Historically, why do we have English Lit classes?

OK, I know all the reasons given to students about why they should take English Literature and related courses (it’ll help you appreciate art, it’ll help you formulate arguments, it’ll help you look like a cultured yuppie swine, etc.) but none of those things help me understand why the courses are there in the first place. The Trivium was grammar, logic, and rhetoric and the Quadrivium was arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music. Nowhere in either of those groupings does fanwank show up. When did the lit geeks get their foot in the door?

I don’t really see what the Trivium and Quadrivium have to do with anything. These ceased to be the basis of university courses rather a long time ago.

I’m not sure when the formal study of Englsh Literature was introduced but teachers have used the works of the great writers as models for their students for centuries.

Here’s a couplet from one of Pope’s Imitations of Horace, 1735, showing that Shakespeare was studied at school in the early 18th century.

In earlier times it was the great Greek and Latin writers that were studied in Rhetoric.

But they’re the ultimate basis for the liberal education, which is what all schools above the level of a trade school aspire to.

But, as I understand it, rhetoric was more practically-minded than English Lit is now, and more focused on what is now called forensics or ‘debate team’ work.

Grammar and rethoric are both aided by reading the work of good practitioners of both arts.

Nowadays Latin and Classic Greek aren’t basic educational tools any more, among other things because the general availability of printed books has helped make translated versions available. You don’t need to know those languages in order to be able to communicate with your peers from other nations (that would be English, although my ESL classes involved very little “literature”) and you don’t need them in order to be able to enjoy the great works written in them. I like reading books in the original language whenever possible, but picking up translated versions of the Witcher series of books was a lot faster and more convenient than learning Polish, you know. So I didn’t need to study Greek in order to read parts of the Iliad in Universal Lit class, and was able to analyze the grammar of Lope, Góngora, Bécquer and Rubén Darío, which was a lot more relevant to my daily life and ability to communicate than that of Homer.

In Spain we didn’t have “debate team,” but Philosophy and History of Philosophy involved a lot of debate (along with any other course where the teacher just happened to like discussions).

Granted. However, the focus shifted at some point: English Lit isn’t about grammar or rhetoric in the old senses.

This is entirely off-topic. There is no reason we can’t do old-fashioned grammar and rhetoric using only English texts as the jumping-off point.

Well, I’ve never had an “English Lit” class, but my “Spanish Lit” involved a lot of grammar and quite a lot of discussion (Góngora vs Quevedo is a classic). Maybe your question should be “when did we stop using literary works to learn grammar?”

OK, I guess it’s different in America. My English Lit classes were all about looking for themes and grand overarching concepts like “Discuss the concept of fidelity as it relates to Macbeth’s actions” or “What does the pig represent in The Lord of the Flies?” and other fanwanky stuff. Grammar isn’t even mentioned. (Most people here can’t distinguish grammar rules from usage prescriptions and they certainly can’t distinguish good usage rules, such as “avoid choppy sentences,” from nonsensical ones, such as “never use the passive voice.”)

And in fact Johnson’s dictionary used what he considered the best written works of English literature to provide examples of words used in context.

Studying the masters of the English language was a requirement for all gentlemen with pretensions to sophistication definitely from the 18th century. I’d put the actual date much earlier, because by Shakespeare’s time it was de rigeur for educated gentlemen to be knowledgeable not just about classical authors but also of contemporary authors, English and foreign. The whole idiot notion of the Earl of Oxford being Shakespeare depends on this.

The requirement that one be educated in prose, poetry, and plays therefore moved backward from the gentlemenly classes to the university, not the other way around.

In any case, universities by the 17th century definitely had long since stopped teaching the trivium and quadrivium as basic coursework. That was a hallmark of medieval universities.
ETA: Your usage of “fanwanky” is hopefully unique to you, and you can keep it.

My girlfriend is studying this as part of her English Lit Masters .

I’m afraid I can’t give you a cite for this, but from what she’s told me English Lit wasn’t deemed worthy of siginificant study until relatively recently.

From what I remember, it was only in the 18th century that English works (as opposed to the Latin and Greek classics) were deemed worthy of serious academic work and even then they weren’t really considered as important as the clasical areas of study.

For a long time English lit was seen as being a ‘womans subject’, and it wan’t until the 19th or even 20th century that it came to have the same status as other subjects.

I could be wrong, I’ll see if I can get anymore information.

What I’ve heard agrees with what King Solomon Hill said: a study of English Literature as part of an educated person’s curriculum is a fairly recent development. Before that, you would have studied the classics: that is, Latin and Greek (both the languages, and the great works written in those languages, like Homer, Sophocles, Virgil, Ovid, etc.)

In many works of literature, what you seem to be calling “fanwankery” is essential to understanding the real meaning and significance of the work.

The trivium and the quadrivium are the historical basis for a liberal education, but not the modern basis. Times have changed since the medieval period, and so have expectations of what an educated person should know.

Hm, because otherwise there would be no sales of My Darling My Hamburger, Still Waters Run Deep and most of the works of Hemmingway?

Frankly, I hated english lit. I detest Hemmingway [the ultimate in wank mary sue writing]

Don’t get me wrong, I actually have read a lot of american lit - I even read Last of the Mohecans and House of the Seven Gables before I got into high school but in general the kids dont want to read it, and being stuffed into a room with 20 other kids who DONT want to be there and reading, kids who actually do like to read end up suffering.

Heck, before I was in high school I romped through the adult section of the library reading stuff that most kids have to be forced to read. That is when I determined that I actually hated most of the stuff we ended up being forced to read.

Give me an unexpurgated Chaucer any day … Give me Whitmans Leaves of Grass, give me the original Dracula Frankenstein and Jewel of the Seven Stars.

:dubious: If someone wrote one of the boys in Lord of the Flies having relations with a pig and tried to submit it as the answe to your LotF question and then posted it to fanfiction.net and it finally ended up on fandom_wank, then it would be fanwanky.

I get what you’re trying to say, but I doubt a high school teacher actually loves all those books enough to teach them just to bask in the glory of superior knowledge.

It’s irrelevant to the world outside the novel, hence ‘fanwankery’. The characters in a novel act the way they do because the plot demands it. Any further enlightenment is secondary to what all authors attempt to do: Tell an interesting story.

It isn’t that fanwank is useless. It’s just that it’s the same thing whether applied to stories in and out of The Canon.

Fanwank is different from fanfic because fanfic is at least marginally creative in a storytelling sense, whereas fanwank is creative in a BSing sense. Fanfic has brought us the Le Morte d’Arthur and the Aeneas. Fanwank has brought us rather less.

Honestly, I think we’d be better off if schools taught fanfic. Creative writing demands more creativity than fitting story A into archetype B. But creating fanfic is morally wrong because publishers have eternal moral rights over everything they purchase.

That’s a critique of the way English Lit is taught, not an argument against introducing students to the history of great writings in their own language. Every educated person should have a knowledge of, and some familiarity with, those works that have shaped the history of his or her language.

It’s not publishers, it’s the writers - the creators - who most often object to fanfiction, at least to fanfiction based on prose. (Publishers have little to do with fanfiction not based on proise.) Your failure to understand this basic distinction fatally undermines whatever point you were trying to make.

Not that it had any hope of life to begin with, but this was a giant smothering pillow over the poor gasping beastie.

That is indeed the official party line and far be it from me to question it.

I used fanfic to make my point because of the word ‘fan’ in it - I could have used fanart too. Fanwankery assumes that you are a fan of something - lit isn’t being taught in school because some guy who makes the curriculum has a copy of every edition of The Great Gatsby. It has nothing to do with fandom. It isn’t a bunch of Tolkien scholars fanwanking over an obscure passage in the Appendices.

You could try to put it in the context of meta, but it still comes around to learning something in school isn’t the same as being a fan of it/participating in fandom.

It really helps on the Dope to read everything. Cecil should try it sometime.

Anyway, I happen to be currently reading How the Scots Invented the Modern World by Arthur Herman. And on page 244 look what I came across.

The passage refers to John Witherspoon, a Scots minister who came to America to become president of Princeton in 1768.

So English literature presumably was already standard in Scottish universities, which were among the great universities of Europe at the time. And Princeton set a model for what the well-educated young American was expected to know even before the Revolution.

If you are suggesting that every author’s sole objective is simply to tell an interesting story than you are wrong. Literature is more complicated than an outline. Analysis requires more than plot summary. Contextualization requires more than content. Many authors, particularly most of those found in the canon, are engaging in complicated issues and moral/logical/sociological/psychological, etc. gray areas that we haven’t figured out today and possibly will never figure out.

I also find it interesting that most of what is being discussed as “literature” in this discussion has been limited to prose novels with opaque references to other classical forms of aesthetics. The novel is a literary form only a couple hundred years old and therefore has a different perspective and emphasis than other forms of aesthetics. Classical aesthetics as promoted and defined by Aristotle were designed to elicit particular emotional reactions in their audiences so that they could become better citizens and contribute more to the city-state. Aristotle, and Plato if i remember correctly, were both concerned with poetry and art for art’s sake as a waste of time and energy that could have been devoted toward the state or the needs of improving the polity. This was the predominant view for many centuries. Eventually poetry somewhat evolves out of communal songs and stories and takes the form of cautionary tales to spread moral messages and origin stories. (Some of the more famous examples of this would be The Divine Comedy and The Decameron). The new classicists revert to the older philosophy of the Greeks with the added notion that art should teach something to its audience.

The Romantics emerge as a clear opposite with an emphasis on literature and poetry as a vehicle for emotion and personal feeling, not moralizing or demogaugery. It was the intent to be a “spontaneous overflow of emotion” and literature such as Coleridge’s Kubla Khan and Shelley’s Adonais are hardly about more than themselves as artistic creations. So there is where your argument has more creedence. Classes, instructors, etc looking too heavily into Romantic poetry or other forms that evolved out of it (confessional poetry, etc.) for something deeper and more profound. But many other forms and ideologies emerged to compete against Romanticism and Rousseauian ‘liberalism.’ And many of these forms were predicated on the idea that poetry, novels, literature in all its forms does way more than simply tell about my emotions or tell an interesting story. The Wasteland, Ulysses, any number of Shakespearian plays, and works of more modern authors such as Ted Hughes, Mark Strand, Robert Lowell, Don Delillo are clearly operating on more levels than plot, content and personal feeling.

If this is a criticism from a student perspective, then the answer is different but similar. Using higher levels on Bloom’s taxonomy such as synthesis and application require students to think beyond the source material or the words on the page. The idea is to make literature not just static material on a page but something that has relevancy still today. Through helping people see the connections between the text and themselves, the text and society, the text and other texts, the text and the past, etc, students can develop these higher forms of thinking and make them more discerning, critical, analytical in all or other phases of their lives.

This principle is not regulated just to literature either. Many musicians and filmmakers are trying to make clear statements beyond just making interesting and “good” music or films. There are plenty of authors, artists, and other entertainers that do not put a great deal of thought, introspection or foresight for motifs into their work. But to minimize all authors as simply interested in telling a good story is way too broad of a generalization to have significant merit.