At the 2015 ADE-ADFL Summer Seminar East in Arlington, Virginia, John David Guillory (NYU) and Domna Stanton (CUNY Graduate Center) presented papers that consider the problem of the content of the undergraduate curriculum in literary studies. We publish the papers below. Guillory reflects on the role of the historical survey course in presenting a disciplinary knowledge base to undergraduate literature majors and offers six purposes that such courses serve. Stanton argues for interdisciplinary collaboration and double majors as better ways to serve undergraduates and enhance their employment prospects, emphasizing transferable skills over disciplinary coverage and substituting close observation and deduction for the ideal of near-native fluency.
We invite your thoughts in the comment section on these two excellent interventions in our field.
Read the papers:
John Guillory’s “Discipline and Knowledge Base”
Domna Stanton’s “Content and Its Discontents”