Cornell English Then and Now -- 1

Here's a truth that blows my freakin' mind: since I earned my B. A. in English from Cornell University in 1960, sixty-five years have come and gone. Glaciers have melted and rivers have changed their course since, way back when, in a prior millennium, I was first introduced to serious literature -- to Chaucer and Milton and George Eliot.

My professors in those far-away-and-long-ago days were exclusively male and for the most part veterans of WW2 or the Korean war. They wrote definitive scholarly articles for the Philological Quarterly or for Modern Philology; they published learned monographs on canonical poets and novelists; and they taught courses with such forthright titles as The Seventeenth Century and Wordsworth and Coleridge. Although I was an indifferent student before I arrived at Cornell, I found an intellectual home in the Department of English. Inasmuch as I did not have a brain for rigorous science or for the tough analytic philosophy that was then in fashion, I was fortunate that the work of English suited my limited abilities -- curiosity, patience, a good memory, and something of a feel for language.

Just yesterday (and what, pray tell, prompted me?), I took a peek at the current website of Cornell's English Department. (In the index-card 1950s, when the manual typewriter was the acme of technology, the word "website" would have signified a dark corner colonized by spiders.) Even at first glance, the 2025 Cornell website said to me "very very different, very 'now'." While an occasional word or phrase was recognizable, it was the novelty -- the modernity, I guess -- that flared from the electronic page and dazzled mine eyne. Time marches on, no doubt, but whether it marches boldly forward or plunges over a cliff remains to be established.  

First of all, it's no longer the Department of English. It's now, hurrah!, the "Department of Literatures in English." What a welcome redefinition -- an assertion that English is a world language and that it houses a world literature. Nowadays, if I sit down with a work of fiction, I'm just as likely to read a novel by a writer from Africa or India or Australia as one from the British isles or North America. There's not a reason in the world why Chinua Achebe or Abdulrazak Gurnah should not be studied in an English Department. I respect this shift in focus and I regret that my 1950s Beowulf-to-T. S. Eliot English department was so parochial, so provincial. I can only admire the fact that the Department of Literatures in English has annexed to itself whole continents of writing -- a case of academic imperialism that this time seems wholly right and just.

The website also reveals that, in a nation in which the study of the humanities in higher education is at risk, Cornell's English is a huge thriving enterprise. There are fifty-one people on permanent staff, almost all of professorial rank. Of this number, twenty-seven -- or slightly more than half -- are women. And among those pictured on the site, a significant number are "of color." Undoubtedly, the present department is a far more representative collection of individuals than my 1950s faculty. Moreover, the chair, the associate chair, the director of undergraduate studies, the director of graduate students, and the director of writing are all women. It may once have been the case that the occasional female interloper was a token for display only, but not so now.

And what do these handsome and distinguished men and women study? Fortunately for me, members of the faculty list their areas of concentration. Most claim two or three specialties, some as many as five; a few recalcitrant individuals list none, leaving me to wonder whether they are polymaths or just ornery uncooperative academics. Among the fifty-one, the single expertise most commonly claimed is "cultural studies." This preponderance set me back a bit, because "cultural studies" is not a term I recognize nor one that existed, as far as I know, in the 1950s, when the word "culture" was synonymous with "civilization" -- sometimes just Western Civilization -- and when "cultured" meant something equivalent to "educated" and possibly even "socially established." But now, apparently, "cultural studies" is, and I quote a respected source, "an academic field  that... investigates how cultural practices relate to wider systems of power. These include ideology, class structures, national formations, ethnicity, sexual orientation and gender." Am I correct, and is it possible, for me to infer from this litany of nouns that "cultural practices" comprehends just about everything that we as a society say or do? Clearly the Department of Literatures in English lays claim to a heck of a lot of intellectual territory -- and that it is a far more aggressive entity than is revealed by its mere absorption of Anglophone novels. I was initially suspicious of these extensive claims, but after reflecting a while I recognized that, if I set to one side the self-aggrandizing listing of ideology, ethnicity, class... etc,), cultural studies may in practice simply bring to the forefront such elements as imperialism and nationhood in Robinson Crusoe or race and gender in Othello. Wouldn't it be comforting if "cultural studies" is at least in part merely traditional wine in spiffy new bottles? I, for one, certainly hope so.

After cultural studies, it is "literary theory" that claims the largest group of adherents -- thirteen, or about a quarter of the faculty. This revelation surprised me because I would have guessed that "theory" had long since gone the way of the aurochs and the mouflon. "Theory" had its herd of enthusiasts in its obscurantist heyday in the last century, yet it seems to be alive and kicking at Cornell -- but only, I suspect, as a vestigial remnant of an earlier time and only among the more senior members of the Department.

Following "theory" in popularity among the professoriate are the seven members who stake their claim to "gender studies." Six other say "African-American." The nine who announce a specialty in creative writing may not know that they are the successors and the beneficiaries of the late revered Professor James McConkey. Not a single member of the faculty offers "Shakespeare" or "Milton" as an area of expertise. I do not doubt that the study of gender and African-American and Asian-American literatures is a good thing, but I would have wished that the authors of the finest works of art in all of Anglophonia be accorded equivalent attention and status.   

Would a reincarnated Youthful Me elect take a degree from such a faculty?  I'm skeptical, but I can't say for sure because I don't know whether or not, in the classroom, the scrupulous examination of literature and ideas has been undermined by transitory and faddish ideologies. I must confess that the biases of the website make me feel old and wary and out of touch. And tired.

Well then, what does take place in the classroom?

Let's sample some evidence.

In days of yore, I enrolled in "Elizabethan and Jacobean Drama," a course taught by the distinguished scholar and teacher David Novarr. The course was organized as a chronological march from Kyd and Marlowe in the 1580s right through to Ford and Massinger -- the last playwrights of significance before the theaters went dark in 1642. I remember savoring some delightful comedies by Ben Jonson and Francis Beaumont and also a couple of ferociously brilliant tragedies by Thomas Middleton -- writings, I suspect, that 2020s English majors are not destined to encounter -- even though an acquaintance with these plays is essential background for understanding the timeless works of Shakespeare.  

There's no equivalent course in the present curriculum, but there is an analogue, and it appears in the catalogue of offerings thusly: 

ENGL 3240. Blood Politics:  Comparative Renaissance Drama

Blood is everywhere. From vampire shows to video games, our culture seems to be obsessed with it. The course examines the power of "blood" in the early modern period as a figure that continues to capture our imagination, not only as a marker of racial, religious, and sexual difference and desire, but also as a dramatic player in its own right. How does a politics of blood appear on stage when populations are being expelled and colonized for reasons (mis)understood in terms of blood?.... Topics include honor, revenge, purity, the body, sexuality, conversion, and death.

The course description itself is a mess -- both incomprehensible and meretricious. I'm shocked by the catchpenny pandering. Do 2020s teachers need to lure students into their classrooms with "vampires" and "videos?" The assertion that "blood is a dramatic player in its own right" is nonsense. The description reads like advertising copy for a cheesy low-budget horror flick playing at some louche all-night grind house.

Moreover, "blood" isn't "everywhere." Goodness gracious!

I'm afraid that these entrancing plays are doomed to be put through the "cultural studies" homogenizer. Or "theorized" out of all compass.

Ah, well.

Back in 1960, I had a summer job in Ithaca and therefore happened to be loafing around the campus when the University hosted its returning alumni. Among the returnees were the old folks  -- some few of them members of the class of 1895 -- who had walkered and wheel-chaired to their Sixty-Fifth. Geezers, I thought. It's sobering to realize that those codgers were the same age -- 86 -- as I am now. Should I  return to Ithaca this coming spring, for my very own Sixty-Fifth, I will be perceived by the young 'uns exactly as I observed those Class of 1895 guys: as ancient and irrelevant.

It follows, therefore, that my reservations about the 2025 English curriculum have their exact parallel in the 1895ers perspective on my 1960 curriculum. It's not hard to imagine that they -- I mean the members of the class of 1895 -- who had been educated in elocution and Old Norse, would have been shocked and perhaps outraged by the 1950s "modern" curriculum that I found so enticing and illuminating.

And now, because I don't want to go full curmudgeon and become the kind of superannuated guy who shakes his ebony stick at the modern world and deplores the decline of civilization, I'm going to make an effort to find out what's really going on in 2025. I have therefore set myself the task of reading a representative sample of the books written by members of the present-day English faculty.

I'll report on my studies right here.

Stay tuned.

[January 18] Bernhard Starr writes:  "Vivian, you are right about the course description. It's a disgrace. It's badly written and ridiculous. Why didn't you include the name of the prof. who wrote it?  He/she needs to be exposed. What "populations are being expelled and colonized" by Volpone or The Changeling?  And did you look other course descriptions -- are they equally silly?  What's worst about the course description is that it doesn't respect the plays that the class is going to examine. They're not important interesting dramas to the teacher -- they're just fodder for an ideology. 

[January 19] Vivian de St. Vrain replies: "Mr. Starr, I didn't identify the author of the course description because the website doesn't identify him/her. Just as well. Also, I didn't read other course descriptions though I might do so in the future. I think you're correct that the course description does not respect the dramas or their authors. Which is, as you suggest, mighty disappointing." 

[January 19] Bernhard Starr replies:  "I think I'd rather study Old Norse."

[February 4] Thurston Dale replies:  "I guess I'm a geezer, too (Cornell, '65). I'm glad I majored in English before criticism turned crazy. Great teachers -- Mizener, Abrams, Parrish, Novarr."

[March 17] Anatole Miles Webber writes: "Vivian, you were naive back in the 1950s and you're still naive now. You assume that the Cornell English Department of your youth, 65 years ago, was normative and normal. You were then and still are oblivious to the fact that the Department's 1950 curriculum was the product of stress and change and compromise. Try to remember that there were at least three forces at work and that various faculty members had various degrees of commitment to them. The first group was the oldest -- the traditionalist who studied, as they had always done, literature as history and biography and philology. Get the text and the context right was their primary concern. Then there were the 'new critics" -- heirs to Leavis and Scrutiny in England and the southern agrarians (Ransom, Tate, Warren) in the US. But the main intellectual current riling English Departments were the fierce critics out of New York (mostly Jewish) circles (Kazin, Trilling, Fiedler, Paul Goodman, Irving Howe, etc). In retrospect, even though Cornell brought both Lionel Trilling and Cleanth Brooks to Ithaca during your and my years there, the new winds made little impression on our education. Cornell was peaceful, isolated and non-ideological. It appears from your writing that you preferred it that way and still do. It was stable until the theory people brought in novelty and confusion and excitement.

[April 15] Parnell Pratt replies: "And also monumental pretension. And eventual collapse and failure."

[May 3] Lance Birdseye (Lt., USAF) writes: "What a funny website this is. Hey, folks, join the real world."

 

Comments

[Fran Gardner]

Maybe when I have the time (like never) I’ll go to the Berkeley website and see how the Department of English has changed. When I was getting the degree in the early 1970s, you had to take at least one Shakespeare course. I hope that’s still the case.
My daughter Maggie teaches at Cornell, but in the law school.

[Don Z. Block]

Homogenized Middleton? Would it not be educational to read his satiric tragedies and discover that he was not dramatizing colonization or anticipating Freud? Or that Shakespeare in "Taming of the Shrew" was not being a subtle feminist?