Defenders of Shakespeare Do Protest Too Much, Study Finds

Dead white men are alive and well and being widely taught in college English courses, according to a study released Wednesday at the Modern Language Assn. convention here.

The study found that authors such as William Shakespeare and Nathaniel Hawthorne, thought by some to be in danger of being displaced by the rise of multicultural studies, in fact continue to dominate the so-called “meat and potatoes” survey courses taken by most undergraduate English majors.

Moreover, the study found that historical periods of literature still receive more attention in survey courses than post-World War II writings. While non-traditional and contemporary writers such as Toni Morrison and Alice Walker are sometimes included in survey courses, the study concluded that their inclusion has not resulted in the exclusion of writers who came before them.

“The findings should be reassuring to parents of college-age students,” said Phyllis Franklin, the executive director of the MLA, a 31,000-member society of English, literature, linguistics and modern foreign language scholars that is the largest humanities association in the nation.

Franklin said the MLA undertook the study, which identified authors and time periods taught in survey courses at 527 English departments in the 1990-91 academic year, in part because the fate of traditional authors was presumed to be dire, but had not been studied in a systematic way.

The study comes at a time when continuing pressure to broaden literary scholarship to include different cultures and ethnic groups is being met by countervailing criticism. Some scholars have been vocal in their assertion that multiculturalism has gone too far.

But Patricia Meyer Spacks, the MLA’s president and a professor at the University of Virginia, said the study does much to refute that view.

“We wanted to try to see whether it was true that the great literature of the Western canon was disappearing from the curriculum of our universities,” Spacks said. “That is not the case.”

Of the English departments that participated in the study, for example, nearly 90% said they regularly included Geoffrey Chaucer in their British literature survey courses, while more than 70% included Shakespeare and John Milton.

Two-thirds of the same departments said Hawthorne was regularly included in American literature survey courses, while more than 40% listed Herman Melville, Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson. By contrast, Morrison, Walker, Langston Hughes and Zora Neal Hurston were each listed by fewer than 2% of the English departments.

Bettina J. Huber, the MLA’s director of research, acknowledged that the study’s methodology might have contributed to this huge discrepancy because respondents were asked to list only five writers that they regularly included in survey courses, not to list all of the authors taught.

“There is no way of knowing whether the failure to mention a specific author is an oversight, represents a judgment that the author is unimportant, or is the result of the limitation on the number of authors a respondent could name,” Huber wrote in the study.

But Huber defended the results as the first systematic study about what is being taught nationally.

When asked about time periods regularly covered in survey courses, English departments put a clear emphasis on the more distant past.