Critical Approaches to Literature Should Not be Required of English Majors
In the controversy that surrounds the issue
of requiring English majors to take Critical Approaches to
Literature, it is not important whether the course is academically
justifiable, but whether requiring English majors to take it is
justifiable. By thinking about this issue in this way, I have
concluded that Critical Approaches to Literature should not be
required of English majors.
The main reason for including Critical Approaches to Literature as
a required course for English majors is to incorporate a sense of
multi-culturalism and feminism into the English major. I would be
the first to agree that writers such as Toni Morrison, Langston
Hughes, Beth Bryant, and Sherman Alexie should be required reading
for all English majors at some point in their education because
these authors and their works do bring a dimension of multi-cultural
appreciation and feminist understanding to the student's literary
background. However, the Critical Approaches to Literature class
that I attended did not teach me to appreciate the literature of
other cultures; instead, it taught me how to analyze Western
Literature as if I were a sociologist or psychologist. In this
class, I began to feel that there was a hidden agenda imbedded
within the course's objectives. This agenda was to destroy the
literature, which I am familiar with, of the culture I have grown
up in, and to force me to appreciate the literature of other
cultures along the way. It did not work.
By saying, "It did not work," I do not mean that I have no
appreciation for the literature of cultures other than my own. What
I do mean is that if I had not already possessed an appreciation for
Multi-cultural and Women's Literature, Critical Approaches to
Literature would not have conveyed this appreciation to me. I firmly
believe that the poetry of Maurice Kenny is some of the most powerful
poetry that I have ever read, and Duan Niatum's love-poem "Round Dance"
is comparable to the best poetry that Western Literature has to offer.
These are authors I know and love not because I have taken Critical
Approaches to Literature, but because I have read these authors' works
in a Native American Literature course.
This is one reason why Critical Approaches to Literature should not be
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Lingenfelter, S.. (1985). [Review of A Critique of the Study of Kinship]. American Ethnologist, 12(2), 372–374. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/644228
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