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ECONOMICS and idealism drive the recent debates about the relative merits of literature and composition. We in English departments of colleges and universities hope we can find a comfortable place for the useful within the pleasures of literature. To our credit, we have had a tradition of dealing with that issue long before economics became a major indicator of the health of a department. 1 Most departments do see the educational question of composition's place in the curriculum as significant, though purity of motive may never be assumed. What we have assumed, for the most part, is the existence of a single debate between composition and literature, with theoretical issues of most efficacy and energy taking place within the intellectual field of composition. The recent theoretical arguments within the field of literature have certainly appeared threatening, but they have had little effect on the English literature curriculum. Curricular change in literature is nowhere as exciting as the changes in the composition curricula that are reflected in the development of writing-across-the-curriculum movements and in the new money being put into computer-assisted instruction and writing and reading laboratories. Most of us have assumed, with good reason, that the term literature in the debate has meant the usual array of British and American courses with their genre and theme variations. I argue that this core of the literature curriculum is, in some institutions, shifting and that it must and will shift as we move into the twenty-first century.
Let us begin at the center of the British Empire and at the beginning of chapter 10 of Joseph Conrad's Secret Agent:
The Assistant Commissioner, driven rapidly in a hansom from the neighborhood of Soho in the direction of West-minster, got out at the very centre of the Empire on which the sun never sets. Some stalwart constables, who did not seem particularly impressed by the duty of watching the august spot, saluted him.
Conrad's irony and critical eye do not allow that step from the carriage to be steady or true in 1907, but in 1987 the Assistant Commissioner would have nowhere to stand. Now, the language rather than the navy links the “empire,” and the language is as diverse as the peoples that exported or adapted it. English is recognized as a world language, and linguists have been busy studying the various manifestations of the “mother tongue” (Fishman et al.; Bailey and Gorlach). Recent additions to the list of noteworthy periodicals such as English Today and World Literature Written in English attest to the turn of many scholars to English literatures and languages that reside outside England and the United States. This reorientation can most definitely influence the way we see the traditional literatures of England and the United States. As Bruce King suggests, “We can no longer assume that there is a fixed subject called English … The British literary tradition has become one among many” ( Literatures 20). For a decade now we have accepted course by course the international literatures of Anglo-Irish, Afro-American, and Amerindian writers, but now we are faced with an entirely new set of circumstances. Bruce King's latest book is entitled The New English Literatures ; England is now one of many. We have yet to confront that fact in our departments of English.
George Steiner, certainly “one of us,” challenges the traditional curricula in his provocative essay “Why English?” by framing the issue as a matter of the loss of Empire. I quote him at some length because of the importance of his challenge:
The first, most obvious point to make is that the linguistic centre of English has shifted. This is so demographically. … Any map of “world English” today, even without being either exhaustive or minutely detailed, would have to include the forms of the language as spoken in many areas of East, West, and South Africa, in India, in Ceylon, and in the United States possessions or spheres of presence in the Pacific. It would have to list Canadian English, the speech of Australia, that of New Zealand, and above all, of course, the manifold shades of American Parlance … It is English, though in a form or variety of forms, distant from the mother-tongue.
But this shift of the linguistic centre involves far more than statistics. It does look as if the principal energies of the English language, as if its genius for acquisition, for innovation, for metaphoric response, [have] also moved away from England.
(910)
These colonial languages—and American English is one of the earliest established colonial languages—have spawned dialects and literatures of their own. The Modern Language Association's Bibliography is now categorized by most of these literatures, some developing and some very well established. We may easily assume that as English expands even further these literatures and languages will develop a sophistication and history comparable to British and American English. We must add this expanding and increasingly important trend to the problems facing English curricula, even if few departments have recognized it as a significant pressure. Our concern with the relationship, even threat, of composition to the major in literature has commanded our attention and diverted us from a greater concern, the transformation of the English and American literature curricula. The composition-literature argument is really an argument between general and specialized education, between service to all and service to the major, with those intrigued by the question trying to couple one with the other so we will have a theoretical and pleasurable marriage of necessity and desire.
The last detailed study of the curriculum, The Anatomy of College English (1973), by Thomas W. Wilcox, suggests that little change occurred between the period after World War II , with its expansive energies, and the late sixties, despite small additions in film, women's studies, and ethnic studies:
There are few earlier statistics to compare with those I gathered, and therefore I cannot verify or disprove the common suspicion that English programs have remained almost static over the past twenty years. But the very fact that I was able to classify about 80 percent of the courses now being offered as versions of types which have been standard for decades suggests that that suspicion is well founded.
(156)
A look at the undergraduate catalogs of the universities within my own university system suggests that rapid change has not occurred since Wilcox's study in the late sixties. The long-established campus at Madison in the University of Wisconsin System offers 57% of its courses from British and American literatures, while the younger Milwaukee campus presents 34% from British and American literatures. The ten other campuses that have the English major are nearer the Milwaukee percentage. Basically, the difference between the Madison campus and the others is the emphasis on credit course work devoted to writing (both creative and expository) rather than an emphasis on other literatures. Madison devotes 10% of its course work to writing (Madison does not have a required freshman program for all students), and the others are in the 20% range. One campus does have 16% of its course work devoted to world literature in translation, mainly European. The remaining courses of the system universities are split rather evenly among linguistics and language courses, ESL, and teacher education. To my surprise, criticism, per se, has little hold on the curricula outside of the 3 % of the total offerings at Madison. These figures do not, of course, reflect enrollment or even student preference or courses outside the departments that might touch on my concerns here The courses in the catalog, however, do reflect the faculties' preferences and the intellectual message presented to the student and to the intellectual world. In the entire system, there are two courses devoted exclusively to literature written in English outside the British and American traditions. Again, a warning is in order, since many departments do teach such literatures here and there in genre and themes courses. A casual microfiche check of other catalogs does not suggest that this pattern differs much across the United States.
Wilcox and the teachers and scholars in the Wisconsin university system know full well that the Dickens course of 1930 differs from the Dickens courses of 1969 and that by extension those differ from the Dickens of 1987. Perspectives, critical interpretations, new discoveries in scholarship, and teaching styles change; that is not the point. More important, the plot tilled remains quite the same with a few acres added here and there. We could argue that tradition is served by the stability of these curricula and that, on the basis of some sort of Darwinian paradigm, those literatures and functions that do muscle their way into the English department deserve to be there.
But let's face it: the curriculum perpetuates the power of the British Empire and its extension, the American Empire. I say that without political malice; the effect is there, it's a fact, and it can be seen in almost every English department in the United States and in many abroad. It is not surprising that the literatures and language of English departments are sustained by the power and notice that empire brings and, finally, by the increasing number of speakers and writers using English as either a primary or an official language No other language can match either the diversity of cultures influenced or the geographical dispersion of language and literatures. Cultural geography and the sociology of power have far more to do with the stability of the English curriculum than does the aesthetic quality of English literature. In Alvin Kernan's apt phrase, literature is part of a “socially constructed reality” that gives “meaning and value to human existence” (46).
Of course Milton is a powerful aesthetic force, but his influence has been enormous because he has been noticed by the English curricula of the world as a major English poet. He has had the opportunity to influence the better minds of two very powerful English-speaking countries. True, the study of Milton has itself fluctuated in reputation, but it has been discussed as central to English literature since the eighteenth century. Milton is central to the curricula because he is a great poet, but the curricula are there because they are part of the power of English and American universities which are there because of the past and present power of England and the United States. Milton has an academic life not because a mysterious poetic force sustains him (though some still believe that) but because first he wrote in English and then he was a great poet.
The question is not what critical theory to adopt but what books to teach. Though I would not accept the list of Secretary of Education Bennett, he does ask the right question: what should we teach? Though many advocates of critical theory would suggest that theory does lead to a list, we need to see that list soon and it needs to be a list that acknowledges English as a world language. I will let Bruce King continue: “But we must also remember that each literature is a part of world English literature and each is a development, and shares in the heritage, of British writing.” Further, “If we do not find a way of integrating traditional English studies with the study of other national English literatures, there will be an increase in provincial, specialized or incoherent visions of the world, which is exactly what the study of literature is presumed to prevent” ( Literatures 2021).
The usual method of “integrating” the new with the traditional by adding one or two courses here and there will not work. The individual faculty member advocating change is bought off, and the empires, both British and American, sail on. Another disadvantage of this method is that such courses compete with the other fledglings in women's and ethnic studies. Both women's studies and ethnic studies courses that reside in the English department have language at their base, but their political and critical ideologies often override the concern for language. Although I may be mistaken, the approval of these courses seems to stem from politics and guilt, not from a transformation of the faculties into advocates of fundamental change. But the courses have had their effects on “standard” courses. Walk through a university bookstore, and you may see Kate Chopin's The Awakening on the English 120—American Lit II shelf. Sometimes it is right beside Ellison's Invisible Man , but not too often. Anthologies are changing as well; we are adapting by adopting other points of view. But the central issue is ignored: our English departments still teach British literature two to one over American, and few offer a course or even teach one book that recognizes that we are now in the age of English as a world literature. Isn't American literature only a mature colonial literature and one of many developing literatures? Isn't the pattern of the establishment of American literature very much the pattern we are seeing in the establishment of other literatures written in English outside Great Britain?
We must link the former colonies by changing our curriculum, by challenging the supremacy of the empire, and by having a deep sense of the past and of our place in it. We cannot permit the chilling cynicism of Dina, a Hindustani, in Shiva Naipaul's Love and Death in a Hot Country:
He waved his arms. “Shakespeare and Goethe and Raphael are universal. They belong to all of us.” “I know … I know … That's what I used to believe—or used to pretend I believed. But it's not true. It's a lie. All those famous people you mentioned have nothing to say to me and I have nothing to say to them.…”
(124)
And Dina majored in English. Before we accept our role as perpetuator of empire, we should heed the epigraph to George Lamming's In the Castle of My Skin : “Something startles where I thought I was safest” (Walt Whitman). George Lamming is West Indian, the forward to his book is by the Afro-American Richard Wright, and the epigraph is from the finest poet of the nineteenth-century United States; it is a world of English.
I will end where I began, with Joseph Conrad, the British author who helps us understand how we must leap into the dark. A fragment from Chance:
“You know,” continued Marlowe out of the shadow of the bookcase and nearly invisible in the depths of the arm-chair, “the …”
It is Jozef Teodor Konrad Korzeniowski who gives us Marlowe, the English voice itself, late at night telling tales from far and near, a voice from out of the shadow of a bookcase that contains what we guess to be the classics of the Western world, Shakespeare and Goethe and Raphael. We can accept the fact that there are other voices telling other tales from far and near and speaking their own brands of English. And they are speaking from the shadows of other bookcases containing the works that coincide with those of the empires of the world. We need not fear the voices, since they are extensions of the books on the shelves; remember those books. The metaphor won't stretch much further but one more turn might be accepted: We can only read so much, we can only listen to so many voices, we can only teach so many books. Why is it wrong to listen to those voices that speak eloquently, directly, and with aesthetic force but that have yet to crack the hold of centuries of books? The past will have its due since we always seem to educate our children for our world, not theirs. But we must listen to the new voices in the foreground telling us new tales for a new world.
The author is Professor of Literature and Language at the University of Wisconsin, Green Bay, and has served as Associate Vice Chancellor there and as Senior Academic Planner for the University of Wisconsin System, Madison.
1 See William Riley Parker for a classic history of the English department's roots in rhetoric, composition, and philosophy.
Bailey, Richard W., and Manfred Gorlach, eds. English as a World Language . Ann Arbor: U of Michigan P, 1982.
Conrad, Joseph. Chance . New York: Bantam, 1985.
———. The Secret Agent . New York: Bantam, 1984.
Fishman, Joshua A., et al. The Spread of English: The Sociology of English as an Additional Language . Rowley: Newbury, 1977.
Kernan, Alvin. “The Social Construction of Literature” Kenyon Review 7 (Fall 1985): 3146.
King, Bruce, ed. Literatures of the World in English . London: Routledge, 1974.
———. The New English Literatures . London: Macmillan, 1980. Lamming, George. In the Castle of My Skin . New York: McGraw, 1953.
Naipaul, Shiva. Love and Death in a Hot Country . New York: Penguin, 1984.
Parker, William Riley. “Where Do English Departments Come From?” College English 28 (1967): 33951.
Steiner, George. “Why English?” Contemporary Approaches to English Studies . Ed. Hilda Schiff. New York: Barnes, 1977.
Wilcox, Thomas. The Anatomy of College English . San Francisco: Jossey-Bass, 1973.
© 1987 by the Association of Departments of English. All Rights Reserved.
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