Teaching Literature as Art
rj HIE question "What's the good of taking that?" seldom interrupts students' advisers when they are setting down "English Si," "20I," or whatever else it is that the course of study offers, because both required and elective courses in literature are quite as thoroughly accepted essentials in the curriculums of all schools and colleges as are subjects of any other sort. But when the question is asked, it deserves an answer-a better answer than some maunderings about the cultural value of such study or a counter-attack upon the student's presumedly excessive practicality. What is the reply to be? Should the undergraduate be led to expect merely a special approach to English history and a cultural veneer consisting of the names of authors, their chronological sequence, some gossip about them, and little more than the titles of their principal works? Or can he be promised a discipline which he can get nowhere else and from which he can learn to understand, respect, and enjoy some principal art forms? It is painfully clear, from annotated anthologies intended as bases for instruction in survey and "period" courses and from the ready acceptance which is given them, that the majority of the men and women who help frame courses of study and who teach college English perform for their students no more than the first of those functions, in part because they confuse literature with its peripheries and in part because they lack a technique for leading their students in a critical analysis of the works themselves. The following is a representative passage from the note on Milton's verse in Coffin and Witherspoon's Seventeenth-Century Prose and Poetry: