I'm sympathetic, but I think the university system itself might be to blame. Once everybody needed a degree, and English was the easiest to get, we ended up with more Shakespeare scholars than there are words in the first folio, all required to publish or perish. It was perfectly impossible that they could all find rational original aven…
I'm sympathetic, but I think the university system itself might be to blame. Once everybody needed a degree, and English was the easiest to get, we ended up with more Shakespeare scholars than there are words in the first folio, all required to publish or perish. It was perfectly impossible that they could all find rational original avenues of research, so once those were exhausted, they had to turn to the irrational avenues, and when they were exhausted, they had to find other people to apply the same irrational avenues of research too.
And then, in search of new fields to conquer, they decided that they should teach writing rather than reading and thus created the MFA. Literature, to that point, had been created by hacks and sea captains and journalists and old soldiers and glove-makers' sons. Now it was supposed to be made by a hoard of MFA graduates with no life experience of anything but the university.
This contributed to a hollowing out of literature, where what I call "serious popular fiction" disappeared and the market divided into genre fiction on one hand and an effete "literary" fiction on the other.
As Joseph Bottom has pointed out so cogently in The Decline of the Novel, it was about this time that literature ceased to matter as a way for society to explain itself. Not since Bonfire of the Vanities, he claims, has there been a novel that you would be ashamed to show up for a cocktail party not having read.
And once literature ceased to matter, the universities became a vacuum that sucked in all the leftist philistines because there was no longer any cause to resist their influx. It was not as if any of those degrees actually mattered to anyone; they were merely a trial valued for the diligence and application they demonstrated. And now they don't demonstrate diligence or application anymore, they are ceasing to matter at all.
In short, the universities studied literature to death. I doubt it can be trusted to revive it. Sometimes the only way to save the patient is to rescue them from the hands of the surgeon.
I really like this comment. And your last paragraph:
"In short, the universities studied literature to death. I doubt it can be trusted to revive it. Sometimes the only way to save the patient is to rescue them from the hands of the surgeon."
may very well be true.
It occurs to me that, back in the day, they didn't study English literature in university. They studied classics. And for that, you needed to learn Greek and Latin. That in and of itself would keep you busy for quite some time. Just learning enough Greek and Latin to be able to sit down with some Plato or Virgil and enjoy the content in the original would surely merit a degree! (Even if you had nothing "original" to say about Plato/Virgil.) But English literature (or more to the point: literature in the students' native language) has a low barrier to entry, which raises the question of what exactly students should be learning in such a degree program. Wouldn't informal or semi-formal book clubs do the job just fine? I suppose a degree program could just be "read many more books than normal people." And the exams are what, just content knowledge ("who did what to whom in name-your-book"), with a bit about historical background and stylistics? As soon as you require people to say something "original" about the books that they read, you run into the exact problem that you described: too many people are doing it, everything productive has already been said, so now what?
ETA: Though y'know, requiring English majors to properly learn Anglo-Saxon might cut down on the number of majors and fix some of the problems. But no, it wouldn't fix the PhD overproduction issue, at least not if those PhD's are supposed to survive in publish-or-perish world, meaning they publish nonsense just to avoid perishing.
My father was a professor of English, and he said that he spent most of his time teaching the history behind the literature his students were studying because otherwise, they would not understand half the references nor any of the moral and social assumptions of the characters. In other words, he taught context.
And, of course, that's what the classics teachers were doing, too, with the additional matter of language as part of the context.
And yes, annotated editions and Google searches can do most of that context-setting for those who need it. And Substack can provide the venue for those kinds of discussions that in my day we called Caffeteria 101.
The problem with English as a degree program, though, is what do you examine people on? You teach them to read better. That fine. The classics provide the fullness of artistic experience to those with the context to receive them. But how do you measure and grade that?
That's when you decide they can't just read and enjoy. They have to analyse. That's when you have them start to take the thing to pieces and look for evidence that the author was a closet homosexual or sleeping with his sister. And all of that is fatally destructive of the kind of complete artistic experience you were supposed to foster. What should have been a fine romance becomes instead an autopsey. Students are not taught to love but to dissect. No wonder most of them never pick up another novel after college.
Thank you for your comment. I wonder if it might make sense to teach literature as a part of a history major (rather than as a major in its own right). Because it's precisely as your father said: literature teaching becomes most informative when it discusses the historical context. Otherwise, you might as well just read the book for enjoyment and leave it at that.
Yes, I know, there's also stylistics and sometimes philosophy. But how much is there really when it comes to stylistics? As for philosophy, well, you could also teach some literary fiction in a philosophy program.
Wish I could like this comment repeatedly! Everything you said rings very true. I’ve personally been seriously contemplating going back to school for an MA in literature purely for the pleasure of studying the Great Books, but perhaps taking classes from places like House of Humane Letters would be a better use of my time.
I'm sympathetic, but I think the university system itself might be to blame. Once everybody needed a degree, and English was the easiest to get, we ended up with more Shakespeare scholars than there are words in the first folio, all required to publish or perish. It was perfectly impossible that they could all find rational original avenues of research, so once those were exhausted, they had to turn to the irrational avenues, and when they were exhausted, they had to find other people to apply the same irrational avenues of research too.
And then, in search of new fields to conquer, they decided that they should teach writing rather than reading and thus created the MFA. Literature, to that point, had been created by hacks and sea captains and journalists and old soldiers and glove-makers' sons. Now it was supposed to be made by a hoard of MFA graduates with no life experience of anything but the university.
This contributed to a hollowing out of literature, where what I call "serious popular fiction" disappeared and the market divided into genre fiction on one hand and an effete "literary" fiction on the other.
As Joseph Bottom has pointed out so cogently in The Decline of the Novel, it was about this time that literature ceased to matter as a way for society to explain itself. Not since Bonfire of the Vanities, he claims, has there been a novel that you would be ashamed to show up for a cocktail party not having read.
And once literature ceased to matter, the universities became a vacuum that sucked in all the leftist philistines because there was no longer any cause to resist their influx. It was not as if any of those degrees actually mattered to anyone; they were merely a trial valued for the diligence and application they demonstrated. And now they don't demonstrate diligence or application anymore, they are ceasing to matter at all.
In short, the universities studied literature to death. I doubt it can be trusted to revive it. Sometimes the only way to save the patient is to rescue them from the hands of the surgeon.
I really like this comment. And your last paragraph:
"In short, the universities studied literature to death. I doubt it can be trusted to revive it. Sometimes the only way to save the patient is to rescue them from the hands of the surgeon."
may very well be true.
It occurs to me that, back in the day, they didn't study English literature in university. They studied classics. And for that, you needed to learn Greek and Latin. That in and of itself would keep you busy for quite some time. Just learning enough Greek and Latin to be able to sit down with some Plato or Virgil and enjoy the content in the original would surely merit a degree! (Even if you had nothing "original" to say about Plato/Virgil.) But English literature (or more to the point: literature in the students' native language) has a low barrier to entry, which raises the question of what exactly students should be learning in such a degree program. Wouldn't informal or semi-formal book clubs do the job just fine? I suppose a degree program could just be "read many more books than normal people." And the exams are what, just content knowledge ("who did what to whom in name-your-book"), with a bit about historical background and stylistics? As soon as you require people to say something "original" about the books that they read, you run into the exact problem that you described: too many people are doing it, everything productive has already been said, so now what?
ETA: Though y'know, requiring English majors to properly learn Anglo-Saxon might cut down on the number of majors and fix some of the problems. But no, it wouldn't fix the PhD overproduction issue, at least not if those PhD's are supposed to survive in publish-or-perish world, meaning they publish nonsense just to avoid perishing.
My father was a professor of English, and he said that he spent most of his time teaching the history behind the literature his students were studying because otherwise, they would not understand half the references nor any of the moral and social assumptions of the characters. In other words, he taught context.
And, of course, that's what the classics teachers were doing, too, with the additional matter of language as part of the context.
And yes, annotated editions and Google searches can do most of that context-setting for those who need it. And Substack can provide the venue for those kinds of discussions that in my day we called Caffeteria 101.
The problem with English as a degree program, though, is what do you examine people on? You teach them to read better. That fine. The classics provide the fullness of artistic experience to those with the context to receive them. But how do you measure and grade that?
That's when you decide they can't just read and enjoy. They have to analyse. That's when you have them start to take the thing to pieces and look for evidence that the author was a closet homosexual or sleeping with his sister. And all of that is fatally destructive of the kind of complete artistic experience you were supposed to foster. What should have been a fine romance becomes instead an autopsey. Students are not taught to love but to dissect. No wonder most of them never pick up another novel after college.
Thank you for your comment. I wonder if it might make sense to teach literature as a part of a history major (rather than as a major in its own right). Because it's precisely as your father said: literature teaching becomes most informative when it discusses the historical context. Otherwise, you might as well just read the book for enjoyment and leave it at that.
Yes, I know, there's also stylistics and sometimes philosophy. But how much is there really when it comes to stylistics? As for philosophy, well, you could also teach some literary fiction in a philosophy program.
Wish I could like this comment repeatedly! Everything you said rings very true. I’ve personally been seriously contemplating going back to school for an MA in literature purely for the pleasure of studying the Great Books, but perhaps taking classes from places like House of Humane Letters would be a better use of my time.