In a recent issue of PMLA, Wendell Harris, lately Head of the English Department at Penn State, gives grounds for supposing that in the next ten to twenty years most English departments nationwide will adopt one of two alternatives: they will (1) "become Cultural Studies departments (whether they change their names or not,)" or (2) "separate into two departments -- literature in English and Cultural Studies" (PMLA 115:7, 2061-62).
The consensus among Rutgers undergraduates to whom I have spoken is that something like option (1) will in the normal course of things occur (or has already occurred) at Rutgers. This is, so far as I can tell, entirely in line with student demand. By far the greater number of English majors who e-mailed me in response to an earlier online questionnaire said that they were drawn by the department's focus on CulturalStudies, including gender, sexuality, political identity, television and popular culture.
A
minority of students who e-mailed me their responses indicated,
however, that they had been drawn to the English major primarily
as an opportunity to undertake "the literary study of literature,"
focusing on such genres as tragedy, comedy, and satire, major
authors such as Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Jane Austen, James
Joyce, systematic study of such periods of English literature
as medieval, Renaissance, and 17th century, such periods of American
literature as colonial, Revolution and early republic, American
Renaissance, etc. A number have said that they would not continue
as majors in a department of Cultural Studies.
A colleague has suggested that if there were a sufficient number of undergraduates -- even as few as one or two hundred -- interested in literary study, it might be possible to form a small separate department of English and American Literature. (The analogy she gives is with the Department of Classics. That is, the "English department" would consist of a small English faculty, with a limited number of undergraduate majors, concentrating entirely on English and American literature.)
This would be option (2) in Wendell Harris's projected state of affairs.To try to see how it might work out in terms of course offerings, I took the list of English courses that currently appear in the Rutgers catalog and divided them up into Literature and Cultural Studies categories. The numbers are imaginary. I made them up to conform to our present 200-300-400-level numbering scheme.
I'd be interested in hearing from colleagues around the country whose departments seem to them to be moving toward a point of permanent and official division into departments of Cultural Studies and literary studies.
Rutgers University
Department of English
Rutgers
University