The English Department Should Change Its Name

To the editors:

Re: “Dept. of Redundancy Department,” editorial, April 7.

I, like you, couldn’t be more in favor of shortening the name of the Department of English and American Literature and Language. Fitting those words on my curriculum vitae or using them to introduce myself to people from other schools is a royal pain. They come across as pretentious and snobby.

Unfortunately, your editorial rests its case on Orwells’ commitment to usage without noting that Orwell had a thing for history as well—and that “The Department of English and American Literature and Language” says a lot about how English departments have developed over the years.

The long name indicates what a big deal it was to add American texts to the canon, which did not really occur until after WWII. It reflects a longstanding tension between the study of literature as something treated objectively (language) and its study as something subjective and inspired (Literature with a capital L). Since the creation of English departments in the late 19th century, “pedants” or “scholars” have shared duties with “dilettantes” or “critics”—often angrily. Questions of methodology can lead to fierce infighting—which in turn can lead to hideous departmental nomenclature.

A hundred years ago, George Lyman Kittredge differed as much from Barrett Wendell as today Barbara Lewalski differs from James Wood. Happily the collegiality, at least at Harvard, seems to have improved. Perhaps the best reason, from this point of view, for shortening the name, is to give full sanction to our methodological pluralism—which makes the department weird and great.

ERIC D.  BENNETT
Cambridge, Mass.
April 7, 2008

The writer is a graduate student in the Department of English and American Literature and Language.