Why is English Literature?

Language and Letters for the Twenty-First Century

T. Bonfiglio

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781137375544
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

Why is English synonymous with literature in the United States? Bonfiglio contextualizes the rising hegemony of English within the anti-labor, anti-immigration, xenophobic, mercantile, militarist, and technocratic ideologies that arose in the US in the first half of twentieth century.

Part I

English and the Languages

Abstract: The transparent discursive habits that invest English with the sign of literature and divest departments of allophone literatures and cultures of literary and aesthetic content are illuminated here. English has colonized the space of “lit,” and allophone studies are perceived as granting degrees “in languages.” These ideologies have caused the vocabulary used to discuss the modern languages and their literatures to undergo processes of semantic elevation and degradation that continually perform hegemonic strategies of empowerment and disempowerment.

1

Can Spanish Count As an English Course?

Abstract: Discourse analysis can effect a raising of consciousness and a clearing of perception. It can reveal the covert prejudices in our vernacular, of which we are largely unaware. The current discourses employed to discuss the study of the modern languages and their literatures in the United States are replete with inegalitarian gestures of privileging and deprivileging. The quotidian terms that we take for granted have separated “English from the languages.” This chapter illuminates the prejudices and often amusing lapses of logic in those discourses.

Bonfiglio, Thomas Paul. Why Is English Literature? Language and Letters for the Twenty-First Century. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2013. DOI: 10.1057/9781137375544

Those who teach in literature departments other than English all have plenty of anecdotes attesting to the misunderstanding of our discipline. Here are some examples:

I have a PhD in Russian literature.

Oh? Do you have to know Russian for that?

In an undergraduate advising meeting, the advisee, seeking to fulfill the general education requirement in literary studies, asks, “So Religion 251: ‘The Bible as Literature’ counts as an English course?” The advisor responds, “No it counts as a literature course,” and the response is met with complete incomprehension.

At the University of Richmond, where I teach, our English department recently had an excellent specialist in twentieth-century drama who was from Germany, but who completed the PhD in English studies in the United States. A first-year student at Richmond met with his advisor and expressed an interest in studying both German and drama. One would assume that the advisor would have sent the student to the German Studies program. Instead, the advisor informed the student that there was a German woman in the English department who specializes in drama and promptly sent the student over to see her. Now this is a very logical conclusion based on the formula: English = literature. Literature is English; therefore German literature would be taught by a German in the English department. This could serve as an algorithm for numerous permutations: Italian literature would be taught by an Italian in the English department, Russian literature by a Russian in the English department, etc.

Discretion recommends that anonymity be observed in the retelling of certain significant anecdotes. At one university, there is an interdisciplinary school separate from the arts and sciences that sought to hire a specialist in world literature. The school in question did seek consultation in arts and sciences, but limited inquiry to the English department. The position was advertised in the English division of the Modern Language Association (MLA) job list. A classicist was among the finalists invited to campus, but the classics department was never informed.

Another university conducted a search for the position of director of the Spanish language program, and the department in question sought administrative approval for its job announcement. The announcement included the specializations commonly found in such a search, such as L2 (second language) pedagogy, L2 acquisition, applied linguistics, etc. One administrator had a question concerning candidates with such specializations and asked, “But how will we know that they can teach Spanish?” This ingenuousness reflects more than just the usual misconception that the PhD is granted in “a language” and not in literature and culture. Here, the misprision deprives the subject of all theoretical content. Spanish becomes a practical autotelic skill, an end in itself. This misprision reveals the perceptual categories and habits of the viewer that confine the subject to a radically restricted space, perhaps the most radically restricted space in the arts and sciences curriculum.

An English department chair recently received the following email (the name has been changed):

Dear Dr. Smith,

I will be travelling to Chile in the fall and was wondering if I could receive my English general education credit for one of the courses I am taking. It’s in Spanish, but it is reading intensive.

A German professor attended a philosophy lecture on Nietzsche. A graduate student asked the professor what he was doing there. Does he translate Nietzsche?

A Slavic studies professor organized a summer course on Czech literature conducted in Prague in summer 2010. A student emailed the professor his first paper on a Czech novel written by a Czech author. The file containing the paper was labeled “prague_English_1.”

A classicist reports the following conversation with a colleague in another department:

What are you teaching this semester?

A seminar on Sophocles. It’s great, I got nine students!

Only nine? Is the dean letting that go?

That’s good for a lit course in Greek.

How’s that?

It’s in Greek.

You mean, like, in the Greek language?

Yeah, you gotta know Greek to take the class.

Can you do that?

The University of Richmond has renamed the department that grants degrees in modern allophone literatures. This happened in three stages:

Original name: The Department of Modern Foreign Languages

First change: The Department of Modern Foreign Languages and Literatures

Second change: The Department of Modern Languages and Literatures

Third change: Departmental split into the Department of Modern Literatures and Cultures (MLC) and the Department of Latin American and Iberian Studies (LAIS)

For the first change, which occurred in the 1990s, the university administration made us ask the permission of the English department to add the term “literatures” to our title, as if English had copyrighted the term and could license others to use it. The department actually voted on this, narrowly in our favor. We had complete autonomy for the subsequent changes, which met with no objections from other departments. This surprised us, until we learned that these changes had largely gone unnoticed. Our department is commonly called “modern languages and cultures.” The misperception that “cultures” replaced “literatures” lends itself well to psychoanalysis as a lapsus. Similarly, LAIS is habitually referred to as “the Spanish department,” or simply “Spanish.” MLC is the only department with “literature” in its title. English is the only department with the name of a language in its title. Nonetheless, English is lit and we are language.

We only too often hear the phrases “a student in languages” and “a professor in languages.” Are there faculty who do not use language? All academic fields educate students in the discourse of their respective disciplines, in their languages, and they evaluate students in terms of their fluency in those discourses. We have no fields of study that do not teach language. Biology students are not born with a precognitive intuition of the phrase “deoxyribonucleic acid is a macromolecule of two nucleotide strands.”

The original unamended constitution of the MLA from 1883 states: “The object of this Association shall be the advancement of the study of the Modern Languages and their Literatures” (MLA 1885: xix). The string “the modern languages and their literatures” remains in the constitution today. It is well known that our discipline began in contrast to classical philology, in an effort to justify the study of the ideas expressed in the vernacular national languages. The discourse of the early MLA reflects the agonistic struggle against the hegemony of the study of ancient Greek and Latin language and literature, which dominated humanistic inquiry at our universities until the early twentieth century. Now it is important to reflect upon what it did not mean to study the classical languages—it did not mean the study of those languages separate from the ideas conveyed by them; one learned Latin and Greek along with the study of the literature, philosophy, history, religion, etc. written in those languages. This was understood in the word philology itself, which unified language and ideas and did not separate them into skills on the one hand and knowledge on the other.

The beginnings of modern philology placed the study of the major western modern languages and their literatures all on an equal footing: English language and literature, French language and literature, German language and literature, Italian language and literature, Spanish language and literature, etc. The following locution would have been very difficult to contextualize at the turn of the twentieth century: “The study of French language and English literature.” Although intelligible, it would not have corresponded to any common academic situation. The current pleonasm “I’m a French language major” is not really a redundancy. The insertion of “language” acts as a strengthener that firmly locks French in the sign of language. The former president of Old Dominion University, Roseann Runte, was twice described in a recent newspaper article as a specialist in “French language and comparative literature” (Geroux 2008: B5). The habits of thought and discourse needed to interrupt the perilous string “French and comparative literature,” which would have associated French with literature; the two spaces became safely separated by the sign of language. Such was not our discourse at the beginnings of the MLA.

It would be productive to reflect upon the phrase “the modern languages and their literatures” from the original MLA constitution. The phrase quickly became reduced to “modern languages and literatures.” Here, the conjunction “and” is of crucial importance. It can indicate a connective of juncture or disjuncture. The following is an example of a connective of juncture: the Department of Mathematics and Computer Science. One would correctly assume here that the two fields have a lot in common. The conjunction “and” properly conveys the situation of affinity. The following is an example of a connective of disjuncture: the College of Arts and Sciences. One would assume here that the two areas are comfortably separate. Here, the conjunction “and” properly indicates a disjuncture.

The meaning of the phrase “modern languages and literatures” easily slides into the frame of juncture or disjuncture depending on the orientation of the viewer/listener. This is similar to the figure-ground phenomenon in perceptual psychology, a common example of which is the familiar diagram that inscribes either a vase or two silhouettes facing each other. Whether one perceives a vase or faces depends on the habits of the viewer. In the string “languages and literatures,” the word “and” is a very pregnant sliding signifier. Initially intended to designate a continuity, it has come to designate a separation into language on the one hand and literature on the other, and transparently so, a separation that we perform every time we utter the locution. This separation has generated the illogical utterance “Engl...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Part I  English and the Languages
• Part II  From ars liber to Modern Literatures
• Part III  The American Century
• Conclusion: Language Needs New Language
• References
• Index