English

Concentration in English is reputed to be the easy way to spend four years at Harvard. Anyone who enters the field with only this fact in mind will be sorely disappointed.

Non-honors students must take six full courses or 12 half courses approved by the Department, two of which may be in related subjects. They must also take General Examinations in their senior year without the aid of tutorial reading.

Honors candidates must make and stay on at least third dean's list in order to get tutorial instruction. They must have had three years of high school Latin, two years of high school Greek, or acquire a grade of B or over in any term of Latin 1-2 here. Eight full, or sixteen half, courses must be included in their plan of study, of which three only may be in related fields.

But Then: English 1

All English concentrators are required to tackle the unavoidable and discouraging English 1. Though the course contains a lot of good reading, the fact that you can devote only about ten minutes flat to each author squelches the pleasures in reading. Lectures fill in good background material, section meetings emphasize appreciation, and the instructors in the course do all they can to take the pain out of the gigantic assignments.

Courses in Milton, Chancer, or Shakespeare (English 131, 115, and 123 respectively) are always good to take in most cases they are necessary to fulfill the Department's demands for three half courses in pre eighteenth century literature. The Department offers excellent writing courses, but students can only count two of these toward concentration.

Levin's course on Proust, Joyce, and Mann (Comparative Literature 161) and Guerard's course on Hardy, Conrad, and Gide (Comparative Literature 162) are all-time favorites. Since they are given only every other year, don't pass them by.

There are two real prerequisites for majoring in English which the Department doesn't mention. 1. It's always nice for the purposes of the field if you like to read, because you're going to spend three years doing it. 2. If you can't correlate material, and just plow through the printed pages without keeping the development and ideas of English literature in mind, you'll leave Harvard just as uninformed as you were when you came.