36, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 12-13
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In This Together; or,
Let Us Not to the Marriage
of True Minds Admit Impediments
J. LAWRENCE MITCHELL
THE joint conference of the ADE and ADFL is best regarded as an opportunity to rediscover a commonality of interests that has been obscured for too long. Even if our willingness to contemplate dialogue is prompted by a somewhat belated recognition of forces beyond our control—the increased cost of education, the concomitant pragmatism it has precipitated among our students, and questions about the value of the humanities in the curriculum—there is no harm in acknowledging Chaucer’s injunction to “maken vertu of necessitée.” Of course, there is blame to apportion. For too long, English departments have practiced an unthinking curricular imperialism, reversing the traditional welcome to declare to their colleagues in foreign language departments, “Su casa es mi casa.” Some of the fault, then, for the status quo lies not with forces beyond our control but with the ways we have responded over the last three decades at least (the span of my experience) to an expanding market for higher education. We have not, for example, done a very good job of fostering English and foreign languages in K–12, in part because the institutions that have major responsibility for teacher education now have other—and often, frankly, more directly rewarding—priorities.
The lure of specialization as evidence of Arnoldian “high seriousness” in literary studies is surely also partly responsible for the gulf that has developed between English and foreign language departments. Literary education in the nineteenth and well into the twentieth century was far less narrow, perhaps because it was not irrevocably institutionalized. Moreover, the study and appreciation of literature transcended national and linguistic boundaries, and was ipso facto linked to knowledge of other languages: Arnold Bennett first read The Brothers Karamazov in a French translation; Charlotte Brontë received some of her education and not a little of her fictive material in Brussels; E. M. Forster assumed that his readers knew their Dante well enough to catch the ironic substitution of baldanza for speranza in the inscription “Lasciate ogni baldanza voi che entrate” in the story “The Celestial Omnibus"; and D. H. Lawrence’s wide reading in French, German, and Italian made him a European writer, notwithstanding the limits of his education at University College, Nottingham. His alter ego, Cyril Mersham in “A Modern Lover,” charts his program of reading and his affair with Muriel, as though it were plotted on a graph:
How infinitely far away, now, seemed Jane Eyre and George Eliot. . . . He smiled as he traced the graph onwards . . . Omar Khayyam, the Russians, Ibsen and Balzac; then Guy de Maupassant and Madame Bovary. They had parted in the midst of Madame Bovary. (11)
Here the trajectory is insistently and triumphantly European.
The division of literature in English into discrete entities called British and American is arbitrary and largely a product of special circumstances of the twentieth century that increasingly seem invalid in the twenty-first. Some might even argue that the invention of American literature—largely a post–World War II phenomenon—was simply the by-product of an American equivalent of the Australian cultural cringe. Henry James and T. S. Eliot might well have agreed. Less puzzling but equally arbitrary in its way is the separation of all foreign (i.e., non-English) literature from literature in English. But that separation means that we treat the rise of the English novel (to draw on Ian Watt’s title) as though its development were entirely discrete and uninfluenced by what was being written in France, Germany, Italy, Russia, and Spain.
Contemporary consciousness of the inadequacy of national boundaries in classifying literature(s) has spurred the development of such innovations as the master’s program in national and international literatures in English that has been offered since 1999 by the Institute for English Studies at the University of London. Here we have something more than a relabeled postcolonial literature: the curriculum embraces national literatures as part of a larger enterprise. Thus optional courses include The Uses of History in African and Caribbean Literatures, Post-war American Literature and History, Contemporary Australian Literature, Scottish and Irish Literary Cultures, 1890–1930, and Literatures of the South Asian Diaspora. With this innovation we can be said to have taken a step in the right direction on the road toward reconceptualizing literary studies.
It will not be an easy task to put Humpty Dumpty together again—that is, fully to repair the breach between English and other languages and literatures. Certainly, there is no overarching solution that will work in all the very different and difficult circumstances that exist around the country. It would therefore be dangerous, in my opinion, to spend too much energy looking for some macrolevel solution. Microlevel or local initiatives—preferably developed in an atmosphere of mutual trust and respect—have a far greater chance of success. These initiatives need not be ambitious at first. Are there, for example, popular courses that can be cross-listed? Can English courses serve as prerequisites for courses in modern or foreign language departments and vice versa? Can courses in one department be allowed to fulfill distribution requirements in another department? Are there situations in which team teaching across departments might be viable—for example, world literature, medieval literature? Could we encourage English majors to minor in French, German, Latin, or Italian (still the most vulnerable languages despite the recent upturn in overall enrollments in foreign language courses)? Could film studies function as a zone of cooperative activity, a sort of neutral territory, for English and foreign language departments? To make all such initiatives feasible, we need to begin emphasizing the importance of foreign language studies in English—particularly in graduate programs. Were English departments, in fact, to start favoring job applicants who could also offer real competence in languages and literatures other than English (not the certified incompetence we tolerate now), none of these initiatives would be beyond the realm of possibility.
The author is Professor of English and former Chair of the English department at Texas A&M, College Station, and 2003 President of the ADE. A version of the article was originally presented at the 2003 ADE-ADFL Summer Seminar West in Snowbird, Utah.
Forster, E. M. “The Celestial Omnibus” and Other Stories. New York: Knopf, 1923.
Lawrence, D. H. A Modern Lover. New York: Viking, 1930.
Watt, Ian P. The Rise of the Novel: Studies in Defoe, Richardson, and Fielding. Berkeley: U of California P, 1957.
© 2004 by the Association of Departments of Foreign Languages. All Rights Reserved.
ADFL Bulletin 36, no. 1 (Fall 2004): 12-13 |
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