Word: englishness
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Vendler agrees that there are aspects unique to Harvard which encourage richness in poetry and literary culture. Harvard still teaches the full range of English literature, which has been scaled down at other Universities in favor of American or World literature. And Harvard has a very strong tradition in classics which underpins even more recent genres...
Beat poet William Burroughs perhaps put it best when describing his brief time at Harvard: “I hated the university and I hated the town it was in. Everything about the place was dead. The university was a fake English setup taken over by the graduates of fake English public schools. I was lonely. I knew no one and strangers were regarded with distaste by the closed corporation of the desirables...
Poetry doesn’t have the prominence it once did. Bass professor of English and American literature and language Louis Menand attributes the decline of poetry’s reputation to the increasingly more professionalized study of literature...
When he was studying, he says, more students were trained as writers—now, students are more likely to be trained as teachers. He points out that the English Department receives only book review publications to its offices and no poetry or creative writing literary journals...
According to the Core program, only four courses in the English Department and one course in Scandinavian can provide the “variety of critical and analytical approaches to literature” needed to satisfy the Literature and Arts A requirement. Likewise, tutorials, some of the hardest classes at Harvard, don’t count because they lack a final exam. And because only pedagogical technique matters in Core-world, the material covered has become increasingly specific and trite...