Why is it that in the sciences, universities try to move forward, and in the humanities, they seem obsessed with looking back?
I’m considering applying to PhD programs in creative writing. Although every program is different, they basically include the coursework for a PhD in English with a few creative workshops mixed in, with a final creative manuscript instead of the typical PhD thesis.
Many (but not all) schools that offer the creative writing PhD require the GRE subject test in English. Back when I was an English undergrad, the GRE literature exam was reputed to be brutal. This is what’s on it, according to the GRE folks themselves:
– Continental, Classical, and Comparative Literature through 1925 — 5-10%
– British Literature to 1660 (including Milton) — 25-30%
– British Literature 1660-1925 — 25-35%
– American Literature through 1925 — 15-25%
– American, British, and World Literatures after 1925 — 20-30%
To sum this up, 70-80% of the exam focuses on work before 1925.
25-30% of the entire exam will be on BRITISH LIT BEFORE 1600.
What concerns me isn’t that I can’t possibly do well on the test (I can’t. I was terrible at recognizing poets from excerpts when I learned them more than a decade ago, and I don’t know a caesura from a sestina) but what this focus indicates. The discipline, as it appears through the lens of this exam, is inherently colonial, still trying to prove to big bad monarch daddy that we deserve his love, we do, we really really do, because we can appreciate him and study his dirty bards and his pious poets and his sarcastic essayists and his metaphysical poets and his beowulf, thank you very much, and since we’ve been so good, may we please have some more moors, please?
I fear if American universities use this same rubric as the basis for the students they admit, it reflects the courses those students will take and the disciplines they will go on to teach. Where is the contemporary fiction? Does it have a place in the academy? I feel it must, but I fear it does not.
For literature since 1925 — from Britain, America and “World literatures” — there will be between 46 and 69 questions. That includes books and plays and poetry and theory. Will there be anything about the internet? About how literariness and literacy has been affected by email, text messaging, virtual libraries? About how the interaction between author and screen (or reader and screen) may or may not change the way literature comes into being, or is received?
If there are as many questions about works published after 1993 — my random date for widespreadingness of the internet — as there are about Milton, I’ll … I’ll … well, I’ll get them right, is what I’ll do.
Sometimes, I wish I was making robots. Then I could do my math and look forward, and wouldn’t be tested on the origin of the goddamn nut.
You make an excellent point, Carolyn.
I studied Math and Archaeology as an undergrad (I must be bipolar)…
Advanced math courses had me working obsessively on new applications. Abstract algebra focused on the latest ideas for cryptology, graph theory on indexing computer data, etc.
Whereas the archaeology really emphasized studies, and recreations done before WWII.
Perhaps it is easier to tell whether a recent achievement in the sciences is noteworthy, because people can find immediate use from these achievements. Not so, with literature, as their immediate use is so personal.
(Perhaps that’s why English teachers have a much harder time grading papers as well.)
Powerful insight. What makes the moderns so difficult to place is that everyone has their own opinion. Then you genrefecation out the wazoo. Everyone has their fave niche. But that doesn’t mean moderns don’t have their place. I argued awhile back that there is a lot of emphasis put on the moderns in the commercial world…the other side of the coin is that in academia there is so little emphasis at all on it.
I guess my next question is this: why would you want a phD in creative writing? Sounds impossible.
Here’s the article I wrote. Ed Champion’s got some good insight in the comments:
http://eliot.stlwritersguild.org/wordpress/?p=30
To frame your discussion a little differently, perhaps the Lit GRE has outlived its usefulness. It was designed to give admissions committees a way evenly to compare applicants, just as the SAT was designed to compensate for those differences out of applicants’ control–whether they went to a respected school, whether teachers were tougher in their grading, etc.
That method worked when undergraduate English degree coursework was relatively similar, i.e., you don’t get your degree unless you’ve read your Milton and your Hemingway. But it all breaks down when the higher level–the PhD program–wants to see what sets an applicant apart, what their specialization is. So anyone considering a PhD knows to seek out the new, timely, or contrarian topic; bringing in Milton can earn you credit for great diligence, but it’s no longer a dependable measure of an applicant’s potential.
What’s insane about this exam is that even if you have had a classical-ish education (i.e. took a core curriculum where you were required to read a LOT of classics) this exam is still almost impossible.
The core at Columbia is one of the most rigorous in the nation, as is the English major and I still got through it without reading The Canterbury Tales, The Faerie Queen, Paradise Lost, or Moby Dick.
So, essentially, NOBODY can do well on this exam. It’s useless. Give us a passage to analyze. Ask us what we are interested in, what we know A LOT about. I’ll write you to death on the line “Leopold Bloom ate with relish the inner organs of beast and fowl.” Isn’t that enough?!
Not to defend something as ridiculous as the GRE subject test in literature, buuuttt…
Have any of you considered that the reason you find works by the “dirty bards” and the “pious poets” not so significant anymore might be due to the fact that its, like, harder to read? Or that contemporary fiction still has to EARN its freaking place in this academy? And for that to occur, boundaries of time, place, and social climate must be transcended? Five years since publication and a bunch of lectures about the writing process (zzzzz) do not a classic work of literature make.
Quite frankly, the fact that the last 80 years of literature (give or take) constitutes 20-30% of the subject test is amazingly generous, considering that the test is meant to encompass ALL OF THE information that will be relevant to those seeking an advanced degree in literature, like Chaucer, Donne, Milton, etc. You know, those guys who had an incredible influence on what we call modern literature, without whom these “moderns” would not be able to exist, at least not in the same way. In spite of that “big bad daddy monarch”, they found a way to pursue their craft and subtly subvert that monarch, an issue that should be incredibly relevant to any self respecting MFA candidate in the current social climate, or anytime, for that matter. The idea that the academy’s focus should shift just because you all think its easier to study contemporary literature rather than sifting through all the big, scary words in classical literature that has given rise to what you claim to love is absurd.
Oh, and Andrew, do you know how many people are still getting their PhDs in 19th Century British Lit? Is that new, timely, or contrarian? Nope! But, somehow, it is still intriguing and worthy of new scholarship.
Again, I’m not arguing for the usefulness of the subject test, I think it is an abomination. However, I think that the grounds upon which you dismiss this particular test are very alarming indeed.
>Why is it that in the sciences, universities try to move forward, and in the >humanities, they seem obsessed with looking back?
I don’t know if you’ve noticed, Pinky, but the situation is even worse when it comes to history. I read these guys, and I just want to say, with James Tyrone: “For god’s sake, forget the past!”
Funny thing. I JUST took that test, with the opposite problem…I know a LOT about the early stuff, as I want to study the metaphysical poets/early seventeenth in grad school. So I was shaky on world lit and postmodern/contemporary lit, and spent a lot of time studying that…turns out, on my particular test there wasn’t a single contemporary world lit identification, only a critical theory deconstructionalist passage which I suppose they “counted” as standing in for all of the creative fiction of contemporary world lit. I was not only irritated due to the amount of time I spent anticipating a decent amt of these types of questions; more than that, it is insulting which works they randomly chose to value over so much of what they omitted. The ultimate problem with this test is that they expect way too much specific understanding of a massive amount of material.
I also, as someone who really cares about the writers of the “big daddy monarch” was not really offended by your interest in the current and lack of interest in the former, though, of course, your understanding of even the most contemporary of writers is improved with a strong understanding of its historical place as a work that speaks not only to the works sitting next to it on a bookshelf at Borders, but also to the vast list of works that have come before it and helped shape and influence the genre it falls into. That being said, I completely disagree with Rabble Rouser’s assertion that past writing is much harder to study than contemporary. While the language is more challenging simply because we are from a different time with a different set of phrases and word usage than the bards, complexity and importance is by no mean lacking in the contemporary…Some of the most difficult works of literature are the most modern! Understanding a conceit by John Donne may be complicated, but making it through Pynchon’s Gravity’s Rainbow is an academic victory!