The Nation, scion of the Left, has joined the chorus in its disappointment with the humanities in general and English departments in particular.  Probably the single greatest humanistic failure of higher education in the modern era can be summed up in a paraphrase from the essay: classicists were deposed by humanists, humanists deposed by historians, historians deposed by critics and now critics deposed by theorists.  With each new deposition, “the same accusations were flung: obfuscation, esotericism and overspecialization; naïveté, dilettantism and reaction. Teaching versus research, humane values versus methodological rigor, ‘literature itself’ versus historical context.”  In other words, getting further from reality and experience and moving toward the Land of Theory and Esoterica.

There’s good news and bad news here.  The good news is that English departments have to justify their existences in universities.  They do this by teaching rhetoric and composition (not classical rhetoric, but a thin and reedy heir to it) to every undergraduate at the institution.  This means that at least some English departments are committed to writing, to argument, to making real claims in a real world.  The bad news, though, can be found in the other kinds of professors English departments are trying to hire and in the “job lists” advertised by the Modern Language Association.

To be fair, the list reflects not so much the overall composition of English departments as the ways they’re trying to up-armor themselves to cover perceived gaps. More revealing in this connection than the familiar identity-groups laundry list, which at least has intellectual coherence, is the whatever-works grab bag: “Asian American literature, cultural theory, or visual/performance studies”; “literature of the immigrant experience, environmental writing/ecocriticism, literature and technology, and material culture”; “visual culture; cultural studies and theory; writing and writing across the curriculum; ethnicity, gender and sexuality studies.” The items on these lists are not just different things–apples and oranges–they’re different kinds of things, incommensurate categories flailing about in unrelated directions–apples, machine parts, sadness, the square root of two. There have always been trends in literary criticism, but the major trend now is trendiness itself, trendism, the desperate search for anything sexy. Contemporary lit, global lit, ethnic American lit; creative writing, film, ecocriticism–whatever. There are postings here for positions in science fiction, in fantasy literature, in children’s literature, even in something called “digital humanities.”

We’re already moving toward smaller and smaller English departments, consigning themselves to interesting and quirky corners of the academy and becoming less and less relevant to the discussion, to life, to the pursuit of knowledge and progress.  If they keep trying to teach courses and disciplines like those listed above, that’s where they’re headed, and by their own doing.  This, I think, is as it should be.  Higher education, at least in respect to the humanities, was better when rhetoric was its own department, when English departments didn’t exist.  I predict that, within another 150 years, English departments will be few and far between and that new Rhetoric Departments will be in their places, focusing on writing, persuasion, speaking, and the handling of ideas from philosophy, history, theology, the sciences, etc.  A man’s got to dream a dream.

HT: Phi Beta Cons