Very interesting, and fair to both the intrinsic and utilitarian appeal of maths. I’m a graduate in English literature, who loved reading as a child and as an adolescent, and for whom it was not a vocational degree (I later went to law school and into practice as a lawyer). I was an undergraduate during a bitter dispute, the Great Stuctu…
Very interesting, and fair to both the intrinsic and utilitarian appeal of maths. I’m a graduate in English literature, who loved reading as a child and as an adolescent, and for whom it was not a vocational degree (I later went to law school and into practice as a lawyer). I was an undergraduate during a bitter dispute, the Great Stucturalism Row, over the career progress of a particular lecturer and more widely over culture and ideology in the Cambridge English faculty in 1981. Although long ago, and of no real personal impact on my life, I’ve quite frequently gone back to it in my mind in recent years. I think its bitterness (there were libel claims filed by at least one member of the faculty against another) and its subject-matter both prefigured some contemporary disputes that have preoccupied thinking people in recent years. And I was and still am largely on the side of the traditionalists in resisting the transformation of studying literature, or literature, life and thought in the rubric of the Cambridge English Tripos, into a form of social science heavily laden with its own difficult concepts and impenetrable language. I feel things took a wrong turn then. But perhaps this is an over-simplification or misperception from someone who has now long been an outsider to academic English literature
Very interesting, and fair to both the intrinsic and utilitarian appeal of maths. I’m a graduate in English literature, who loved reading as a child and as an adolescent, and for whom it was not a vocational degree (I later went to law school and into practice as a lawyer). I was an undergraduate during a bitter dispute, the Great Stucturalism Row, over the career progress of a particular lecturer and more widely over culture and ideology in the Cambridge English faculty in 1981. Although long ago, and of no real personal impact on my life, I’ve quite frequently gone back to it in my mind in recent years. I think its bitterness (there were libel claims filed by at least one member of the faculty against another) and its subject-matter both prefigured some contemporary disputes that have preoccupied thinking people in recent years. And I was and still am largely on the side of the traditionalists in resisting the transformation of studying literature, or literature, life and thought in the rubric of the Cambridge English Tripos, into a form of social science heavily laden with its own difficult concepts and impenetrable language. I feel things took a wrong turn then. But perhaps this is an over-simplification or misperception from someone who has now long been an outsider to academic English literature