I’m experiencing a growing resentment towards the Department of English. They get most of the resources at our College of Arts and Sciences, they steal the right to teach World Literature in translation from us, they squeeze us out of the International Studies major, they see every single student pass through their courses as part of the general education program, they unilaterally decide their graduate students don’t need to be competent in a foreign language and slash the requirement, they have a bizillion faculty positions and keep getting more and more, nobody threatens them with getting rid of them or removing their funding, and they bully other departments around just because they can.
But I see no evidence that they are doing their job. A student who is finishing a Major in English has zero understanding of what a thesis statement of an essay is and what are the MLA guidelines for formatting bibliographies. Students who have passed through English Lit courses have no idea that essays should have meaningful titles (other than Essay #1, that is) and that a 10-page essay cannot be written in a single paragraph.
I just got my students in the advanced literature seminar to submit a thesis statement for the final essay, and the only ones who did a good job are those who took an advanced course with me last semester and learned how to do it. The rest think that a thesis statement means a list of “themes” they identify in the work of literature being analyzed. I swear, if I hear the word “themes” one more time, I will have a fit.
Given that we do exactly what English Lit does but “backwards and in heels” (i.e. in a foreign language) and we still manage to do a better job, I’m beginning to wonder what the problem is.
Clarissa's Blog 
The very first comment this post attracted was by a vicious, unhinged racist whom I obviously banned.
It is shocking how easily racists find excuses to bring up their garbage.
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Humm, I would have liked to reply to that. 😉
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Ugh, I feel the same way about the English dept at my school. I also laughed out loud when I read “a 10-page essay cannot be written in a single paragraph.” I can’t tell you how furious I get when that happens!
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In my country, we called it ‘writing in a continuous sausage.’ Imagine a sausage that goes on and on and on, for miles. 🙂
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French (as the Québec language) and English (as the Canada language and the international lingua franca) departments do the same kind of shit here.
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“Students who have passed through English Lit courses have no idea that essays should have meaningful titles (other than Essay #1, that is) and that a 10-page essay cannot be written in a single paragraph.”
But this is not as stupid here.
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My high school 10th grade English teacher taught me about the “thesis must contain the themes to be analyzed and the literary devices that you will use to analyze the themes” – it nearly broke me in HS English, and took years to shake… I can, however, now report that I am quite capable of formulating a coherent thesis statement. But themes are a huge component of HS English Lit, which may be where they are coming from. (Now, whether i agree with the HS English Lit curriculum or not, well, I don’t think I’m quite qualified to comment, but I thought it was overall worthless)
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“But themes are a huge component of HS English Lit, which may be where they are coming from.”
– Yes, I think you are absolutely right. I’m starting to hate HS English Lit.
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I’m pretty confident that students in Foreign Languages are better than students in English. This is propably the main problem here.
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