Elegizing English: considering English language arts alongside the rhetoric of a field on its deathbed

What is it about?

The proliferation of articles that declare English Language Arts’ death—Nathan Heller’s 2023 The New Yorker piece “The End of the English Major” as a most recent iteration—contribute to a pessimistic milieu around the discipline of English Language Arts at large. This article considers the genre of such elegies, common defenses we deploy in response, and how we might engage this cultural conversation from the field of English Language Arts education to imagine a new conversation.

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