Dennis Jerz provides info from the Harvard Crimson on changes to Harvard English.
The new program will be built around affinity groups: Arrivals, Diffusions, Poets, Shakespeares. The curriculum appears to provide lots of flexibility. But I wonder if this reflects some amount of fatigue.
I hope some of the Harvard faculty will describe their thought process in an editorial somewhere. What were the compromises that had to be reached in order to get past certain sticking points? What were some minority views or rejected early proposals?
I’d love to read such materials myself, Dennis. I think it’s a good thing to promote flexible course work in literary studies. But what are the goals for students and the future of the discipline, given this shift? What about the digital?
I wonder whether the argument is that digital scholarship is now so integral to the discipline that there’s no need to ghettoize it in a separate section — but I suppose we’ll have to wait and see whether Harvard actually enacts the proposal.