Proper Education is a bulwark against totalitarianism and the stupefying effects of lowest denominator titillation. When Eng Lit coincided with properly educating our children, Eng Lit was one of...
English was a bulwark against those twin threats to human intellectual freedom most feared by the establishment intellectuals of the Fifties: the totalitarian ideologies of the Eastern Bloc and the stupefying and ominously expanding empire of mass culture.
Proper Education is a bulwark against totalitarianism and the stupefying effects of lowest denominator titillation. When Eng Lit coincided with properly educating our children, Eng Lit was one of the more excellent vehicles with which to deliver these values. I would imagine the Greek classics and the Chinese classics and many other human cultural treasures once achieved the same goals. When they become pipeline for getting good grades --> prestige --> cushy living that aligns one with the oligarchy whose lives are pampered by titilations, they are no longer useful.
To that end, holding onto the illusion that studying Eng Lit will get Proper Education back is as silly as saying if I stuff pillows under my shirt I get to be pregnant again.
But. Aim for Proper Education, free it from training workers and babysitting, and we will again see the high notes of Literature resonate within the hearts of people across all cultures. Even if they're presented in fragments as a hologram Miku concert or trading card game flavour text.
English, as Stefan Collini observes in his wry and compendious new history of the discipline, Literature and Learning, tends to inspire an extravagant attachment rarely associated with, for example, geography or chemistry. Half the labour of writing a history of English must lie in gathering encomia to the subject by its besotted disciples. To the patrician epicures and monied amateurs who ushered the subject into universities at the beginning of the 20th century (men who fondled poems like antique clocks and ranked novelists like vintages of claret), the study of literature was “a glory of the universe” or “the spring which unlocks the hidden life”. For the evangelists of the critic FR Leavis and charismatic secondary school teachers of the Sixties it was a moral crusade that pitted humanity against the spirit-killing incursions of machine civilisation: English had “life-enhancing powers”, and its study was essential if a modern person hoped to retain “any capacity for a humane existence”. Collini winces fastidiously at some of these “soaring affirmations”. And indeed, such confident panegyrics read strangely in an age when the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking. Today, English is reduced to doing its pathetic, blundering best to ape the sciences, grinding scholars through the Research Excellence Framework and promising students “transferable skills”, that mad but unkillable doctrine beloved of prospectus writers which holds that studying ecocritical perspectives on early Shelley is useful preparation for making PowerPoints at PWC.
But for all the Gradgrindian propaganda embattled modern departments are obliged to turn out, it remains the case that it is only because people have felt extravagantly about books that English is taught at universities at all. The subject remains an academic anomaly, a scholarly discipline premised on the acquisition not of knowledge but of aesthetic experience; on the unlikely marriage of (in Collini’s happy phrase) “beauty and the footnote”. Students of English do not expect to emerge from their degrees able to speak a foreign language (save perhaps a smattering of Anglo-Saxon) or code or say anything useful about the differences between arthropods and crustaceans. According to the purest conception of the subject, Collini points out, “the ur-exam question should be something like ‘Isn’t this beautiful?’”. Though surely, “the way to get high marks would not simply be to answer, ‘Yes, it is.’”
the students who streamed through the redbrick portals and concrete geometries of, respectively, Manchester and York in the Sixties for lectures on “the English Augustans” were no doubt responding to the high, clear call of art but also to the shriller trumpetings of social status. Academic critics were celebrities and, for a while, the culture bowed to them. “It is no exaggeration to say,” writes one historian quoted by Collini, “that in the late Forties and early Fifties, for the hippest of the young (even among those who were beginning to be beat) the best thing in the world to be was TS Eliot or Edmund Wilson. Literary criticism was the philosophers’ stone.” In the US in the Fifties it was possible to watch “a regular TV programme… featuring Lionel Trilling, Jacques Barzun, and WH Auden”.
Proper Education is a bulwark against totalitarianism and the stupefying effects of lowest denominator titillation. When Eng Lit coincided with properly educating our children, Eng Lit was one of the more excellent vehicles with which to deliver these values. I would imagine the Greek classics and the Chinese classics and many other human cultural treasures once achieved the same goals. When they become pipeline for getting good grades --> prestige --> cushy living that aligns one with the oligarchy whose lives are pampered by titilations, they are no longer useful.
To that end, holding onto the illusion that studying Eng Lit will get Proper Education back is as silly as saying if I stuff pillows under my shirt I get to be pregnant again.
But. Aim for Proper Education, free it from training workers and babysitting, and we will again see the high notes of Literature resonate within the hearts of people across all cultures. Even if they're presented in fragments as a hologram Miku concert or trading card game flavour text.
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