Word: englishes
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...addition to Higonnet, Jennings cited English Professor Joseph A. Boone—the first openly gay professor at Harvard—as a source of inspiration...
...dinner party last month, a biomedical engineer asked me a rude question. He was not trying to be rude. He was drunk. Informed that I am an English professor, he responded, "Why?" He explained that his mission in life is to save lives. Mine is to say clever things about dead writers. Prodded by his wife’s grimace, he backtracked a bit and reassured me that Shakespeare is "obviously important." Praising Shakespeare is how the world apologizes for its lack of interest in literature. Those of us who have devoted our lives to literature are dogged by this...
...never move out. The exodus of undergraduates from the humanities to occupational majors—coupled with the devaluation of literature and art in our society—has driven certain humanist disciplines to the brink of extinction. From the early 1970s to the mid 1980s, the number of English majors in the United States dwindled from 64,000 to 34,000. Despite the fact that more students across the country are attending college than ever before, less than four percent of them in 2004 chose to major in English, a number that has declined each subsequent year. In this...
...number of students, our claims that literature refines the mind, makes one a more interesting and intellectually supple person, sound pretentious, or worse, therapeutic. The Arnoldian notion that culture elevates us, makes us empathetic and sensitive, is just not true. Don’t believe me? You should hear English professors discuss each other’s work! Students want to be empowered by knowledge, not refined or made precious by it. The age of the snob has passed. There will always be a core constituency of sweet-tempered undergraduates who find literature intrinsically fascinating, just as there will always...
Matthew B. Kaiser is an associate professor of English at Harvard University...