Posted on 04/15/2014 7:12:24 AM PDT by Academiadotorg
If you love literature, you might find it easier to actually buy it than take a course in it. “According to the most recent comprehensive report on staffing by the Modern Language Association and the Association of Departments of English, published in 2008, English lost 3,000 tenure-track positions from 1993 to 2004, roughly 10 percent of the total,” Marc Bousquet writes in The Chronicle of Higher Education. “Even that understates the case, since more than a third of the new tenurable hires have not been in traditional literary fields but in composition, rhetoric, theory, cultural studies, new media, and digital humanities.”
“Combined with evidence of lowered public interest in reading traditional literature and plummeting enrollment in traditional English majors, many faculty members in traditional literary studies have engaged in a backlash discourse against the new or renascent fields, a ‘moral panic’ in defense of traditional literary studies.” Bousquet is an associate professor of English at Emory.
“Last year, at my institution, Emory University, the traditionally trained lit students typically received zero or one invitation to an MLA interview,” Bousquet relates. “Most didn’t even come close to winning campus interviews—much less tenure-track jobs—even coming from a top-25 program with support packages that rival those at Yale, Duke, and Stanford.”
“cultural studies”?
yes but they don’t actually study them, just trash the West.
Then it would be anti-English studies.
it would and it is
Well, it needs it’s own Department.
For people who earnestly believe being able to speak and read English is inherently racist.
Yup, the Modern Languages ( new name for the old English Dept) is the place where most Universities that do not have a formal Ethnic, Racial, Women's, Queer (thats what they call it), Lesbian and Transgender Studies Dept.
Teaching Literature these days is so passé and one percenter that it is only good for deconstruction in the brave new post Western Civ world on campus
it has many,
gender studies
post-colonial studies
disability studies (which rarely do)
......
The elites in this country have also made it unpopular for students to read the Bible. The King James version is probably one of the greatest books in the history of the English language. There was a time when great American playwrights thumbed that book for wonderful titles for their plays (think “The Little Foxes”). A lot of these playwrights were non-believers but had excellent taste in literature. I pity today’s students.
you should pity them.
“If you love literature, you might find it easier to actually buy it than take a course in it.”
Worst opening line ever. It doesn’t even make any sense. Wasn’t it always easier to just buy a book than take a course?
“But since 2005, only two in five of those who graduated from Emory with Ph.D.’s in English have landed tenure-track jobs. The research university employing the most English Ph.D.’s from Emory is Emory itself—in staff positions.”
So they’re complaining that students aren’t interested in a major in English, but out of the five who actually went through it, only two got serious jobs in their major?
Gee. I wonder why students aren’t interested in the major.
“Hey Hey, Ho Ho, Western Civ has got to go.”
Looks like they got their wish.
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