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Ooo! I Know, I know! Pick me!

A BACKHANDED COMPLIMENT

“You all in the Humanities might not have the largest job placement rate, but you serve a very important role in the University.”

-actually said at a recent faculty

orientation to a room full of Liberal

arts majors.

IT ALL STARTS WITH LITERATURE?

What is that again?

IT ALL STARTS WITH “LITERATURE”(BUT WHAT THE HECK IS THAT ANYWAY?)

Eighteenth-Century England:

• The whole body of valued writing in society•Philosophy•History•Essays•Letters•Poems

ENLIGHTENMENT AGE (17TH AND 18TH CENTURY)Literature was:

• Rational

• Structured and Systematic

• Exposed Universal Truths

• Made You a Better Person (Lead to a Better Society) Through the Exercise of Reasoned Faculties of the Mind

CIVIL WAR AND CLASS WARFARE

How do you incorporate the growing middle class into a unity with the ruling Aristocracy?

Dear lord . . . THEY’RE LEARNING TO READ!!!!!!!

“As a liberal, humanizing pursuit, literature could provide a potent antidote to political bigotry and ideological extremism. Since it deals in universal human values rather than in such historical trivia as civil wars, the oppression of women or the dispossession of the English peasantry, it could serve to place in cosmic perspective the petty demands of working people for decent living conditions or greater control over their own lives, and might even with luck come to render them oblivious of such issues in their high-minded contemplation of eternal truths and beauties”

-Terry Eagleton

In other words: throw the peasants some novels and they might forget how much their lives incredibly suck!

OTHER GREATEST HITS OF THE CULTURAL ELITES

• Claimed Shakespeare for their own

• Imposed dress codes for the orchestra and theatre

• Stole peasant ballads and poetry while simultaneously looking down upon the people who created them.

“When everyone can read, it’s no longer that you can read that matters--- it’s what you read.”

THE ROMANTIC PERIOD (THE COUNTER-ENLIGHTENMENT) LATE 18TH CENTURY

Much of what we largely consider literature (imagination, narrative, felt experience, personal response, uniqueness) came later during the Romantic Period.

• William Blake• Samuel Coleridge• John Keats• Mary Shelley• William Wordsworth

CAUSE THIS JUST SUCKS A SOUL DRY

LEST WE THINK THE ROMANTICS WERE ALL INCLUSIVE AND EGALITARIAN

LATE VICTORIAN AGE

Scientific Discovery + Social Change + Technological Innovation = Less Faith in Religion

For Victorians, religion fostered meekness, self-sacrifice, and a contemplative inner-life.

THE EARLY UNIVERSITY

English: Now Good For the Ladies!!!!

FROM LADIES ONLY TO NATIONAL PRIDE: FRANCO-PRUSSIAN WAR

We gotta bring the pride back!!!!

MASS CULTURE AND CONSUMERISM

MODERNISM

CRITICAL ANALYSIS AND CLOSE READINGS

The Purpose of Lit Studies Becomes:• Equip People With Skills to Resist

PC• Offer People A Way to Understand

an Ever Fracturing World (WWI)• To Put One’ Self in the Mind of

Great “Men” who “got” it

ELITIST?

THE ERADICATION OF HIGHBROW/LOWBROW & THE RISE OF POP STUDIES AND FANDOM

A SHORT POEM PRESENTED TO A CLASS IN 17TH CENTURY RELIGIOUS POETRY

JacobsRosenbaumOhman

POMO is the death of the author, the end of preferencing authorial intention, the end of stable meanings, the end of trusting language, and the destruction of the silly concept of TRUTH.

. . . Yeah, this freaks some people out.

EDUCATION AS VOCATION

• Publishers• Editors• Technical Writers• English as Addition

IT’S A TECHY, TECHY, TECHY WORLD

EXPANSION

• Technical and Business Writing

• Rhetorical Theory• Multimedia Production• Cultural Studies

QUESTIONS FOR YOU

• What is the purpose of being/having an English Major in the 21st century?

• Does “class,” “nationalism,” and “power” play any role in the purpose you defined above?

• How does literature studies adapt for the technological age? Should it?