A group of Stanford professors are pushing to increase the University’s focus on foreign language and culture, and leading the charge is French & Italian professor Dan Edelstein.

For students interested in combining their study of English with that of other national literatures, the department offers a major track with an emphasis in foreign language literature. This emphasis allows students to count up to four upper division foreign literature courses toward the major.

Only four of the 155 declared English majors are on this track.

In a Feb. 16 editorial entitled “Gerrymandering the Canon” on the Inside Higher Ed. Web site, Edelstein lamented the categorization of literary studies by nationality and argued that such partitioning leaves English majors with an incomplete understanding of literary history.

“Given that English is the natural home for literary-minded students who are not proficient in another language, it is depressing that they can graduate from college with the implicit assumption that literature is the prerogative of the English-speaking peoples, an habeas corpus of the arts,” Edelstein wrote in the piece.

Professor Jennifer Summit, chair of the English department, corresponded with Edelstein while he was writing the piece and seconded his view that the modern university’s emphasis on specialization often comes at the expense of a well-rounded knowledge base.

“Dan’s article raises a larger question we face any time we declare academic specialization,” Summit said. “To specialize is to focus, but that deep focus needs to come from a context of broad focus.”

The English department plans to address the question of “broad focus” with its new set of major requirements, to be instituted this spring quarter and effective 2010-11. According to Katie Dooling, the Undergraduate Student Services Coordinator for the department, the new curriculum introduces a team-taught, three-quarter core sequence that will survey literature in English from the Middle Ages to the present. In addition, the major will require three courses in methodology: poetry, narrative, and method.

Blair Laing ’10, a creative writing major, refutes the accusation that the field of English literature is one exclusively preoccupied with work written in English. Laing, who plans to attend graduate school, recently took the Graduate Record Examination (GRE) in English Literature and said it covered a variety of English and non-English works.

“For the GRE, you have to know classics, Greek mythology, translations of Middle English, as well as foreign authors like Neruda, Flaubert and Kafka,” Laing said.

She also pointed out the logistical issues that would arise from an attempt to fuse English and foreign literatures at the undergraduate level.

“The problem is, who would be qualified to teach these classes [on foreign literature]?” Laing said. “For example, it doesn’t serve the French department to teach classes on French literature in English. And English professors aren’t specialized in French literature. If English and French professors team up, [the class] becomes more of a general humanities course, like an IHUM.”

Another option for literary-minded students with worldly interests is pursuing a major in the comparative literature department, emphasizing the critical and cultural analysis of national literatures. Christina Ho ’10 considered majoring in English before ultimately deciding on Comp Lit. She said the two majors offer two different but equally valid perspectives on English literature.

“You can gain a certain type of understanding of English literature by focusing only on the literature–that is, what’s on the page,” Ho said. “You can gain an equally important aspect by looking at the effects of other cultures and literatures on English Lit. After all, English literature is the literature of a particular culture.”

Professor Nicholas Jenkins, director of undergraduate studies for the English Department, argued that the divide between English and foreign texts grows increasingly blurry in the case of American literature, as the culture of the United States is one composed of countless ethnic and cultural traditions.

“When we think of foreign literature, we think of literature outside the United States,” Jenkins said. “But there’s a lot of internal diversity within the U.S. If a Cuban immigrant to America writes a novel in Spanish, I think that’s part of American literature.”

However, even the staunchest advocates of foreign literature acknowledge the practical limitations of studying texts in multiple languages. Edelstein listed steps that he believes Stanford can take to encourage exploration of foreign literature, such as increasing the language requirement for all students to two years.

“In an ideal world, we would all speak 10 languages and have 20 years to read the canon of literature of every country,” Edelstein said. “I’m not an absolutist. I think there’s room for reading works in translation–otherwise none of us would read anything in Russian or Japanese or, for me, Spanish.”