Uchicago — English Department

marlowe1
Fri, 25 May 2018 02:28:57 +0000

Thanks for that help, @ThankYouforHelp . With your nudge I googled and got some further information on this swashbuckling Rachel Fulton Brown and her spat with the Vassar Assistant Prof. Over-the-topness seems to be what Brown is all about, but the Vassar Prof was to my mind saying some pretty crazy things as well, and they both got in their punches there. It doesn’t seem likely that the younger scholar was harmed by any of this - quite the contrary. Although it’s no way for academics to conduct themselves, I can’t see why the English Department should have made such a big deal of it or even taken note at all. Yet passions run high in common rooms as in board rooms.

The History Department seems to be standing by Brown, so does that mean there’s bad blood between the Departments? Brown is a full-blown Christian believer. English Lit Medievalists used to be like that. At Chicago Jeremy Taylor - before moving to Notre Dame - was cut from that cloth. Or think of C.S. Lewis wearing his hat as learned academic - author of “The Allegory of Love”. Maybe English Departments have moved with the po-mo times, whereas History is stuck still in the Middle Ages, as it were. This is from the description of the basic course in Medieval English Literature: “The course examines the relations among psychology, ethics, and social theory in 14th Century English Literature. We pay particular attention to three central preoccupations of the period: sex, the human body, and the ambition of ethical perfection.” Sounds a bit like Hamlet without the Prince - a study of the literature of the quintessential Christian Era without reference to Christianity (except as whittled down to a dubious “ambition of ethical perfection”). That’s criticality, I reckon, and should be sufficient to repel the neo-Nazis.