Departmental Philosophy

 

A former member of the Department once described the teaching of English as "a particularly indirect form of spiritual direction." The fact that our former colleague now sits in the House of Bishops may offer some explanation for his comment, but it seems to us that he was getting at something central to our discipline. "Literature" is one of the "humanities," in modern American academic terms. The two words, used that way, date back to the Renaissance, when knowledge of "humane letters" began to be set over against knowledge of "the sacred page," the study of secular writing over against the study of Holy Scripture. But the sense of "human" as opposed to "divine" literature inevitably carried with it the related senses of "literature about being human" and "literature which helps to make us human." In that last sense, we would point to the literal sense of the name of one of the University of Oxford's disciplines, litterae humaniores --"more humane letters," as if to emphasize the possibility of development. The business of an English department is to help its students to "more humane letters"--to show them, on the one hand, the potential of literature to help us grow, to educate us, to lead us toward magnanimity (that "greatness of soul" treasured as a virtue both by Aristotle and by those disciples of Gandhi who titled him "Mahatma," a precisely cognate Sanskrit phrase) and, on the other hand, to train them in using the fundamental tools of grammar, logic, and rhetoric by which they can take advantage of that potential. The long term goals of the Department are those set out in William Faulkner's Nobel Prize Banquet speech from 1950: "to help man endure by lifting his heart."