Classic Writers

* In “Defenders of Shakespeare Do Protest Too Much, Study Finds” (Dec. 29), The Times reports that a study just released by the Modern Language Assn. reveals that “dead white male” authors such as Shakespeare and Hawthorne are not only “alive and well in college English courses,” but “continue to dominate the so-called ‘meat and potatoes’ survey courses taken by most undergraduate English majors.”

These findings are said to derive from a 1990-91 survey of 527 English departments. In fact, that survey was confined to three upper-division courses, from which Shakespeare was specifically excluded. Only one professor in six thought the greatest epic in the English language, “Paradise Lost,” “particularly important” to teach in a course that embraced the 17th Century. Only 11% of the respondents thought Donne “particularly important.” The only 19th-Century American author thought “particularly important” by more than 50% of the respondents was Hawthorne, but no single title by any author was so named. Only 34% put “The Scarlet Letter” in that category. Only 29% named “Moby Dick.”

Moreover, the MLA survey was carefully designed to produce the most traditional and publicly reassuring result possible. More than half the respondents were senior professors. The mean year of Ph.D.s for the entire survey was 1973, long before deconstruction, the New Historicism, or a “cultural criticism” overwhelmingly dominated by race, class and gender ideologies had radically politicized literary study. The survey demonstrated that radicalization was most extreme at our most prestigious universities and especially among our youngest professors. My own English department at the University of Minnesota recently voted overwhelmingly to abandon the requirement that Ph.D. students be required to have taken a course in Shakespeare, Milton, or Chaucer.

In 1993 I co-authored an article demonstrating from the MLA’s own data how empty was its claim that traditional authors and texts were not being displaced and that such changes as had occurred had “not come at the expense of traditional authors.” In the widespread controversy that followed, the MLA never mentioned that its survey had included lower-division survey courses, as they now appear to claim.

NORMAN FRUMAN

Laguna Beach