Wednesday, 08 July 2009

• Currently Zidane: A 21st Century Portrait By Mogwai see related

  English Major

   

  from Harvard University's English Department page on the English Concentration program:

   

  To attack the insoluble and to represent the invisible; to track the mind of a suicide before the act; to speculate on heaven; to mimic the construction of a modern city; to ask why the beautiful is inveterately destroyed; to speculate how we might feel about marriage –this is what literature attempts. To create a plausible taxonomy of the bewildering genera and species of ancient and modern literature – this is what poetics does. To ask why a work seems to "click," why a line is memorable, why a character looms large in literary history – this is to inquire into the intrinsic workings of a work of literature – a work as complex in its function as the human genome. To ask how and why writers of different times and places have represented men and women (or the rich and the poor, or the colonizer and the colonized) as they have done is the question that compels cultural studies – a form of history and anthropology combined. To argue that Melville's poems are not "failures," that Wallace Stevens is not solely a cerebral poet, that Keats's odes are not merely freestanding poems, but comprise a sequence – this is to put forward literary theses. To defend a work as intelligible that has been called a hoax, to defend a work as beautiful that has been called obscene, to defend a work as interesting that has been called tedious – this is to make literary argument. To unravel the allegory written by a writer under political censure, to explain the connection between censorship and literary creation, to inquire into the history of literary suppression – this is to understand the connection between history and literature. "The most marvelous bishops of heaven," said Stevens, "have been those that made it seem like heaven." How does the literary artist make the work seem like reality? Or redefine reality?

   

   

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