Cornell English Department votes to change name to "Department of Literatures In English"

One can only say “every (noun)” about a noun that can be pluralized, so you just argued for the word “literatures.”

I think the “English Department” is a dumb name, and many schools don’t even have one. Departments update their names all the time, so there is nothing especially newsworthy here. Every department I’ve ever been a part of since graduate school has a different name now then it did 20 years ago. Naming a department doesn’t usually impact the names of majors and degrees, as that is usually a separate process, and that is what even the students and graduates will talk about. Nobody asks a graduate “what department did you get your major from”, they ask “What was your major”, which still might be English, or literature, or whatever Cornell offers.

The name change is branding and marketing, probably with an audience of academic peers, graduate students, and members of the department, and they probably have good reasons for doing this for their intended audience. It certainly won’t do anything to impact the long decline of humanities degrees in comparison to STEM, or help their PhD graduates on the academic job market, but they should be able to call themselves whatever they want if they follow the university rules. All that being said, this is exactly the type of thing the right are talking about when they mock political correctness and lampoon 'SJW’s.

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Agreed! But I obviously ran with the “other side’s” argument on purpose. I actually felt bad writing it like that :smiley:

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This reminds me of The Shakespeare Requirement, Julie Schumacher’s visionary novel about mission statements. “Department of Literatures in English” sounds clunky. Perhaps all the prose masters have moved into teaching English composition.

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It’s not derogatory afaik and is a word they use but less frequently these days. I don’t know why.

What’s in a name? That which we call an English Department by any other name would smell as sweet.

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Obviously, you’re not a real estate developer.

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We’d need some more hyphens: The Department of Literatures in At-Cornell-On-the-Gorges

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Same here. In the UK, math is called maths. Mathematics ends with an “s,” but literature does not. American English classes have titles like “Comparative Literature,” “World Literature,” etc.

I’m going to put this case in my Noah Webster file, somewhere between aluminium and zed. :wink:

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a reboing?

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Ha! I just googled it. The first interesting thing that wasn’t behind a paywall or captcha

Fuck it, why not?

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There are at least a few famous authors who are famous for writing in second or third languages:

Nabokov, Kerouac, Milan Kundera, Samuel Beckett; but there are many more.

In general-- members of diasporas, members of first nation groups, members of cultures where bilingualism and trilingualism are common, persons who immigrated at a young age. And some of those authors have very much contributed to the sense that “Literatures in English” should be pluralized.

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“A literature” - the count noun - is a reified collection of literature - the mass noun. There are as many literatures as you care to reify.
The literature of child-emancipation court documents.
The literature of MCU fan-fic.
The literature of toilet bowl cleaner warning statements.
The literature of arguments about the meaning of the count-noun “literature”.

Take any set of written material, conceive of it as a thing, give it a pithy name and viola! you have a literature.

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I wasn’t making a comment on the pluralization, rather the resemblance of the agonizingly florid language to property developers et al. I’d argue for a simple Department of Literature(s).

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Department of the Most Useless Degree - or DoMUD for short.

IMHO it should be Anglish not English. They ain’t called Englophones in Canada, eh?

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