Alas, Georgetown Shelves Classics

My reaction to the curriculum for Georgetown University’s English Department can be summed up with a few Elizabethan imprecations: “Fie, fie, fie! Pah, pah! Howl, howl, howl! Tut!”

Joining the rush to multiculturalism, the Jesuit university no longer will require English literature majors to study the English language’s dynamic trio - Chaucer, Shakespeare and Milton.

Never mind that dissing these classics is a mistake anywhere. In this town, we need them. They provide the highest form of punditry.

Pick up the paper and you will see Milton’s good and bad angels warring here, and plenty of illustrations that “The mind is its own place, and in itself, can make a heav’n of hell, a hell of heav’n.”

What better place to take Chaucer’s words to herte: “Ech man for hymself,” “Now up, now doun, as boket in a welle” and “Thing that is seyd, is seyd; and forth it gooth.” (We even have our own bawdy Miller in Bob Packwood and babbling Wife of Bath in Enid Waldholtz.)

He may be too white, too male and too dead for Georgetown, but there is no greater writer about politics than Shakespeare.

In Washington, we need to know about this great stage of fools, with its strange bedfellows and vaulting ambition and unkindest cuts and tides taken at the flood. We need to know that reputation is all, that conscience hath a thousand several tongues, that the oldest sins are committed in the newest ways, and that truth’s a dog to kennel - he must be whipped out.

We are, after all, a town with so many scandals that we must regularly resort to the Shakespearean instruction: “Exit, pursued by a bear.”

But gorgeous language and timeless insights are no longer enough. Now courses must reflect, as Georgetown’s English Department puts it, in its dialect of English, “the power exerted on our lives by such cultural and performative categories as race, class, gender, sexuality, and nationality, and on the ways in which various kinds of representation aid in the construction, reproduction, and subversion of these categories.”

Henry James, Herman Melville and Nathaniel Hawthorne can be found huddled in Course No. 112, “White Male Writers,” which probes “why the canon of a pluralistic society remains so uniform.”

No. 114, “History and Theories of Sexuality,” “seeks to historicize contemporary theoretical debates about sexuality, in particular gay and lesbian studies and ‘queer’ theory as it is informed by African American and/or feminist theoretical and political concerns,” covering topics such as anti-masturbation tracts of the 19th century, sexology and the science of inversion, and Vanessa Williams and the Miss America Pageant. (I look forward to a new M.A. degree in Vanessa Williams Studies.)

No. 105, “Women, Revolution, and the Media,” ranges “from Emma Goldman and Angela Davis to the Mothers of the Plaza de Mayo and Rigoberta Menchu. We will look at how women have utilized the various media to further their political struggles. … we will ask questions about the role of media in shaping different gendered, raced and ideological identities.”

In No. 118, “Unspeakable Lives: Gay and Lesbian Narratives,” “We will examine strategies of representation occasioned by politically suspect sexualities.”

John Glavin, an English professor who is the chairman of the curriculum committee, says the school needed to change to meet the students’ needs. “We want students to be aware that there are problems in Shakespeare’s plays with the way women were portrayed,” he said. “We want to get away from the notion that literature is sacred. That is really a secular version of fundamentalism, the belief that there are magic books that have all the wisdom, all the authority, and if students passively attend to these books, they’ll have all the answers.”

This is ridiculous. It is impossible to go very far into Shakespeare and remain passive, or indifferent to social and sexual collisions.

Whoever said that Shakespeare has “all the wisdom”? And it is hardly the case that the race and gender brigade do not revere their own sacred texts. In a city in which much ado is often made about nothing, it wouldn’t kill anybody to make much ado about something.

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