In this essay, I am responding to Adam Ellwanger’s essay published over at Quillette. I will proceed by dividing up my efforts in two parts. The first part will be the assumptions I working in the background and I note some problems with them. The second part will be the most extensive part of my response. In the second part, I reflect upon and refute several propositions and openly question their soundness. I will end this essay on an open-ended inquiry that I think English faculty, humanities faculty, and my own field of philosophy should be exploring.
I. The Assumptions of Ellwanger’s Argument
Let’s first start with who I am. I am a philosophy professor trained in Continental and American philosophy. I engage the theory that literature professors want to use, and beyond that, I am housed in an English Department with a BA. We are also making an MA happen, so fingers crossed that our New Program and Curriculum Committee’s proposal passes muster (more on this below). I teach at Southern University and A&M College, just four hours East of Dr. Ellwanger. And sir, although I will disagree substantially with you, I am glad to make your acquaintance in the spirit of learned debate.
With that said, I have worked in humanities departments, philosophy departments and adjacent to English departments for some time. And now for the past three years, I am housed in English. Let’s start by citing at length a passage of the predicament most English departments find themselves, how to respond to that crisis, and my disagreement with Ellwanger’s reasoning.
First, I agree with everything said here. Ellwanger writes,
Today, most people who take English departments seriously are English professors and the handful of students who still choose the major. Current university administrators see the English department as serving a gatekeeping role: the required freshman-level courses generate massive enrollment, mostly from students who are not prepared for the demands of college writing. Thus, in the eyes of the administration, the job of the English department is remedial—getting those students “up to speed” so that they can do the writing required by their majors (which are overwhelmingly housed in other departments).
Indeed, this criticism is common. It’s true in my department too. The bulk of our teaching includes, a co-requisite remediation course for students who cannot write coming from public high schools, Composition 1, Composition 2, and most students fulfill their Africana studies requirement (we’re an HBCU in case that’s not clear) with African American literature survey, and if you count me since everyone has to do 1 philosophy about 200, then my department teaches everyone five times. One could interpret our efforts as merely service teaching and the gatekeeping role.
Now when Ellwanger says that liberally educated professors “have a nostalgic reverence for the humanities and humanistic knowledge”, it’s not clear to me that:
(1) “English Professors no longer serve as guardians of that tradition,”
All citations are from the Quillette article already given at the top
(2) “[T]he vast majority of English faculty are resolutely opposed to traditional notions of humanistic inquiry,” and
(3) English faculty “have become a parody of the erudition that used to be synonymous with literary study.”
If we take them as separate propositions, these are just assumed without evidence. Let’s take them in stride.
First, (1) seems false or at least problematic as an assumption. In order for us to accept (1) it would have to be true that nobody debates what the literary canon is that defines the tradition. However, that’s not true. If our history of race is concerned in this country, then we have been blind to what else might be included in American literature (and race is just one of many concerns we might have with literature). So, what is debated is that the tradition is itself problematic, but in order to have that debate you must know the tradition from which the judgment of its improvement originates. In other words, it’s out of the literary tradition that the tradition itself becomes problematized. So, if we are looking at the canon of white male authors that have defined it and in which later on Ellwanger will insist is sacred and ignored.
Second, (2) seems rather strange to me and not just false. If English professors are opposed to “traditional forms of humanistic inquiry”, then what are the traditional forms? My colleagues are reading centuries old narratives, plays, poems, and novels. They are encountering literary forms that have been used for centuries. As a philosopher, I crack open Aristotle or Plato and engage in presenting the arguments that were persuasive in both Hellenic Greece and medieval Europe in my philosophy classes just as much as either Howard Thurman and Martin Luther King, Jr are theologians that we read philosophically who are presenting arguments during the Civil Rights Era. Is argumentative reconstruction, logic, and the Socratic questioning of my class about the reading “traditional forms of humanistic inquiry?” When my colleagues teach Toni Morrison or Nathaniel Hawthorne are they doing something different than what passes for English literature? I do not know what humanistic inquiry entails, and without any definition of what is meant by traditional forms of humanistic inquiry, I really can’t parse that distinction responsibly, though I can speculate.
In speculating, maybe Professor Ellwanger means that whatever methods of literary study was alive in his day are not enacted anymore. Does he mean to suggest that a reading group on Icelandic fairytales that inspired Tolkein is more real than if one of us were to teach Richard Wright or James Baldwin who certainly are contemporary add-ons to the canon of literature? Let me press further. Is a reading and translation group on Icelandic fairytales any different from me and another professor talking about Afrofuturism and decolonialism in literature? I hardly think so. When I look at my colleagues, they’re doing the same thing in English class with students that I experienced in my undergraduate literature classes (1998-2003). Back then, there was still something like structuralism, post-structuralism, Marxist critique, historicism, text-only criticism, and a host of other ways of interpreting literature, some traditional and others seen as innovations upon the text. To this day, these all vie for competing ways to experience and encounter texts as every single literary text as a cultural work invites us to interpret it, including whatever it is that informs the phrase “traditional forms of humanistic inquiry.”
Third, (3) accuses English professors of being a parody of erudition that used to make up whatever it is that Ellwanger wishes English departments did. At the very least, it seems that there’s a bit of nostalgia for a past at the end of the 19th and early 20th century where literature departments decided that this is good and this is bad. Revisiting these judgments on canonization hardly seems flawed as is revisiting our judgments about Kant, Aristotle, and Hume. What’s more, (3) feeds into several of his reasons for why the English department is in decline. Beyond that, again, I look to my colleagues who have an incredible array of knowledge of African-diaspora literature from North America and the Caribbean to the Victorian Era, Shakespeare, and Chaucer. I do not see a lack of erudition with my friends who I’ve met.
As someone who teaches logic and critical thinking regularly, I know there is no underived argument. Every argument has assumptions built into it. It’s just that people making good arguments should tell you what the assumptions they’re helping themselves to are before stating them and passing them off as fact. In the previous propositions, Ellwanger assumes the objectivity of the former literary canon and tradition without argument whereas that might be problematic for many who wish to add to it, refine it, or abolish it altogether for some other reason that goes unmentioned between us. Second, he completely leaves humanistic inquiry open to interpretation by not defining what he sees English faculty abandoning. It’s important to define key terms of one’s own argument. Finally, he assumes a dearth of erudition and cites no examples as to what he means, although there are some ways one might read (3) into his reasons he gives. Let’s transition to them.
II. The Six Reasons
The punch of Ellwanger’s essay is given in six reasons why he thinks the English major is in decline. I will first list them here and discuss each one in turn as I did the assumptions from above. I will only take up A-E; I feel as if Reason 6 is to “in-house” for an outsider to tackle and those internal debates about what a discipline is to achieve might be best left to English faculty and its practitioners. They will be in a good position to respond to my arguments about A-E.
A. Reason 1: Disdain for the real world.
B. Reason 2: Disdain for objective standards of value
C. Reason 3: Love of literature and disdain for the practical
D. Reason 4: Disdain for the rules of writing
E. Reason 5: Love of “theory”
F. Reason 6: They’d rather watch the field die than reform it (as long as…)
II.A: Reason 1: Disdain for the “real world”
Ellwanger says some true things here. Yes, universities have expanded to include many first-generation learners. That’s true in Houston as it is in Baton Rouge. There are many families who have never had a college graduate, and the education they are receiving from public high school may be questionable, so unfortunately English professors must pick up the slack a bit in terms of teaching them to write. English departments teach composition 1 and 2, and teach students at least twice at most universities. The first course is usually about establishing authorial voice and writing skills across the board and the second course is usually intensive practice at writing research papers and scholarly writing involving attention to formal citation methods.
Many of these students are coming from historically underrepresented groups. They may be on Pell Grants, and they are told starting in high school that a degree is about credentialing them in a profession. Academic advisors may carry that story forward as it goes virtually unchallenged, and yes, Ellwanger is right here. Philosophy degrees have the same “marketing problem” although I do not know if the MLA has responded like the APA has to these concerns, but I know several places where I can go that shows clearly philosophy’s effect on real world salary earnings and its awesome status involving the LSAT, GRE, and GMAT tests. I’m not too sure English has those resources in any centralized place.
Be that as it may, Ellwanger has some problems about how English faculty respond to the neoliberal job-training conception of what university education means. “English professors often mock the valid concerns of students and their parents.” Ellwanger grants that the neoliberal credentialing concern of parents have a valid concern. Yes, they have a practical concern, and it’s an assumption we all must contend with. It’s arguably not the only thing that a university is for that animates faculty thinking that the complaint does not entirely describe what it is literature professors do. When we remind people that universities are also places to understand the world, there’s a necessity to see understanding implicated by the real world that inspires the production of literary texts to study.
Professor Ellwanger is picking up on an old idea. It may be argued at any time that professors in their erudition are often bumbling people who are so concerned with their subject matter that they have taken comfort in retreating from the “real world” to the armchair. The university armchair, this argument goes, is a better place than the real world. Somehow, a life of the mind generates disdain for the real world that undermines an English faculty member’s response to students and parents concerned about job prospects. And while this is admittedly an anxiety, Ellwanger does not question that it’s also the very mechanism that has ruined intellectually curious students. Students are not inquisitive and regard education only through these lenses, so when an English professor challenges that belief, it should not be interpreted as mocking student and parents. It may be that it’s really symptomatic of how universities are ran like businesses, and while this matter is too complex simply to lay at the feet of the behavior of English faculty in the way Ellwanger disagrees, he should admit that this is a deeper systemic problem that requires more reflections than blaming faculty.
There’s an entire history of devaluing university education in this country by those in power, and I challenge this assumption constantly in the philosophy classroom. I do so not because I have disdain for the real world, but because so much of the assumptions as to what universities are for are more than simply credentialing students with marketable degrees. It’s also a place that asks philosophical questions, reads ancient texts, studies historical movements, looks at the behavior of institutions, collects field samples from the Mississippi, looks at galaxies, learns about atomic particles, monitors coastal erosion, predicts Presidential elections, preserves the memory of Negro spirituals, puts on plays, and teaches students about the Renaissance window in studio art. In doing so, university changes the soul of those who attend them.
So if English professors decide that deconstructing the literary canon might be necessary in order to do something else with it, then rather than complain about it, shouldn’t Ellwanger show why it’s the case that it’s wrong. Such deconstruction is enacted for a variety of reasons, including that some “openly express” the system’s “morally indefensible” features. On this, there may be some agreement. Many engagements in literature come through an economic or politics angle. However, it’s too much to say that parents and students are not responded to because English professors by and large consider “the legacy of a Western tradition that is racist, capitalist, misogynist, colonialist, xenophobic, and homophobic.” In some ways, that’s very true and in other ways perhaps not. The point is that you cannot draw an inference about the collective behavior of English faculty institutionally without some responsible data collection and social scientific methods. Such a generalization is an empirical one, and it is testable. Ellwanger may, in fact, be right, but Quillette is the type of place that would accept that his assessment uncritically as it fits their narrative about universities. In many ways, the American professoriate is Center Left. I can think of a few dedicated Democrats, but we know that moderate and Center-Left democrats are multicultural capitalists and are not the ones willing to shake or rot the boat to undermine systemic institutional challenges.
It’s unclear that disdain for the real world is a real answer. It’s part of the problem, but Ellwanger may be overstating his case and relying too much on empirical generalizations of his discipline that require empirical testing and confirmation.
II.B Reason 2: Disdain for objective standards of value
Ellwanger calls attent to the fact that “there used to be something called the literary canon.” For him, he agrees with Matthew Arnold that it consisted of what was thought to be the best forms of intellectual excellence. Truthfully, I am sympathetic. In order to understand why Merleau-Ponty’s aesthetics challenge Western philosophy, you need to know what Plato and Aristotle said about art. It’s not the only example, but to understand the range and implication of his thought about Cezanne’s paintings, you are required to know a great deal of the history of aesethetics. In order to know why William James’s pragmatism is a challenge to modern philosophy of Descartes and Hume simultaneously, you need to read the people James is reading.
Now, it’s up in the air about whether these assumptions of the existence of a canon in philosophy or literature were necessary. It could be that they require revision to some extent or outright abolition. The point is that’s a deeply contested issue in his discipline whereas in philosophy there’s a great deal of difference between the methods of analytic and Continental philosophy that regard the necessity of history as wrongheaded or necessary. Again, it’s a live debate for us and we have entire an entire journal Metaphilosophy that hashes out these disagreements. Ellwanger presents the existence of the canon as if it is fact and that English faculty should be the guardians of it sets up English in ways that turn his discipline into a form of “a secret knowledge….a transcendent wisdom that was beyond the grasp of other disciplines.” However, these two conclusions really beg the question. These are shaky conclusions offered on hand with some missing shaky premises that are themselves open to question.
I would contest that it’s hard to think that literature contains in itself “transcendent wisdom.” If there are timeless truths, then whatever the truth of, say, To Kill a Mockingbird is would be an ethical claim, and ethical criticism was tried and seemed a failure within English. What’s more, ethical criticism did become unpopular because English faculty are bad at ethics, and the bulk of my experience confirms Ellwanger’s judgement here. I’ve often wondered why this might be true, and as best as I can figure, it’s the conflation of moral value and aesthetic value. The pluralism of interpretive methods means that most English faculty think values are relative because they wrongly think of ethics as if those values work the same as they do in textual interpretation.
With that said, Ellwanger is still asserting that the objectivity of value means there is an objective value in terms of the moral knowledge proffered by literary texts. While “love of wisdom” belongs to the etymology of philosophy, wisdom always means moral knowledge. When we translate phronesis, practical reasoning just is moral reasoning. Moral knowledge is the concern for values, and the question of whether or not there are objective values is whether or not there are objective sources of normativity in this universe. This metaethical question is one that I’d never trust to English. Sorry. It’s a deep question whether or not there are transcendent values that apply at all places, all times, and for all people. What’s more interesting is when English becomes the tradition of this secret wisdom for Ellwanger as if it truly were some mystical tradition as if the canon of literary texts availed themselves to offering us a way of life. Literary texts may model a way of life, but I’d hardly suspect that they do the same as philosophical texts. How would literary texts give us the impression that they offer us a way of life? I understand how Buddhism and Stoicism might, but they are philosophies that are grounded in giving us an answer to how we should live. In order to do that, however, both Buddhism and Stoicism have a metaphysics of value, a philosophical interpretation of human beings and an understanding of human beings in relation to a cosmology of the universe. Herman Hesse loses to Seneca and the Dhammapada on that one.
What’s more, deconstruction is applied as a way to make sense of literary texts for any number of reasons, including that there could be things about the canon that we should question. If there are better ways of thinking about the universe that stand outside of the canon, then should we not call it into question? It’s not just about bigotry as Ellwanger pretends and there is a deep concern that “dead white males” might not see things that a Black writer like Richard Wright or James Baldwin might. I’ve certainly benefited from reading them, but I’ve also benefited from reading “dead white males” as much as black authors. I don’t understand why his complaint impugns others at the expense of what is comfortable and traditional. There’s no disjunction necessary here. You could live in a world of ands!
Since this essay has gone on for too long, I will write part II tomorrow and continue with the other reasons.
The Horizon and The Fringe 