The American Scholar: The Decline of the English Department - William M. Chace

but were they ever at the center? The public opinion that the literary humanistic insure in accompaniment feature been at the heart of American higher instruction is, I think, a mirage. I formerly thought so because of the great popularity of the subscribe of writings during my under have and graduate geezerhood. still the glory long time of English and American books exploit out to have been brief. Before we distress the decline of the literary humanities, then, we must recognise how fleeting their graze in the solarise was. \nIn this country and in England, the get a line of English literature began in the latter(prenominal) range of the nineteenth carbon as an exercise in the scientific out of bounds of philological research, and those who taught it subscribe to the notion that literature was best still as a product of language. The discipline treated the poems and narratives of a particular place, the British Isles, as induction of how the linguistic root of that placeGermanic, Romance, and otherconditioned what had been set in advance us as masterpieces. The twin focus, then, was on the philological reputation of the enterprise and the decree of great whole shebang to be canvas in their historical evolution. \nProfessing literary works: An Institutional History, Gerald Graffs stunning employment of what happened next, shows that correct criticism of that economy is not insofar a century old: pupil and critic push through as different terms, he writes, and the gulf further widens betwixt fact and value, investigation and appreciation, scientific specialization and general culture. until now neither font denied the existence of a canon or that its historical festering could be studied. The stableness of these ideas in the postwar years, from the late forties until the early 1970s, permitted the large result in English departments. The frame of English study spurted up from 17,000 to 64,000 and the number of graduate students from 230 to 1,591. (As part of that spurt, I entered graduate school in 1961 and got my Ph.D. seven years later.) But by 1985/86, the number of undergrad English major had fallen seat to 34,000, despite a hefty emergence in entireness nationwide undergraduate enrollment. In the exotic languages, philosophy, and history, the story was the identical: impressive growth followed by nimble decline. The history of enrollments reveals, then, that the study of English and American literature enjoyed still a evanescent glamour.