Literature At Last

THE FACULTY'S SLUGGISHNESS in adapting its structures to new currents of thought is legendary, so it was a considerable surprise last week when Faculty members voted overwhelmingly to approve an undergraduate concentration in literature--only three millenia since the birth of this field.

Students who wanted to study literature in the past have had a circumscribed set of choices: the Comparative Literature department offered them no undergraduate concentration, so they could squeeze into the English Department's honors option II--with all of that department's labyrinthine requirements--or try to tailor their own program in some other language-oriented department or interdisciplinary committee.

The new concentration gives the student who wants to study English literature along with foreign literatures and literary theory a place where he can do so without pretending that his concentration is something different. The requirements of the program seem highly restrictive, and the number of students it will be able to accommodate regrettably small. But for the most part this new addition to the "Fields of Concentration" booklet looks like a helpful reform that will ease the paths of some students through Harvard's academic wilderness.