pretty much the opposite direction to the one I advocate, letting a narrow emphasis on (supposed) practicality dominate as we prescribe more courses than ever, heap yet more pedagogy on our students' innocent heads, and deliver them to those outside the Department who (at worst) seem bent on turning them into unthinking robots.

But I refuse to be discouraged, because finally a curriculum is just an outline waiting to be filled out. What really matters, and what to a surprising degree saves everything, is the passion and talent with which individual courses are taught. In the hands of a gifted instructor, a course in Directing the High School Year Book will not be the stultifying exercise it sounds like to me (I should confess I have never HAD a "methods course"), but will do what good courses always do: become its own Theory of Everything, zen-like, incorporating its own rich and disciplined view of things, demanding a suprising amount of higher reasoning and solid information. I can't resist adding, though, that to the extent it succeeds in this, it will have become exactly the kind of course we have always taught inside the Department: speculative, strange, ambitious, difficult, occasionally obscure, paradox-ridden, a little mad, entertaining, and in all ways perplexing to those who think everything learned should have an obvious and ready application.

top | E-mail the author
Agora Home Page | Contents Page | EIU Home Page
English Dept. Home Page | Past Issues

•• ••

English Studies at EIU; Or, Can a Literature
Program Thrive Without Providing a Strong
Background in Rhetoric and Cultural Studies?

The tone of my question probably reveals my answer (which, of course, is a resounding NO). With a major that requires students to complete 51 hours, however, implementing a solution to what I see as a deficiency in the program may seem impossible. That is, until you take a look at my proposal, which, I'm afraid, changes current requirements rather radically. I propose that we add more required Group 1 courses (so that students share a common foundation in English studies) but then eliminate any other group requirements, so that students will have many more electives from which to build more individualized concentrations. According to my dream plan, we would keep five of the six current required Group 1 courses-all but English 2601, Backgrounds of Western Literature-and then add four courses that would give students a survey of British and American literatures. So students would take 27 hours of required courses and gain a strong sense of American and British literary histories.

So far the plan looks pretty darn conservative, I admit. But if we were to keep the number of required hours for the major at 51, after completing required courses, students would have 24 elective hours to complete. That's eight courses! With the help of their advisors (thank you Olga and John), students could then map out a concentration that would suit their individual needs. If they hoped to pursue a career in professional or technical communication, students could concentrate their coursework there, completing a minor in professional writing-that's 21-23 hours-along with another course of their choice. If they planned to complete graduate work in American Studies, they could concentrate their coursework in their area by taking Cultural Studies and American literature courses. They could focus on creative writing, too, completing a minor in creative writing (now 18 hours) and then choosing two other courses to supplement their minor. Students could complete concentrations in children's and young adult literature, in English literature, in drama, in American literature, in literary/cultural studies, and (perhaps) in film studies. Opening up the major in this way also offers more opportunities for students to minor in Women's Studies or African American Studies, since courses in English could fulfill part of the 18 hours required for each minor. All in all, I believe my idea will work well.

What may not work as well, however, is the newly approved English Education program. Increasing the major by six hours is bad enough, but requiring that students take more methods classes outside of the major seems redundant to me. The Integrated English Language Arts Course was designed to help students meet the new Illinois Standards (that include more emphasis in speech and, to a certain extent, reading), so I believe the adding those six hours is unnecessary and, potentially, detrimental to the program. With the changes we have already made to English 3401 and 3402 (Methods of Teaching Composition and Methods of Teaching Literature, respectively) and the addition of the Integrated English Language Arts Course (English 4801), again, we are already meeting the Illinois State Standards. No additional coursework outside of the major is necessary. In fact, no other institutions around the state are adding courses from Speech Communication or any other department-they are either revising their methods course(s) or adding an additional course in the English Department. Now English education majors have even fewer choices. Let's at least give the rest of our majors more choice.

top | E-mail the author
Agora Home Page | Contents Page | EIU Home Page |
English Dept. Home Page | Past Issues

•• ••

top
Agora Home Page | Contents Page | EIU Home Page |
English Dept. Home Page | Past Issues