The progression from language instruction or composition to the higher discipline of literature is no longer the only or even preferred path everywhere. For example, MIT stresses that its literature program goes beyond the traditional:

Language rustles. its particularity can be heard and even described. When Roland Barthes first suggested this metaphor for the ways in which language is detectable per se, he offered a structuralist rejection of the mimetic and hermeneutic models of literature. Nearly forty years later, his insistence on the detectability of language suggests a defense of literary study that is profoundly humanistic. Barthes's literature, with its special discursive density, answers the claim that literature programs, which perhaps were never seen as fully practical, have betrayed the public trust through aloof hermeticism since the advent of poststructuralism in the 1970s. The case for majoring in literature either has too fine a historical pedigree or goes too much against the grain of the current institutional and political emphasis on utility and accountability in education. Thus, the imperial Roman rhetorician Plutarch felt the need to write a defense of literary education in “How a Young Man Should Hear Lectures on Poetry.” Indeed, despite the successful closing of the commercial theaters in 1642 by the Puritan London City Council, new plays continued to be encouraged, written, and performed in the universities of Oxford and Cambridge without interruption. Even Glavrepertkom, instead of silencing Soviet literature, policed it and honed it into a distinctively effective system of ideological dissemination, albeit with the censorship of such luminaries as Vsevolod Meyerhold and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn. My essay, with its claim that our students should continue to concentrate in literature, has thus already been written and enacted, even under strict surveillance of extremist governments. In the face of so many arguments for applied literary studies as one of “the basics,” for the integration of the literary into the pedagogical, there is in the academy a sense that a literary education is at best supplemental. It is a pleasing option to consider, budgets permitting, after writing and analytic reasoning have been addressed. A case for majoring in literature can and must be made, and it can avoid the cultural globalism of E. D. Hirsch's arguments for an exclusionary “cultural literacy.” It can also avoid taking refuge in Harold Bloom's justifications for a canon, which are centered on an Emersonian view of Shakespeare's necessity, lest “we cease to think” (41).

In the aftermath of what has come to be known as Nine One One, literary texts became the last resort of consolation in a vast desert of mindless media commentary and aggressive but ultimately futile political rhetoric. The Philadelphia Inquirer promptly published email messages exchanged by four University of Pennsylvania students trying to grapple with the tragic enormity of the historical moment. For these students “[t]he old world died on Tuesday [11 Sept. 2001],” and they had to learn to live in a new reality. To make sense of this not-so-brave new world, they sought for answers in “books and literature” (“Facing”). Mass-circulated email carried messages of consolation in literary format across the cyber globe. W. H. Auden's “September 1, 1939” was reprinted in all the major newspapers and forwarded to countless e-mail accounts. The conservative columnist George F. Will quoted liberally from the closing lines of Albert Camus's The Plague. “Today's president, his rhetorical rheostat turned way up, vows that the current military campaign 'will rid the world of evil,'” observed Will with undisguised sarcasm. He countered the president's naiveté by citing Camus's allegory of the plague as the permanence of evil in the world. In the final paragraph of the novel, Camus's narrator, Dr. Rieux, muses that the plague bacillus never dies but lies dormant until its time comes to unleash its terror on an unsuspecting world once again. By invoking The Plague, Will wanted to remind his fellow Americans “who are mild in temperament and amnesiac in tendency” that for America “there are only two kinds of years, the war years and the interwar years.” The banality of this conclusion contrasts sharply with the profundity of Camus's final lines.

My title came to me as a way of suggesting immediately both the exciting and the troublesome potentials of collaborations between foreign language and English departments. No one can take Disney's banal lyrics at all seriously, and the tune is both insidious and annoying. So why invoke it in a serious discussion?