In a recent PMLA, in its "For Members Only" section, William R. Parker contends that the English profession is sensibly beginning to limit its purposes to "literature, language and composition, period." I had thought a humanist would never prefer a categorical period to the Socratic question. Admittedly, the provocation to this curricular austerity has been formidable. "Everythingism," after all, has cursed all of us throughout the Progressive interlude. Dating adjustment, one-worldism, semantics, you name it, and we've had it--every panacea to ease the individual's and his world's ills has at one time or another camel-nosed the English teacher's tent.
But the alternative to everythingism is not necessarily nothing but-ism. Let's look at the new trinity and see how they got there. Composition has perhaps the most ancient credentials--coming as it does from the grammar, rhetoric, and logic of the medieval liberal arts curriculum. Literature, in our sense of recent and contemporary work in the vernacular, has only recently displaced the puberty rite of translating Latin and Greek. As near as the 1920's, American literature specialists were grappling for a place of status in the academic sun.
Once this battle for contemporary literature was won, it only remained for English departments to try to make peace with a basic ambivalence: between the difficulties of civilizing the semibarbarous prose of everyman in service courses such as Freshman English and the pleasures of explicating deeply loved literary works. This ambivalence is a basic fact of life that we should candidly face as we are tempted to settle for the deceptively simple "literature, language, composition, period" solution to our profession's problems.
Composition courses, let us be frank, have subsidized the higher life of some professional minds in literature courses. Very often the graduate assistants work their red pencils to bloody stubs to free upper level professors for survey courses that are in fact staging areas for personal research. At the high school level, as college professors have somewhat sourly complained of late, cosmic literary discourse can even totally displace the grubby business of rooting out sentence fragments.
The high school English teacher doesn't have the alternative of banning his younger peers to the Siberian wastes of Freshman Comp. But it seems clear to me that the pleasures of self-indulgence in literature have seduced us from confronting as grimly as we must the linguistic flabbiness of our students. Literature and composition, period? I should put it rather, "Composition si, Literature no." First things first. At the very least, shouldn't it be "Composition, literature, question mark?"
And how about language? This is the newcomer to our trinity, thanks to the emergence of linguistics as a discipline which has not been tarred with the sloppy brush of core curricula, learning experiences, and other excrescences of the sentimentally egalitarian spirit. The scientific study of language clearly belongs in our bailiwick. Which is encouraging. For it shows us that a new discipline, soundly and systematically organized, can enter the select circle. So we can, as a profession, take a fresh look and be convinced. When we all have assimilated linguistics, we shall be much more effective in teaching language and literature.
But a totally fresh look at the English curriculum might lead us to do more than admit linguistics to our central concerns. To put it in simplest terms, the English teacher has two responsibilities, and two only-disciplining the language of his students and explaining to them how style informs a culture. We attempt the former in composition and the latter in literature.
To do these two well, we must not refuse to ask ourselves the tough questions. "Language and Culture, question mark." Not "Literature, language and composition, period." What are the tough questions? How do the conditions of our cultural democracy influence our chances for success in the task of passing what we know about disciplining language and about informing a society with style. How do the conditions aid us? How do they deter us? That is half of the fresh look we need. Not only what we know, but how we must act to surmount the obstacles.
The chief obstacles to our disciplining the language of our students are as easy to catalog as they are difficult to exorcize. The democratic flattery of a comfortable slackness, the advertiser's inflation of the superlative, the media's exploitation of sex and violence in headline and closeup, our sheer inundation by mass produced imagery, the activist's preference of a quick blur to a studied clarity, and the engineering of assent as the growing incorporation of society makes its stakes more attractive and more problematic. These conditions press in on us as we attempt to increase our students' control of their native tongue. To be literate today, moreover, it is necessary to master the many languages of man: oral, written, printed, graphic, and broadcast. This is tougher to do, but attempt it we must. Stress, pitch, juncture, yes. But not if it obscures from us the total dimension of our task.
The second half of our task concerns how successive artistic styles give form to a society. A personal style informs a work of literature. It is our task to reveal the nature of that integrity. What makes it difficult for us today? Look about you. The dominant "style" of our culture is disorder. Our fantasies begin with baroque encrustations of chrome and end in automobile graveyards, those peculiarly American images of ugliness. The slum coexists with the Lincoln Center, and the latter gets most of the publicity. Our cities have rotting centers ringed by fiefs of lily-white privilege.
There are, to be sure, enclaves of wholesomeness in our industrial society. But it is these overwhelming pressures to ugliness, expediency, and disorder which most complicate our task of inculcating respect for, and understanding of, style, the hallmark of an individual's, as well as a society's, integrity. Style is the imprint of an ordering sensibility. The formlessness of our culture is subversive of this integrating imagination.
To withdraw into the inner sanctum of purely literary analysis is merely to turn the already too formless milieux over to those who care neither for literature nor life in its fullest potentials. "Literature, language, and composition, period?" Not really. This is the beginning, not the end of the matter. Control of the languages man uses, understanding of how styles give form to a culture: This is a new agenda worthy of a sophisticated profession.
Note well that the math, foreign language, and science scholars have not retreated to the status quo ante Dewey (Bloomfield). To make up for their two-generation neglect of the public schools, they have completely revised their own subject matter, have devised new ways of organizing this material logically, and have incorporated modern technology like tape recorders and teaching machines to cinch their reforms. Can our discipline do less?
Source: The English Journal, Vol. 52, No. 1 (Jan., 1963), pp. 68-69
Published by: National Council of Teachers of English
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