Attention English Majors: the Final Exam of Your Life

Category: Education Fiction Poetry (Thoughts occasioned by reading a review of collected notes and essays of students of F.R. Leavis, the professor - critic who developed "the English Major" as an academic category.)

1. Which metaphor best describes the role of professors working and writing within the English Department of any college or university? They are . . .

a. . . . priests who mediate between Great Literature and those of us who cannot appreciate what that literature tells us about ourselves and our societies.

b. . . . creative artist wanna-be's who use the work of creative writers as material, the way that creative writers use experience. In these creative exercises, the author is the protagonist, and the author's choices are the plot.

c. . . . curators who preserve and arrange displays of art from the past.

d. all of the above

The thoughts here are long-simmering ones, brought to boil this morning when I encountered an article about F. R. Leavis, whose name was tucked into the parentheses of hundreds of pages that I read as an English Major at Duke and New College at Oxford. The article reminded me how fun it was to do nothing but read D.H.Lawrence, T.S.Eliot, Virginia Woolf, Henry James, and how much I enjoyed seeing what these guys (and lady) thought of each other, and how much I got into arguing that my experiences reading them were closer to the authors' intentions than what my friends may have experienced.

Leavis thought of himself as (a).

My answer is, naturally, "all of the above," with a couple of caveats. First, at their best, English Professors do what good curators and museums do, putting us in touch with our literary heritage and helping us to get through barriers that might put us off at first. In my experience, literature and visual art and music of the past put me into a relationship with great personalities of earlier times, and with their whole worlds, and all of those enlarge my frames of reference for my own life.

The other caveat is that, at their worst, these curators are more like taxidermists who kill what they preserve. Is it coincidence that Shakespeare was the supremely popular author for four hundred years among college graduates and prairie - borns (including Lincoln) until his work became a Subject for multiple-choice tests and essay questions?

Attention English Majors: the Final Exam of Your Life | Category: Education. Fiction. Poetry