WELCOME TO ENGLISH AT YC

A MESSAGE FROM THE CHAIR

Welcome to the Yeshiva College English Department. Many things are new about us, including this introduction and statement of purpose. At a moment when Yeshiva University is re-imagining its institutional mandate for the 21st century, the English faculty believe it is vital that our department define itself and explain why its coursework in literary studies, and expository and creative writing is of such core importance for Yeshiva College students. English is the only department in the college through which every student must pass. Why is that?

Let’s begin with our name. Unlike other departments whose designation corresponds exactly to a clearly bounded academic discipline (e.g., sociology, chemistry, Biblical archaeology), ours is a little more complicated. We teach a set of cultural traditions along with a set of expressive skills; we teach expository writing and textual analysis; we teach rhetorical practices in various media (literature, film, performance); we teach writing by Geoffrey Chaucer and Emily Dickinson, by Junot Diaz and Zadie Smith, and by Yeshiva College students themselves. And yet, withal, we are called the “English” department—at its best, descriptive shorthand for something obviously far more variegated. But departments of “English” have their own institutional history, which also explains their name. In the mid to late 19th century, literary education was confined to Greek and Latin classical authors. Only gradually did the study of English language and literature (along with other modern languages) become an academic pursuit in its own right. By the turn of the 20th century, the German philological system of specialized linguistic training and research was behind the early bifurcation into “English Literature” (Anglo-Saxon writers through early twentieth-century British modernists), and “American Literature” (the Puritans through American modernists). But departments of English also typically divided their labor along two distinct and never harmoniously integrated tracks: the aesthetic or “belletristic” appreciation of canonical authors and texts on the one hand, and the development and honing of writing skills and self-expression on the other. This stage in the evolution of English departments roughly corresponds with the founding of Yeshiva College in 1928.