The New Yorker’s recent account of ‘The End of the English Major’ in US universities reminded me of a peculiar trend in the essays written by my first and second year undergraduates at Berkeley: a surprising number of them seem to think that a book and a novel are the same thing. Or, at least, they often use the two words interchangeably, and find it difficult to articulate the distinction between them. Reading their first essays each semester, I often encounter sentences that begin: ‘In Margaret Mead’s anthropology novel …’; ‘Edward Said, in his novel Orientalism …’; ‘In Marx’s novel, Capital …’ I’ve seen such sentences written by very good writers and by very poor ones; by students interested in the topics on offer and by those who couldn’t care less. Almost all of them are native speakers of English.
