What Defines an ‘English’ Course, Anyway?
Posted by Rohan Amanda Maitzen on 11/18/09 at 08:01 AM Yesterday my department debated a motion to cross-list a course on Dante offered through the Italian Studies program*–that is, to enable students to take it as an English course, and thus, among other things, to let English majors count it towards the number of English courses they need to fulfill their degree requirements. There was a fair amount of discussion, some of it about practicalities, but some of it about principles. Nobody questioned that it was a good thing to encourage English majors to study Dante, but should their doing so be considered part of their work in ‘English’? If so, why not Boccaccio, Proust, Flaubert, or Tolstoy? It was pointed out that we already cross-list a Russian course on Nabokov. We also offer courses ourselves that feature literature in translation: World Literature, for instance, or Canadian literature (Quebec, remember?). We used to have a course on the Bible as literature. So the working defini
