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The essay is a reflection on value and validity in criticism in light of Matthew Arnold's essay on the function of criticism, plus an anecdote about a graduate student who bothered to complete her dissertation after nearly half a century, finding it worthwhile even then. It asks how we might keep these old projects of ours meaningful in unfolding circumstances and what patience can do; also, how critical discrimination might address the needs of the present time by suggesting a different way of proceeding, a sort of procedural change, with recourse to the criticism of Alain Locke, John Dewey, and F. R. Leavis. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This paper aims at identifying the challenges of World Wide Web to the process of teaching and learning English Literature for undergraduate students majoring in English Literature in Indonesia and promoting the solutions of how to coup it. While providing many advantages the World Wide Web serves some challenges in the process of teaching and learning English Literature, inviting serious thoughts of how deal with it and how to avoid the possibly existing negative impacts. The data were taken from her experience as a student of English Literature before the invention of World Wide Web and her experience as the lecturer after the invention. This study shows there are some challenges in the process of teaching and learning English Literature in the digitalization era concerning with such as, the provision of materials, the choice of theory, the practice of plagiarism and the maintenance of interpersonal relationship . [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This idea lies at the basis of the present pilot study, which aims at discovering the impact of students' evaluation of their literature classes on the classroom environment as, in our opinion, such assessment may lead to the improvement of the teaching strategies used during literature courses and seminars. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

An extensive body of scholarship has documented the way disciplinary texts and activities are produced and mediated through their relationship to a wide array of extradisciplinary discourses. This article seeks to complement and extend that line of work by drawing upon Witte's (1992) notion of intertext to address the way disciplinary activities repurpose, or reuse and transform, extradisciplinary practices. Based on text collection and practice-oriented retrospective accounts of one writer's processes for a number of textual activities, the article argues that the writer's developing disciplinary writing process as a graduate student in English literature is mediated by practices she repurposed from previous engagements with keeping a prayer journal as a member of a church youth group and generating visual designs for an undergraduate graphic arts class. Ultimately, the article argues for increased theoretical, methodological, and pedagogical attention to the discursive practices persons recruit and reinvigorate across multiple engagements with reading, writing, making, and doing. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article reports that concurrent with the rise of women's studies and cultural studies, children's literature has been making its way back to the halls of academic respectability in the last thirty-five years. Eleven universities in the U.S. and abroad now offer both the MA and the PhD in English with concentrations in children's literature. In the last decade, the Harry Potter phenomenon has spurred an even greater interest in literature for children.

The article presents a response to the views of David Laurence on the reported evidences in the decline of English department in the U.S. colleges and universities. The evidences of the claim were based on several reviews of the English departments, wherein twenty categories emerged for the 1980, 1985, and 1995 time periods. It was only after considerable speculation it was concluded that English departments are both less visible and less identifiable as an institutional unit. According to the author, it can be very difficult to compile an accurate count of any number of what one is interested in--the number of English departments and the number of students who graduate from high school. The author refers to the book "Writing Assessment: An Autobiography of English Studies" by Tina Good, which focuses on a single system, the SUNY system, that has the benefit of including both two-and four-year schools. Good's analysis shows that literature has been collapsed into the humanities more generally as a general education requirement.

Articulates the visions of a professor tasked with developing graduate programs in English literature at the State University of New York in Albany, New York. Aim of producing more generalists rather than specialists; Requirement to take courses across broad categories; Involvement in departmental politics.

Describes the author's experiences in teaching the works of English dramatist William Shakespeare to two classes of postgraduates during the spring term of 1987 at Hunan Normal University in Changsha, China. Students' deficiencies in the skills of analysis required for the advanced study of literature; Gaps in literary training; Absence of training in theater; Finding that the students' limited knowledge of Western culture posed fewer problems than might have been expected.

The author presents her opinion on a position paper that proposed the need to define graduate education in interior design in the U.S. The author cites the failure of the position paper to provide an understanding of the value and the nature of the post-professional master's degree and the doctorate education as a valued terminal degree. The author also encourages Interior Design Educators Council Inc. to become more futuristic and explore various cyber-technology available or maybe develop a Doctorate in Interior Design, instead of standardizing and legitimizing a master's degree.

The article presents information on the decline in the number of English departments in the U.S. colleges and universities. Findings report that there has been a decline in the number of departments called English of about 30%. According to the U.S. Department of Education degree completion data files, the number of English departments is about the same today as it was twenty years ago. It presents data which offers that in 1986 a total of 1,117 separate institutions reported awarding at least one baccalaureate degree in the general English major. But these government data about degree completions offer only an indirect indicator of the number of English departments because the figures reflect the fields of study in which graduates receive their bachelor's degrees and not the departments in which graduates study. Kathleen Blake Yancey's "Made Not Only in Words," delivered as the Chair's Address at the CCCC Convention in March 2004 and published in the December 2004 College Composition & Communication presents no evidence and cites no source to document this assertion.

This article presents the author's recommendation to students from those institutions in the U.S. which consider graduate work in English literature. The author depicts the questionnaire distributed to every University of Pittsburgh senior who applied to graduate programs in English and the document "Advice to Students Considering Graduate Work in English." It mentions that the students can make the best decision about graduate work by consulting several faculties whom they trust.