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Why is Literature so important to the English curriculum?

Why was high school history much more theoretically conservative than English literature?

  • I went to high school in Perth, Western Australia from 2003-7. While the English literature classroom required us to think about intertextuality, subjectivity, the creation of meaning, and other postmodernist buzz concepts, it always seemed that the history curriculum had a comparatively old-fashioned and empirical foundation. Perhaps this says something about historians, and particularly the sorts of historians that contribute to curriculum development. Or perhaps it says something broader about the discipline of history itself. I'm particularly interested in this question as it relates to the issue of whether and why school students find history 'boring'. NB I took history only until the end of year 10 (after that, ancient history), so it's possible that my premise is misguided.

  • Answer:

    A friend of mine said: "The English department is where good ideas go to die." In my experience, certain departments are enamoured with French theory and others not as much. For example, science students do not study "Science Studies" courtesy of Bruno Latour - I suppose that makes them less hip. Nor does it seem that historians get as tied up with theory as the rest of the humanities would like them to: I suppose it's a bit like any field that's resisted the French, "We need to produce some kind of subject-knowledge to legitimise our existence. Let them worry about our foundational issues, we'll just avoid Parisian conferences like the plague." Also, the French and their American acolytes are a contradictory lot. They're happy to use 'History of Science' a lá Foucault to try and break imagined scientific hegemonies (enter Cosmopolitics and poorly understood science) but shudder at the thought that history is this narrative which informs the present (since "It's all text man" *lights a joint*). Anyway, basically it's in vogue in English literature and not as much in Historical studies.

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I can't speak to what happens in Australia, but I majored in History and minored in English and did one semester of grad school in English, and in my opinion, history based on post-modernism is untenable. History is based on objective facts. Either Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean or he didn't. Post-modernists dissect words and ideas to the point of rendering communication meaningless so that "Christopher Columbus sailed the ocean" doesn't mean what anyone with common sense would think it means. You can't do history that way. History needs objective facts, some rules of analysis and some kind of inherent meaning, otherwise it becomes  futile mental gymnastics. When people study the past, they're trying to derive some kind of objective knowledge, and post-modernism makes it impossible to do. English literature lends itself to that kind of critique because literature is imaginary. My bone of contention though-- and one of the reasons I couldn't hack grad school-- is that because it's all subjective, English students and critics think they don't have to research historical claims. It's all relative, right, so whether the history is actually factual is not that important. It...drove...me...crazy... Now there's a lot more social history in schools than there used to be, but education systems tend to like political history that explains their country's founding myths and the origins of on-going  conflicts so that people can have some idea of what they're about. That type of history tends to be more empirical and event-based. But I think this is ultimately a good thing because young kids can't deal with abstract ideas. They need to be *told* facts.

Suzanne Fortin

I think literature is a bit more liberal than history (bases on gut and experience)--from a political viewpoint. You spoke to the issue of post-modernism....I don't think it falls on the liberal versus conservative axis in some sense.  I think in terms of history....the importance of interpretation is challenging to make I think.  All literature seems to invite interpretation....I think history has interpretive aspects.....but the number of interpretive debates may be fewer.

Nathan Ketsdever

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