![]() As one who went to grad school for the love of it and not for a career (I did not conduct my first job search until fifteen years after earning my PhD), what I see as the real problem here is that we have been focusing our programs incorrectly for decades, coasting on expanding demand rather than recognizing that our field should never have been primarily about jobs. In Endgame, there is also an emphasis on the growing reality of a lack of jobs utilizing graduate degrees in English. I want to open the world of higher education to undergraduate students whose vision has been limited by factors structural, cultural and economic. Many of the pieces in Endgame, though quite interesting to me as the product of a rather traditional American graduate program in English, speak more to the rarefied world I studied in than to what really concerns me professionally today. Rap also reflects Gerard Manley Hopkins (himself looking back to the Anglo-Saxon) and his ‘sprung rhythm.’ Through broad exposure, students, I hope, can start to see the greater intellectual weave, recognizing that nothing comes to exist in isolation or without precedence. Old English poetry resonates in Rap with its internal rhymes and alliteration. They can engage any literature, especially when drawn to connect it with art they are more familiar with. That my students are rarely themselves whites of European background makes no difference to what they can appreciate and understand. The map I have drawn for them also includes much more that is modern by a much more diverse body of writers, but the point is that I want to pass respect for history and the development of thought and art on to my students as well as introduce them to the complexities of the modern world, all while teaching them to write more effectively. My First Year Composition students this coming semester will be exposed to “The Seafarer” in Anglo-Saxon (I will provide a translation of it as I read it aloud), an excerpt from Chaucer’s “The Nun’s Priest’s Tale” (in Middle English), a piece from Shakespeare’s The Tempest, and a passage from Milton’s Areopagitica. After all, students need something of a roadmap if their approach is going to get them anywhere, and they need to be able to read it. But neither I nor anyone else in the Humanities has given up or lost relevance through this approach.īut curiosity and even skills aren’t the whole of it We always teach ‘the thing itself’ as well. If I can instill curiosity in a student, I have done a large part of my job. ![]() It’s true, I do want to teach ‘approaches to knowledge.’ ‘How to learn’ is every bit as important as what is learned. ![]() umanists have often trapped themselves in a false choice between “dead white males” and “we don’t transmit value.” It was, and remains, an insane view for humanists to take, a unilateral disarmament in the contest for student hearts and minds no other discipline promises to teach only a style of thinking and not some essential substance…. Ur so-called “core” curriculum promised to teach us “approaches to knowledge” rather than the thing itself. Responding to a Chronicle Review collection of essays on the demise of traditional studies in English called Endgame, New York Times columnist Ross Douthat, in “ The Academic Apocalypse: The crisis of English departments is also a crisis of faith” (01/11/20), expresses the worries of some:
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