School's Out: "Excellence" at Our Ivy League Schools

I haven't been following the Harriet Miers fiasco because I've been busy with life, and Miers doesn't really matter.  Honest.  It might seem like it, but she's not that important.  However, since gloomy Rod Dreher announced the coming of the Great Will Column that intended, in his words, to silence the opposition to the opposition to Ms. Miers, I've been waiting with bated breath for Mr. Will's staggering crie de coeur, his column to end all columns. 

Well, All Things Beautiful has an excellent response to Mr. Will's Column To End all Columns.  Carol Platt Liebau does, as well.  As for George Will, let me tell you a secret:  I've seen this bespeckled, pot-marked jerk up close and personal, and I wasn't impressed.  Unlike Hugh Hewitt, I'm not willing to give him the credit he doesn't deserve.  He's a pompous bore.  He eats French food and writes with the sort of dramatic, "insightful" voice that makes people yawn after a few sentences.  He gets all the Sunday column space, because the liberal elites like him.  He's one of them, with a bow-tie.

However, since Mr. Will and his supporters in the opposition adorn their elitism as a defense of excellence, I thought I'd continue my exploration of what is being taught at our nation's "elite" schools, where grade inflation and "legacy" students (read: nepotism) are standard practice.    I began the other day at Harvard, now I'm turning my attention to the English Departments at Princeton and Yale.

NOTE:  Readers get extra points for counting the number of times quotation marks are used senselessly.

 

From the English Department at Princeton:

ENG 383/AFS 383
Topics in Literature and Nationality: Writing Race and Nation: The South African Example
Description/Objectives:
What is a nation? We will examine the ways in which the nation is imagined, debated, and deconstructed in literary form. We will focus on the example of South Africa where questions of race and nation are historically and culturally entangled and have, for that reason, generated a literary culture that has produced winners of major literary prizes, including the Nobel and Booker Prizes. We will also examine how the national imaginary and literature are connected across time and space and how the process of political change transforms literary culture.

The Victorians: Sociability and Its Discontents
Description/Objectives:
In this course we will survey a range of more or less familiar literature, criticism and theory. Our broadest aim will be to find out what the nineteenth century novel has to teach us about how people are drawn into modern society and how they draw away from it. Our list of writers will include Austen, Dickens, Eliot, Thackeray, Wilde, Trilling, Foucault, Marx, Durkheim, Simmel and Goffman.

ENG 563
Poetics: Poetry, Metaphysics and the Environment
Description/Objectives:
This theoretical course will approach poetry in general and in relation to environmental fact. It will consider changing metaphysical assumptions and, following Vico's New Science, will treat the question of "poetic wisdom." We ask, regarding individual authorship and ideological constraints, "Is eco-criticism via viable?" Our texts will include earlier authors such as Tennyson, Hopkins, Dickinson and Whiteman, along with more recent poets.

ENG 572/COM 572
Selected Topics in Criticism and Theory: Derrida: Ethics, History, Politics
Description/Objectives:
This course aims to introduce students to the ethical, historical, and political dimensions of Jacques Derrida's thought and writings. Engaging contemporary critical debates over the politics and ethics of deconstruction, it will seek to understand the ways in which Derrida's meditations on language and literature open onto questions of ethics, history, and politics. We will be reading several of Derrida's most well-known books as well as his essays on the university, law, religion, democracy, nationalism, psychoanalysis, and the war on terror.

TheLeague notes:  Good God! The Philosopher Frog lives!

From the English Department at Yale

ENGL 285a, U.S. LITERATURE IN THE ELECTRIC AGE
Nineteenth and twentieth century U.S. literature and the history of technology, with an interest in how innovations like the telegraph and the electric chair, the automobile and the radio have transformed the literary imagination..."I sing the body electric"--Walt Whitman's famous line uses modern technology to imagine the power of modern poetry. This course reads Whitman and several other well-known U.S. writers with an eye toward the technological transformations that have generated the imaginative world of modernity. How do the telegraph and the electric chair, the automobile and the radio inform the American scene as writers have conceived it? Can the experimental literary forms of "modernism" be understood as technologies designed to transform social life? How does literature, a relatively old-fashioned medium, adjust to the explosion of new, hi-tech media in the twentieth century? The course has two mascots: Thomas Edison, whose electric innovations promised Americans new, sometimes shocking, forms of contact with each other; and Harry Houdini, whose escape stunts explored the dynamism, the mobility, of a modern society where old geographical and social divides appeared to be losing their hold. Attending to history, however, doesn't mean forgetting about the details of literary texts--only close and careful reading will reveal the subtleties at the contact point of literature and technology.

ENGL 328a, FICTION WITHOUT BORDERS
"The dream of the great American novel is past," Maxine Hong Kingston declared in 1989. "We need to write the Global novel." But what does it mean to write a global novel? Examining contemporary fiction from the United States, South Asia, South Africa, China, and Britain, we will explore the changing relationships between literature and globalization.

In particular, this course will focus on three sets of questions. First, how do these novels address the social, political, and economic changes that we associate with contemporary globalization? We will ask how phenomena such as migration, travel, social reform, transnational communication, consumerism, and expanding capital markets influence our ideas about what it means to be global. We will discuss not only how novels portray the nuances of increasingly transnational lives, but also how these novels themselves shape transnational experiences for their readers.

Second, how do novels attempt to represent worlds that are often quite different from the cultural locations of their authors? Writing about other people and places has often been seen as a way of asserting power over them, and thus the idea of "fiction without borders" can be considered a project fraught with ethical difficulty. We will explore literary and philosophical defenses of the need to imagine others, asking if novels with global aspirations can adequately evade the common charge of imperialist, Orientalist, or primitivist representations.

Third, what is the relationship between a novel's literary form and its portrait of globalization? This course will examine different aesthetic approaches to the problem of global fiction, ranging from realist novels to multilingual texts to works that play with the boundaries of fiction. We will discuss the consequences of particular stylistic and formal choices, and we will question how those choices might imply or invent specific global readerships.

ENGL 345a, ORIENTALISM
This course introduces students to English and American representations of the East, the Orient, or Islam, often referred to as "Orientalism." The emphasis will be placed on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century literary works that imagine the Orient as a holy site of Christian pilgrimage, an allegory of unrestrained sensuality and fantasy, and a discursive mirror against which English and American traditions measure their own distinction and progress. Reading poems, plays, novels, and travel narratives inspired by the translation of The Arabian Nights, we will examine the ways in which this epic shaped several Anglo-American genres and forms. A comparison between British and American authors will allow us to demonstrate how the latter drew on Eastern cultural traditions (e.g., mysticism and soufism) to liberate their writing from European cultural hegemony on the one hand, and counter the rigid precepts of Puritanism, on the other. Theoretical works by major critics of Orientalism will be discussed throughout the course to help students understand how literature is both critical of and complicit with the discourses of power such as imperialism and capitalism. One of the main objectives of the course is to expose students to the problems of "interpretation" in cross-cultural contexts: the representation of unfamiliar cultures and geographies; the patterns of exoticist and stereotypical thinking; the textual construction of identity and difference; East-West interactions; and the possibilities of dialogue across diverse literary and cultural traditions.

ENGL 347a, CONTEMPORARY SOUTH ASIAN FICTION
Contemporary fiction by writers of South Asian birth or descent. Issues of identity, modernity, empire, and history as well as of narrative and linguistic experimentation. Authors include V.S. Naipaul, Salman Rushdie, Amitav Ghosh, Hanif Kureishi, Rohinton Mistry, Arundhati Roy, Bapsi Sidwa, and Jhumpa Lahiri.

ENGL 354a, LITERATURE OF FRIENDSHIP
One of modernity's great untold stories is the rise of friendship to a preeminent position in social imagination and practice. As the anthropologist Robert Brain has written, "We are friends with everyone" now: parents, co-workers, teachers, etc. Whereas friendship was once a relatively unimportant relationship, clearly subordinate to family, feudal, and other more formal, stable, and hierarchical ties, over the past two centuries it has become the relationship in terms of which all others are understood, against which they are all measured, into which they have all dissolved. It has become, in other words, the characteristically modern form of relationship. New types of friendship have emerged, and new ways of thinking about old types: with feminism, the emergence of equal friendships between men and women, as well as friendships between married couples; with the rise of a visible gay culture, changes in the way non-sexual friendships between men are lived and understood: with the emergence of youth culture, a new emphasis on group friendships.

This course will explore some of these changes through their expression in British and American literature. The main emphasis will be on fiction, with some attention to poetry, essays, and film. The syllabus will include some or all of the following: poems by Wordsworth, Jane Austen's Emma, essays by Emerson and Thoreau, Thomas Hardy's Jude the Obscure, D.H. Lawrence's Women in Love, E.M. Forster's Passage to India, Virginia Woolf's The Waves, Mary McCarthy's The Group, Michael Cunningham's A Home at the End of the World, and John Sayles's The Return of the Secaucus 7.

I haven't even reached the graduate courses yet.   Here are a few:

ENGL 925a, AMERICAN LITERATURE AND WORLD RELIGIONS
Beginning with Cabeza de Vaca and Olaudah Equiano as instances of Christianity in the Atlantic world, this course studies the extension, migration, and transformation of world religions-Islam, Hinduism, Buddhism, and their folk variants-within the context of American literature, challenging the standard account of an exclusively Puritan heritage. Readings range from Emerson and Thoreau to Henry Adams, Willa Cather, Malcolm X, Allen Ginsberg, Gary Snyder, Amy Tan, and Bharati Mukherjee. Also AMST 925a, CPLT 529a.

ENGL 801a, VICTORIAN PROSE: THE CONDITIONS OF ENGLAND
In Past and Present (1843), Thomas Carlyle announced, "The Condition of England…is justly regarded as one of the most ominous, and withal one of the strangest, ever seen in the world." Although there was no more a single "Condition of England" in the nineteenth century than there was one unified Victorian period, Carlyle's statement does epitomize the conflicts and excesses both of Victorian culture and of the prose that charted its contradictions. Starting with Carlyle's Sartor Resartus and ending with Morris's News from Nowhere, this course will examine the art and rhetoric of Victorian nonfictional prose by focusing on two of its characteristic tensions-between social criticism and personal experience and between fact and fiction. Readings will include canonical texts-Carlyle's Past and Present, Mill's On Liberty and Autobiography, Newman's Apologia pro Vita Sua, Arnold's Culture and Anarchy, and selections of Ruskin's works from Modern Painters to Praeterita-as well as periodical essays by such women writers as Cobbe and Linton and working-class contributions to the debates on the "factory question" by Brown and Dodd. As an example of the fictional techniques often mined by these writers as they explored the various conditions of England, two monthly numbers of Dickens's Bleak House will also be assigned during each of the ten central weeks of the semester. (Students are encouraged to read Bleak House in its entirety before the beginning of the course so that the weekly assignments of the novel may offer them the pleasures and advantages of rereading.)

The last part is the best.  "Students are encouraged" to read Bleak House in its entirety.  How about...they read Bleak House and study Dickens in a class on Dickens,.

Excellence at work, foks.  Excellence at work.

Next week, I'll descend into the second level of "elite" school status...the dreaded Tier Two Ivy League schools.

Comments

[Bleak Mouse]

One phrase struck me in the above (and having a phrase actually strike you in that long, lumbering drone of stock phrases is quite something), under the course description on Orientalism: "...the patterns of exoticist and stereotypical thinking..." Of course, the author was referring to those poor benighted souls who actually believe they can COMPARE different cultures. But it more aptly describes the manner of pseudo-analysis of ALL of these courses. Learning exoticist and stereotypical formulas for pointless discourse is what distinguishes the TRUE elite from all of those clueless folks who merely read and think about what they have read.

Yes, the university is dead. It merely has to realize it and stay buried.