Critical Approaches to Literature Should Not be Required of English Majors

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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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