The Mumpsimus

Earlier this month, just back from a marvelous and productive MLA Convention in Austin, Texas, I started to write a post in response to an Inside Higher Ed article on "Selling the English Major" , which discusses ways English departments are dealing with the national decline in enrollments in the major. I had ideas about the importance of senior faculty teaching intro courses (including First-Year Composition), the value of getting out of the department now and then, the pragmatic usefulness of making general education courses in the major more topical and appealing, etc. After writing thousands of words, I realized none of my ideas, many of which are simply derived from things I've observed schools doing, would make much of a difference. There are deeper, systemic problems, problems of culture and history and administration, problems that simply can't be dealt with at the department level. Certainly, at the department level people can be experts at shooting t...

Questions of literary canonicity have been stalking me for the past few months, mostly in relation to teaching. Some I began thinking about because I was designing a course called Currents in Global Literature, and when faced with giving English majors perhaps their only taste of writings from beyond the U.S. and U.K., I had to figure out my priorities. One of the things I decided to do was try to provoke the students to think about why they have read what they have in school, why they have the assumptions they do about books and writers, and how they can learn more. So I had them watch TED Talks by Chris Abani and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie , listen to Stephen Snyder on "The Business of International Literature" , and read Dan Edelstein on "Gerrymandering the Canon" , Binyavanga Wainaina on "How to Write About Africa" , and Manijeh Nasrabadi on her experiences trying to write and publish a memoir . Additionally, our poetry textbook  challenged the templ...

Last month I wrote about Joseph Epstein's hilariously grumbly screed against The Cambridge History of the American Novel , and now at Slate the editor of that volume writes a temperate, rational, and utterly ungrumbly response . I particularly liked this paragraph: Simply recording our appreciation for the "high truth quotient" (the measure Epstein wants) of a stream of canonical novels won't do. It's not clear what that "quotient" is for Epstein, but anything that smacks of pop culture is by definition excluded. Yet novels were and remain a vital part of popular culture, and their emergence in the 18th and 19th centuries was greeted as an affront to the "centurions of high culture" who appointed themselves to guard the gates before Epstein nominated himself for the job. Only a tiny fraction of the hundreds of thousands of American novels published ever achieved—or even aspired to—the exalted status of high art.

I hadn't read an ill-tempered screed against all things contemporary and academic for at least a couple of days, so it was with delight that I happened upon Joseph Epstein's Wall Street Journal review of The Cambridge History of the American Novel . What a hoot! Some sadistic editor at the WSJ assigned Epstein to read and review a book that was never intended for people to just sit down to read. It's a reference book, something for library shelves, a book to be cited, and, for its contributors, a credit for touting. That's not to say it's not useful -- were you doing some research on a particular phase of American lit, it might give good guidance, and I would find it especially useful with undergraduates to show them the wide range of topics that can be thought about, analyzed, studied. Like a 1,200 page collection of academic essays about American history. Useful for various purposes, but not really something to take to the beach or the bed. Properly categori...

I woke up this morning and thought, "I really need good ammunition against people who say that 'hopefully' can't be used to mean 'I hope'," because that's the sort of thing I tend to wake up thinking (yes, my paranoias are often about being mugged by style goons). I fired up my ol' computer machine and plugged into the intertubes and went immediately to Language Log , where I got a concise explanation of what I needed : Speaker-oriented (or "stance") adverbial hopefully has been taking abuse pretty steadily for 30 or more years (see MWDEU ). Linguists are mostly just baffled by this disparagement; see the discussion in the American Heritage Book of English Usage , where it's noted that " hopefully seems to have taken on a life of its own as a shibboleth." But the word fits right into long-standing patterns of the language -- cf. frankly in "Frankly, this soup stinks" and surprisingly in "Surprisingly,...

Geoffrey Pullum , co-author of The Cambridge Grammar of the English Language , is not celebrating the fiftieth anniversary of Strunk & White -- in an essay at The Chronicle Review , he writes: The book's toxic mix of purism, atavism, and personal eccentricity is not underpinned by a proper grounding in English grammar. It is often so misguided that the authors appear not to notice their own egregious flouting of its own rules. They can't help it, because they don't know how to identify what they condemn. It's a wonderful take-down, the best I've encountered since Louis Menand's examination of Eats, Shoots, and Leaves ("Why would a person who is not just vague about the rules but disinclined to follow them bother to produce a guide to punctuation?"). The power and popularity of such books is astounding. Both books were quite popular in the high school English departments I worked at, and Strunk & White was often assigned to students. I'm...

One Story is a marvelous magazine (and not just because they published me -- that should, perhaps, be held against them...) and I can testify that it makes a great gift for people who like to read but generally feel too busy to do so, because receiving a nicely-produced story every three weeks or so in the mail is great fun. One Story now and then asks for donations, because the magazine is a non-profit and doesn't run ads. Clifford Garstang pointed out that a recent solicitation included this description of the "Editor" donation level: Editor: $100 – I’ll pay one author for their story Mr. Garstang notes that there is, according to certain interpretations of English usage, a problem with agreement between the one author and the plural pronoun their . What he doesn't say, though, is that One Story is simply showing their respect for the history of English literature and the language itself. According to the indispensible Merriam-Webster Dictionary of English U...

Loath as I am to disagree with John Scalzi, I must note a difference of opinion with regard to the word "alright", which John proclaims is not even a word. And he thinks it's ugly. Whether it is ugly is a matter of taste, and I shan't argue that. Whether it is a word , though ... well, it's definitely a word, since it has boundaries and is used to convey meaning, though I will grant that most American dictionaries of English do not accept it as part of formal, standard English yet. I will also say here that I use the word "alright" much more often than I use the words "all right", and when an occasional copyeditor changes my alrights to all rights , I change 'em right back whenever possible. (Usually my sometimes-British/ sometimes-American punctuation distracts copyeditors from my other idiosyncracies, but not always.) In terms of grammar, usage, style, orthography, etc., I am a radical liberal. I teach my students standard English, ...