Students like Kevin Varner, who are driven to write by what they read, are wonderfully teachable, but they are the exception rather than the rule, in my experience. Our Head Advisor, Professor Marina Leslie, reports on an all-too-frequent conversation with entering English majors who proclaim that they do not want to study literature, just to write. When questioned as to what they will write about, these students proclaim, as though Wordsworth or Whitman had never lived, written, or read about how to do so, "myself!" Willful ignorance comes to the service of essentialism yet again.

The undergraduate English curriculum should not only permit students to study writing--the curriculum should encourage it. But students should learn from their writing professors no less than from their literature and criticism professors that the words that they choose for each poem, story, play, or essay are contained in and constrained by the word-hoard, the broad canon, and the cultural legacy. There is, as Derrida states, nothing extra-textual. Signification presupposes the existence of a system.

Before I came to this position, I was committed to the notion while a cunning undergraduate that I would be the first to write a poem about a grammarian. I got to graduate school, read Browning, and learned the object lesson that has stayed with me to this day, and which I have attempted to share above.

-- Stuart Peterfreund, Professor of English and Chair, Graduate Studies Committee, Northeastern University (posted 3/14, 4:45 p.m., U.S. Eastern time)

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