[lg policy] More ‘Who Needs French’ at ‘The New Republic’

Wed Dec 29 15:49:39 UTC 2010

More ‘Who Needs French’ at ‘The New Republic’

December 28, 2010, 7:25 am

By Mark Bauerlein

A few weeks ago in The New Republic, linguist John McWhorter offered
his take on foreign languages and recent developments in higher
education. His argument is that French, German, and Italian are just
fine as minor academic subjects, but to “bemoan” their loss of turf at
SUNY-Albany and elsewhere is to hold on to “fraying traditions.”

On the affirmative side, he says that we live in a new global
condition that sets Chinese and Arabic well above French, German, and
Italian (not Spanish), so “A university of limited resources that has
majors only in Chinese and Arabic should be a perfectly normal
proposition.”

That is an arguable proposition, and curriculum deciders in the future
will hash it out on the grounds of money, student interest, and
faculty pressure. McWhorter doesn’t provide much useful material for
anyone involved in those efforts here except to say, precisely, that
other languages are more important in the new global dispensation.

Mostly, what he provides instead is a series of sniffy and sarcastic
assertions about French and German that amount not to an argument, but
to an attitude.

To begin his essay, he cites those who have criticized budget and
personnel cuts to those departments: “What seems to arouse critics
most is the disappearance of French, German, and Italian
departments—what with Goethe, Balzac and Dante being pillars of a
liberal arts education and so on.”

Those most significant three words in that statement are “and so on.”
Note how they reduce that notion of “being pillars of a liberal arts
education” to a pretense.

The reduction continues with another lazy implication, this one a
comparison that strives to make a common-sense point: “I have as
deep-seated a sense as anyone that an educated person is supposed to
be able to at least fake a conversation in French. But then I also
have a deep-seated sense that the driver’s seat in a car should be on
the left side.”

Once again, an odd conjunction of the significant and the bogus,
“deep-seated” and “educated person” with “fake a conversation.’

The pairing continues once more with an assertion that once again
aligns French with bogus pretense: “That is, is knowing French really
so obviously central to engaging what we know in 2010 as the world, or
is it that French is a kind of class marker? You know: two cars, a
subscription to the Times, and mais oui, Caitlin knows some French?”

McWhorter speaks as one experienced in languages, but few persons who
have majored in French would cast their years of study so casually and
materialistically. It takes five minutes to subscribe to a newspaper,
and all those French classes by themselves won’t help you afford two
cars.

The sarcasm gets worse as the piece proceeds.  Note the rhetorical
work managed by the first word that follows: “Sure, Europe has been
the main cradle of Western thought – but let’s face it, you can be
richly immersed in that via solid English translations; Nietzsche need
not be read in the original.”

Yeah, yeah, he seems to say, “cradle of civilization,” high culture,
“Western thought,” . . . but c’mon, who needs that stuff in the
original?  How easily this dispenses with the spare beauties of
Racine’s lines, or verses such as

Qui pleure la, sinon le vent simple, a cette heure

Seule avec diaments extremes? . . . Mais qui pleure

Si proche de moi-meme au moment de pleurer?

Further on, the sarcasm drops, replaced by a multiculturalist
resentment that one used to hear all the time 20 years ago. “There’s
an awful lot of world beyond Europe; people speak some languages there
too, and in our times, a liberal arts education should focus on them.”

More of the same: “I love French and I’ve read Stendhal. But last time
I checked, some interesting things had been written in Arabic, too”

Later in the essay, McWhorter says he wants to retain Russian, but in
his reasoning he makes a historical error: “Plus, Russians, like
Italians and Japanese, tend to be generous about letting people
butcher their language. No Latin, no Virgil—yes; but is someone who
gets to The Brothers Karamazov and Chekhov in the original deprived,
compared to someone who can decode Catullus?”

In reducing Latin learning to the ability to “decode Catullus,” and
shrugging over the loss of Virgil, McWhorter mistakes something about
the United States.  Virgil was, in fact, a crucial figure in the minds
of the Founders. So was Rome. Check out the one-dollar bill.

Finally, McWhorter closes his piece with a combination of sarcasm and
resentment, one that strives, again, to reduce traditional
liberal-arts learning to a wispy fussiness: “Our sense of which
foreign languages are key to a serious education cannot be founded on
what made sense for characters in Henry James novels.”

Here is what Scott Sprenger, a professor of French studies and
associate dean of the humanities at Brigham Young University, wrote to
me about McWhorter’s approach:

“The idea here is clear: Europe is no longer important, and our
attachment to European languages has outlasted its utility. Linguistic
‘importance’ should now be based on strategic importance and economic
scale.

“However, even if we concede this last point, McWhorter’s Martian
would be mistaken: the European Union is by far the United States’
largest trading partner, and both Germany and France figure in the top
10. Canada, our closest neighbor and second largest trading partner,
is also francophone. And in terms of strategic importance, Europe,
Canada and the United States are all members of NATO, struggling to
share a historical destiny. It’s unclear, given these facts, why we
should so quickly turn our backs on European language and culture.
Can’t we admit that there’s more at stake here than being able to
‘fake a conversation’?”

And let’s not downplay the labor and devotion required for the study
of European languages and literatures. For my part, the later novels
of Henry James are a toil to read—and The Wings of the Dove is worth
every second of it.

http://chronicle.com/blogs/brainstorm/more-who-needs-french-at-the-new-republic/30434?sid=pm&utm_source=pm&utm_medium=en

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 Harold F. Schiffman

Professor Emeritus of
 Dravidian Linguistics and Culture
Dept. of South Asia Studies
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, PA 19104-6305

Phone:  (215) 898-7475
Fax:  (215) 573-2138

Email:  haroldfs at gmail.com
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~haroldfs/

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