If you’re planning to major in literature at Northwestern University, there is considerable news: You won’t be made to worry so much with literature. The conventional stuff will not be affected, at least in the short term.
Two courses in American Literature Survey and English were previously required by the Illinois private research college. Now, however, visitors can skim a lot of this stuff.
Even so, students will be made to complete a couple of “Historical Breadth” courses — one each for works created before and after 1830.
For the 2022-23 school year, “Topics in Literature and Culture: Violence” will satisfy the pre-1830 requirement. For later writing, “Introduction to Poetry” or “Introduction to Fiction” (in the Spring) will nicely do.
It seems that the school wants students to forget the tough stuff in its liquor cabinet of literature.
The Daily Northwestern has the following explanation:
The English department will change its major and minor requirements to make them more “appealing and accessible”…
The department will adopt “Historical Breadth” courses in favor of survey courses. Specific identity and culture categories will also replace three former required class categories — Identities, Communities and Social Practice; Transnationalism and Textual Circulation; and American literature.
Everybody wants to look good.
While brainstorming department changes, English Prof. and department Director of Undergraduate Studies Julia Stern said she compared Northwestern’s curriculum with peer institutions. NU is the only school that requires survey courses. These are overviews of literary traditions for over 200 years.
Most importantly of all, some whiteness from the past can be erased by this change.
Stern said the department’s two introductory survey courses in English and American literature did not make use of its faculty’s expertise, as few professors could teach these courses.
“We had been hiring these fantastic young scholars in African American literature, in Latinx literature, in Asian American literature and in Native American literature,” Stern said. “All of these people were teaching wonderful 200-level courses that weren’t being counted toward the major.”
In education, there’s certainly nothing more modern than “Cast off what’s Caucasian”:
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UC Berkeley professor tells students that eliminating whiteness means wiping out white people
Professor Decries Climate Change as the ‘White Colonization of the Atmosphere’
Report: Professor Tells White Student if He’s Breathing, He ‘May Have Oppressed Somebody’ Today
Professor Insists U.S. Is ‘Only for White People,’ Talks ‘Redemption’ When ‘There Is No America’
What might Northwestern students lose if they ignore the obsolete mandate?
This is what The College Fix says:
Across the two-quarters of English Literary Traditions, the (previous) reading list covered a “millennium-long sweep,” including readings from Beowulf and writings by Geoffrey Chaucer, William Shakespeare, Jane Austen, and T. S. Eliot… Authors covered in American Literary Traditions included Powhatan, Benjamin Franklin, Frederick Douglass, Harriet Jacobs, and Emily Dickinson.
But there’ll be barrels of wokeness on tap:
Students will…be required to fulfill “diversity” course requirements in topical areas of specialization, such as “Gender, Sexuality & Embodiment,” “Postcolonial & Comparative Literatures” and “Race & Ethnicity”…
Northwestern English students can satisfy their “Gender, Sexuality, and Embodiment” requirement with courses such as “Lesbian Representation in Popular Culture,” “Black Feminist Theory,” and “Sex and the Gothic Girl”…
One literature professor has condemned Northwestern’s contemporary move. Writing to the Fix, Anthony Esolen — of the University of Oxford’s Magdalen College — expressed his disdain:
“As soon as education is bound up with partisan politics, it comes to an end, because no one can speak freely, and political advantage rather than truth is what is prized.”
Professor gave a lecture on diversity.
“Study Chaucer on his own terms, and you’ll have your hands full with diversity. … [By contrast], reading authors who are considered ‘diverse’ in our time because they adopt a particular brand of politics, and because they come from some group designated as ‘diverse’ because of their ethnic background or sexual habits, is merely to play at diversity.”
Relative to today’s sensibilities, Anthony sounds like he’s pre-1830.
Chaucer, give up your stationary. The quill has been taken over by better bards.
Cardi’s second verse on WAP is pure poetry. Shakespeare could not neva.
— BARDIOLOGY 😈 (@Bardiology_) January 27, 2021
-ALEX
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