Uchicago — English Department

marlowe1
Thu, 24 May 2018 02:27:49 +0000

The department has always had eminent profs. There were many such in the sixties when I was a student, including my personal favorite, the legendary Norman Maclean. As well as being a flinty detector of B.S. and a poeticizing fly-fisherman he was one of the “Chicago Critics”. The chief exponent of that school, R.S. Crane, was gone by then and the energy of that approach was waning. It had been Chicago’s answer to the “New Criticism”, which stressed irony and superficial verbal felicities. The Chicago School by contrast was proudly and idiosyncratically neo-Aristotelian and stressed form, genre and structure as the principal levers of literary experience and meaning. I still think it was a solid way of analyzing literature, and it did have later practitioners, such as Wayne Booth. However, it was hardly fashionable. I seriously doubt the English Department of those days would have been ranked as tops in the nation.

I have no insight into the present pre-eminence of the Department. A bit of desultory reading of course descriptions suggests to me little continuity with the old Chicago School and not many courses of the sort I would have recognized, dealing with major authors, genres and periods, as opposed to a chaotic jumble of idiosyncratic thematic or political discourses. Ugh. However, these guys must be doing something right - in the eyes of their peers anyhow.

Bellow was never in the English Department, with which he actually had a somewhat testy relationship. He preferred his perch on the top floor of the Social Sciences Building with the big thinkers in the Committee on Social Thought. He was reported as saying about Maclean that “he has world-class cheekbones”. Correct enough, but unmistakably snarky. Perhaps that was after Maclean turned the neat trick in his old age of writing two beautiful books that Bellow could not have thought the old English Prof had in him.