Ha!
I remember my dad, a Latin American Colonialist who worked on Nueva Granada (Colombia basically for him), was sent a PhD candidate from the English department.
She wanted to do her PhD on Garcia Marquez but didn't know Spanish. He protested. No one at that U could understand what the big deal was... She wanted to do a Lit PhD, that's English, right?
This is only one of the many things that fuels my hatred of the
literature= English
in American academia.
I wonder if she finished?
Wonder how her jobsearch went?
Really, some places should just not have PhD programs. If they don't even understand the disciplinary divisions they shouldn't be churning out PhDs.
I must admit to mixed feelings about this. No, not trying to get a PhD in literature you cannot read but in translation--that's just dumb. But in the fact that readings in translation are not really taught in university literature class. Or maybe, what gets me is the fact that for all intents and purposes, the only real literature classes are taught in the English department. (As an undergrad, at my university one could of course find literature classes in all the language departments, including English, as well as a comparative lit program. But the English department was HUGE, and, with the exception of Spanish, all of the others were infinitesimal. And for Spanish, most students were not reading García Márquez, but trying to conjugate ser/estar.)
I think that reading García Márquez is part of being an educated person, along with (for example) Chekov, Kafka, and Camus. However, the ways that people will be exposed to these authors in university is: 1) taking classes in Spanish, Russian, German
and French. Not particularly likely for most students; 2) taking classes in comparative literature; 3) taking classes on e.g., "Spanish in translation" or 4) being exposed to this literature
en passant in history or other classes. It is conceivable that somebody can major in English and not be exposed to these writers since, of course, they are not English. Of course if one is studying literature, hopefully one has an appetite to read widely on one's own.
In this sense, part of the problem is that Americans, when they read, tend not to read foreign writers, even in translation. For example, go to Mexico City, and one can buy affordable translations of most of the Western canon. I would say that it is harder to get the same amount of Spanish translations in an American bookstore (García Márquez being one exception). I know there are various reasons for this (English being the dominant Western language and all that), but it is still striking. It is also true that the likelihood of an average American undergraduate having the language skills to read one of the above authors in his original language is also much smaller than most other countries.
(This I believe is one reason I decided not to major in English but rather history. I got to university, having already read the authors I mentioned in translation, took some English classes and was dismayed that they were all, well, English writers, got bored, and decided to study history. Now, I have assigned many of these writers in my own classes, e.g., on the twentieth century. Of course, part of this is also that in my high school, "English" class was also mainly just a literature class.)
