F r o n t   L i n e Morphing Masterpieces by Austin Graham POETS REVISE, UPDATE STODGY GREEK CLASSICS" read the headline in last Thursday's Cavalier Daily, and the accompanying story described a collection of classical comedies and tragedies that were just too archaic to be interesting to modern audiences. But a dash of profanity here, a touch of slang there, and the disturbingly bloody Medea is palatable to today's reader. I would imagine that the sentiments behind this literary overhaul weigh heavy on many professors' minds. If today's college student are as bored and distant as Professor Edmundson's now-famous Harper's article portrays them, then texts written by the age-old white male masters, immortalized in library busts, are going to be received as unexciting and, dare I say, "stodgy." Reform is clearly necessary. This is, however, an extreme example of a legitimate issue. Only in the last half-century or so have women and minorities been able to suggest that college curricula are too concentrated on traditional WASP studies. Today a broader focus is needed for more reasons than simply holding student attention; diversity and fairness come immediately to mind. Academic reform really is necessary, but so is caution, for there's definitely a right and a wrong way to go about redesigning the curriculum. The U.Va. English Department has an answer to today's academic challenge, and an extremely well thought out one, at that. If asked to identify the most memorable course of their college careers, most English majors who graduated before 1998 would probably identify the epic and required survey courses of the history of British literature, ENGL 381 and ENGL 382. Also prominent in the graduates' memories would be the colossal Norton Anthology which accompanied these courses, containing of thousands of micro-thin pages which spanned Beowulf to Stoppard and beyond. British literature was the backbone of the U.Va. English program in those days, the course series that every major had in common. No more. On the surface, the changes appear minor. The new ENGL 383 has been tacked on, the credit hours of each course have dropped to three instead of four (making what was once an eight-credit sequence only one credit larger), and the new name of the series is "History of Literatures in English." The familiar Norton, though, is alive and well. What's changed is perspective. This new series doesn't merely trace England's literary tradition: where the language goes, so goes the course, suddenly freed of national boundaries. ENGL 381 will remain just as it always has, concentrating on a language which existed only in the British Isles, but as England became a colonial power, Anglophone language and literature began to spread. Therefore, ENGL 382 the first course to account for the geographic change, and is embarking on its maiden voyage this semester with two professors at the lecturing helm instead of the usual one. Professor Herbert Tucker continues the study of Britain, and Associate Professor Eric Lott begins a story that was never fully told in previous years: that of America. "It seems to us," says Tucker, "that common forces were driving cultural change in both places ... you'd be at one end of a telescope or the other, but it's still the same telescope. Quite clearly, we will be looking at phenomena as they take remarkably similar forms in each nation, having something to do with the sense of emergent nationality itself. Integration rather than contrast is going to be our way of approach." The telescope will look even farther in ENGL 383 as the English language spreads to Canada, South Africa, and India. Just as ENGL 382 was a departure from a primarily British perspective, ENGL 383 moves away from a merely transatlantic one. For the first time, the survey course has gone global, not to mention making an unprecedented foray into the twentieth century: the old ENGL 382 ended with Conrad's Heart of Darkness and Britain as a colonial power in the 1890s; ENGL 383 will finish with literature that's closer to the present. Other than a less in-depth study of a single literary tradition, Tucker sees few problems with the new courses. "Such things as Restoration comedy have dropped from view because there was nothing of the kind in America. The pressure of time is a killer in putting together a syllabus of this kind; fewer British texts are going to be read. That's too bad, but American texts for the first time! It's a good trade." It's an exciting concept, and not just on Grounds. Virginia is the first major English department nationwide to redesign so radically its existing survey course. For proof of this originality, consider the case of available texts: no anthology yet exists which combines the necessary literature in one convenient volume. For now, students will have to purchase multiple British and American anthologies, thousands of pages of text for hundreds of pages of reading. It's an inconvenience, but worth it to be ahead of the game. "To put a snazzy spin on it, we're sending out students into a twenty-first global century," concludes Tucker, commenting on what drove the revision. "We could not justify to ourselves that what English majors really needed was to know the history of British literature, that that was the one thing to mandate that they study. This is a change we've made in part because of what we think are the needs of the future. It has the very salutary benefit of shaking up an established order. It's just a good thing to do -- re-arranging the furniture."

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