This is all very depressing and I for one will not be going gently into that good night. It might offer you a glimmer of hope to hear that one of my GCSE students read Keats for the first time yesterday and was left with glistening eyes and an open mouth. It's not dead yet!
Yes it does seem that we're fighting a rearguard action, if not desperately trying to not get trampled in a rout ... But there are still moments, if one accepts the inevitability of doom, in which one sees the last faint glimmers. I've been teaching English literature for some years, both to highschool and university students. I think of teaching Tintern Abbey (don't you feel this?), or Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (look! He is speaking directly to you!) or My Antonía or Their Eyes Were Watching God (you see what it is to be alive, there and then...? And here and now?). I remember giving first year French university students the opening of I Capture the Castle to read, and one seemingly sullen and cool boy coming up to me afterwards and asking if, for someone who had never read a whole novel in English, this one would be a good place to start. I remember another student, after our last class before Christmas during which I read to them from Dickens's Carol and discussed it with them, and she asked me "Monsieur do you like what you do?" I asked her what she thought; she said "I think you adore it, and that is why you're our best teacher" ... We must continue to adore it, openly, visibly, communicably - for there is little so romantic and appealing as a doomed and hopeless love.
Glorious essay, James..and fabulous picture of Tiny Jim too. I’m married to a poet who has a poem on one of the exam board’s A level syllabuses. He is both disparaging of his own Literature degree and academe but also was exposed to some major poets in person. I have always envied, admired and enjoyed his range and depth of knowledge of literature and the arts. You remind him of me..he was once russet-haired too.
I'm a science graduate that wishes I'd studied English Lit, my true love, but even back in the 80s I felt a pressure to study something that would 'get me a good job'. Of course I got a very average degree and ended up a teacher, something I could have been with my first love. I am now studying Creative Writing. After all isn't that what all lovers of literature really want to do, write their own book/play/poem? And I have learnt so much about literature in doing so, in order to learn how to make a car you have to first take one apart and find out how it works.
The doggerel in Punch is worth quoting, if only because it points to a related obstacle to the study of literature (spoken in the manner of the pretentious headmaster in Bennett’s History Boys):
I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper for that year
Had several questions on King Lear,
Which Shakespeare answered very badly
Because he hadn’t read his Bradley.
Since the 1980s, studying poets and novelists and dramatists, English or otherwise, has meant studying at least a century’s worth of critical commentary telling us what to think (not how to think) about the text in question. Reading Bradley or Greenblatt or Dr. Johnson or Gary Taylor is decidedly not reading Shakespeare.
To clarify, I do think theoretical approaches to literature can be useful and illuminating. But when I was a student, reading a critical gloss required a trip to the library, flipping through a card catalog or skimming over a journal’s index, then locating the book/bound volume of the relevant journal, then reading the critical essay hoping it might help explicate the assigned text. If it didn’t, you’d have to go through that process again.
For most of us, unless required to (which was rare), this was way too much hassle. Much easier to just confront the primary novel, play, poem, painting, or short story. And while figuring out what Frost might be up to with Mending Wall or Woolf with Mrs. Dalloway or Manet or Ibsen or Caryl Churchill or Tagore did indeed hurt ones head, so to speak, we got better with practice. Which meant when we did read commentaries on the aesthetic work we loved, we were better able to adjudicate among them, and to assess the quality of their arguments.
Today, students can find multiple critical commentaries online within 10 minutes. Letting other scholars do your thinking for you is no education at all.
I'm a little deflated not to see some reference here to those 'parvenus' briefly mentioned, the social sciences. As colonising forces that have stationed themselves in the middle of literary study and hollowed out its unique enterprise and refilled it with algorithmic inquiries into literature as repositories of capital, gender ideology etc (we know the list as it's everywhere). Students now can study 'media' or sociology or whatever and find the same algorithms without having to sludge through Bleak House or the Canterbury Tales. They can access 'identity relevant' material on their smartphones and get a degree in the process. There's also another category of student who loves literature and has realised what they're looking for won't be found in university English departments.
He’s so funny. It’s plotty with lots of characters, but the satire (especially in the characterizations) is literally laugh-out-loud funny. There’s a reason this guy was so popular!
That said, I am interweaving it with a first read of Metamorphoses—some light(er) witty verse!
But I always recommend widening one’s tastes culturally. Regardless of brow position; you can find gold everywhere, though some areas (“the classics”) are better for prospecting.
Shit, I had a buddy show me how he fixes cars over one summer. I respect knowledge and expertise wherever I find it.
I try (try, mind you) to be anti-narcissistic about it, too. As in, when I don’t respond to a cultural object, I try to say to myself, “Hey—maybe it’s your fault, dude.” Just as a check on our species’ well-known failing.
But I am not going to apologize for finding high art great—let alone high. I’m a near-anarchist lefty (not of the let’s-break-windows wing!) but see no issue in labeling English lit great—as great as Larry Bird could pass, or my buddy can fix a car (he’s recognized as good; not like I’d know). Same rules for everyone.
Sure, sometimes “classics”aren’t so good; there is some subjectivity allowed! I can’t get into the film of Arsenic and Old Lace. Maybe it’s me, but it just ain’t happening. My wife loves Austen. I admire…but don’t have the same attachment. It’s free therapy to try to find out why—without guilt or anything. Art is like an ongoing MRI of your psyche; discuss it with a loved one, friend, and you enrich that relationship, too.
Does that mean art has utilitarian value? Sure, if you insist on such a thing, but it’s like asking if faith has value—and that’s coming from a lifelong atheist! Like, become a nurse or electrician—but read good books! Fiction, nonfiction. Watch good films, like Bicycle Thieves. Watch old Larry Bird games on YouTube (perhaps a more niche taste for those who wrongly elevate Beethoven above Bird). Along with the other stuff. I like watching Tom Cruise run fast across an airborne ICBM as much as the next person. But just add in some Renoir and shit, just for variety’s sake.
I hadn’t realised the extent of English Literature’s collapse at A Level. It’s astonishing to see that the number of students taking it has halved in ten years.
But allow me to be contrarian. Marriott mentions his enduring condescension for those in factual disciplines. He is outnumbered many times over by people with the same view of English Literature. English is seen as a doss subject by many. Ten hours of lectures a week, pretend to read the book, waffle your way through the exam (or, nowadays, get ChatGPT to do your coursework) and come out with a middling 2.1. That is of course not true of Oxbridge, where perhaps the brilliant students writing an essay a week do indeed learn ‘what it means to be human’. But by the time you’ve reached the third tier of universities (Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield…) that experience is increasingly rare. The Guardian dedicated an editorial recently to the closure of the English department at Canterbury Christ Church University. But is it really to be lamented that students at one of the lowest-ranked universities in the country are doing something practical instead of a degree in English?
And all of this before mentioning what has become of English literature degrees in recent decades. I don’t want to exaggerate it, and it’s certainly not as bad as in America, but English departments have been captured by an ideology that sees works of literature as canvases onto which to paint progressive politics, or as relics to be deconstructed. There’s a good argument to be made that the postmodern virus encapsulated by the likes of Foucault and Judith Butler escaped not the sociology departments but the English ones. The more we eulogise English Literature as the bastion of civilisation, the more I think we should resuscitate Classics (the language, literature, history, philosophy and art of the ancient world instead) instead, which English Literature supplanted.
All that said, I’m troubled by the decline. I wonder do British people realise just how odd it is seen abroad to study only three subjects from the age of sixteen? Under the International Baccalaureate (the French Baccalaureate is even broader) students take six subjects, three of which must be native language, foreign language and maths. They then have three optional subjects - equal to the entire choice at A Level. If the popularity of English is to be restored, the only way is to lessen the opportunity cost of taking it by enlarging the number of subjects, or by making it compulsory. Even when it was the most popular subject, only a third of students studied English at A Level. In Ireland, for example, it’s a hundred percent.
Fifty years ago, when I was studying English, a 2:1 was considered pretty good, and only the exceptional got firsts. Now, firsts seem to be commonplace, and to differentiate yourself at all, more money must be invested in securing a Masters, and there seem to be plenty of those around. To say that education has become transactional is to put it mildly; it’s an absolute shakedown. One more reason to feel very sorry for this generation of kids.
Yes, the 2.1 has become the de facto pass grade. A 2.2 is basically identical with a Third or Pass and might prevent you getting a job. Firsts still remain reasonably challenging, I think, but they seem to have shot up to around 30%.
We've come a long way since the British post-apocalyptic television film, Threads, was first broadcast in 1984. For me, the most poignant scene in this dramatic account of the consequences of a nuclear war comes when the child Jane, born after the fall, responds with apathy to her mother's death and takes the last of her possessions, leaving behind her dead father's bird book, which Ruth had resolutely kept with her. The abandoned book, its illustrated pages fluttering in the breeze, signifies the death of culture in Jane's unschooled, illiterate world.
It is sad to think that four decades later, we may have reached the same end without firing a single ICBM.
My partner and I, both Literature graduates of a certain age, can sometimes despair and then hope that reading and writing will endure. I am a freelance editor/writer in the gig economy and there are less jobs advertised for work on text these days than on video and social media content. I have no intuitive love of either forum. Words and me belong. I can only pray that a subculture of readers and writers will live on. Thanks for your wonderful post James :)
Dare I say, that should be "fewer jobs" not "less jobs"? To be more constructive, I don't think that you need to pray for a subculture of readers and writers truly appreciative of literature to live on, that is surely bound to be the case even if the minority in question is tiny.
Thanks Michael! My grammar is not so great, I appreciate the correction. I hope we are not so diminished as to become a tiny minority. That would be so sad. I wonder what evolutionary pathway humans are on. Words are symbols that mean more than I can describe. To lose the ability to communicate via long-form word arrangements would be a backward step on our path.
“George Eliot was no match for the iPhone.” I know what you mean but will offer this small counterpoint: I have this week just finished reading Middlemarch, which I downloaded onto my iPhone thanks to the Gutenberg Project.
Yes, Gutenberg Project is fantastic. I suggested a book they might like to digitise and within 48 hours they'd done it! Sent me a really nice email too. Big Tech gets a lot of kicking but Google Books and whoever else is putting all these old books online for free is doing a public service to us cash-strapped researchers.
I believe that we are at an extreme swing to the dull and numbing screen culture that already is starting to backlash. I myself never was into poetry. Now in my late 40s I realized that the issue was mainly that I did not understand its value i e. create emotions and inspire reflection. I was simply not taught in school why poetry matters and how I can make it worth my time. Only learning what a jambus is and ihow to identify oxymorons and metaphors did not do the trick. But being a very fact oriented and technical person I am starting to find out how to tickle my emotions by music and literature. This was in part driven by the emptiness I felt after 5 minutes of doom scrolling on Insta. I strongly believe I am not the only one. How many else will jump on the backlash train I do not know but I do believe literature and non AI music as well will always stay alive weather in a nieche or in the mainstream or somewhere in between we will see.
I love your work & very much look forward to your weekly column & recommendations.
I’m also very pleased you survived your school days as I know what would have happened to me had I been discovered to have had a love of poetry during mine…🫣💥😀
Good piece, glad to see it here as well. I think the related decline of English Language plays a bigger part in this story, which after all brings a different kind of rigour and intellectual toolkit to bear for students of English. It also looks at language in its great, diverse totality. I’m sad to say a lot of English departments themselves have been the first ones to ditch this side of their subject when given an opportunity.
This is all very depressing and I for one will not be going gently into that good night. It might offer you a glimmer of hope to hear that one of my GCSE students read Keats for the first time yesterday and was left with glistening eyes and an open mouth. It's not dead yet!
I've also heard that there's been a resurgence of reading ever since covid. We're not out of this fight yet.
Yes it does seem that we're fighting a rearguard action, if not desperately trying to not get trampled in a rout ... But there are still moments, if one accepts the inevitability of doom, in which one sees the last faint glimmers. I've been teaching English literature for some years, both to highschool and university students. I think of teaching Tintern Abbey (don't you feel this?), or Crossing Brooklyn Ferry (look! He is speaking directly to you!) or My Antonía or Their Eyes Were Watching God (you see what it is to be alive, there and then...? And here and now?). I remember giving first year French university students the opening of I Capture the Castle to read, and one seemingly sullen and cool boy coming up to me afterwards and asking if, for someone who had never read a whole novel in English, this one would be a good place to start. I remember another student, after our last class before Christmas during which I read to them from Dickens's Carol and discussed it with them, and she asked me "Monsieur do you like what you do?" I asked her what she thought; she said "I think you adore it, and that is why you're our best teacher" ... We must continue to adore it, openly, visibly, communicably - for there is little so romantic and appealing as a doomed and hopeless love.
I left school at fifteen and a half and the Penguin classics and modern classics served as my university.
Glorious essay, James..and fabulous picture of Tiny Jim too. I’m married to a poet who has a poem on one of the exam board’s A level syllabuses. He is both disparaging of his own Literature degree and academe but also was exposed to some major poets in person. I have always envied, admired and enjoyed his range and depth of knowledge of literature and the arts. You remind him of me..he was once russet-haired too.
I'm a science graduate that wishes I'd studied English Lit, my true love, but even back in the 80s I felt a pressure to study something that would 'get me a good job'. Of course I got a very average degree and ended up a teacher, something I could have been with my first love. I am now studying Creative Writing. After all isn't that what all lovers of literature really want to do, write their own book/play/poem? And I have learnt so much about literature in doing so, in order to learn how to make a car you have to first take one apart and find out how it works.
The doggerel in Punch is worth quoting, if only because it points to a related obstacle to the study of literature (spoken in the manner of the pretentious headmaster in Bennett’s History Boys):
I dreamt last night that Shakespeare’s Ghost
Sat for a civil service post.
The English paper for that year
Had several questions on King Lear,
Which Shakespeare answered very badly
Because he hadn’t read his Bradley.
Since the 1980s, studying poets and novelists and dramatists, English or otherwise, has meant studying at least a century’s worth of critical commentary telling us what to think (not how to think) about the text in question. Reading Bradley or Greenblatt or Dr. Johnson or Gary Taylor is decidedly not reading Shakespeare.
With apologies to Andrew Marvell,
“The critic’s world’s a lively place,
But none do Shakespeare there embrace.”
To clarify, I do think theoretical approaches to literature can be useful and illuminating. But when I was a student, reading a critical gloss required a trip to the library, flipping through a card catalog or skimming over a journal’s index, then locating the book/bound volume of the relevant journal, then reading the critical essay hoping it might help explicate the assigned text. If it didn’t, you’d have to go through that process again.
For most of us, unless required to (which was rare), this was way too much hassle. Much easier to just confront the primary novel, play, poem, painting, or short story. And while figuring out what Frost might be up to with Mending Wall or Woolf with Mrs. Dalloway or Manet or Ibsen or Caryl Churchill or Tagore did indeed hurt ones head, so to speak, we got better with practice. Which meant when we did read commentaries on the aesthetic work we loved, we were better able to adjudicate among them, and to assess the quality of their arguments.
Today, students can find multiple critical commentaries online within 10 minutes. Letting other scholars do your thinking for you is no education at all.
I'm a little deflated not to see some reference here to those 'parvenus' briefly mentioned, the social sciences. As colonising forces that have stationed themselves in the middle of literary study and hollowed out its unique enterprise and refilled it with algorithmic inquiries into literature as repositories of capital, gender ideology etc (we know the list as it's everywhere). Students now can study 'media' or sociology or whatever and find the same algorithms without having to sludge through Bleak House or the Canterbury Tales. They can access 'identity relevant' material on their smartphones and get a degree in the process. There's also another category of student who loves literature and has realised what they're looking for won't be found in university English departments.
I’m reading Bleak House for the first time. It’s the opposite of a trudge; it’s fantastic.
It really is fantastic. Like the Alps. Yet from Hannibal's perspective an interminable impediment
He’s so funny. It’s plotty with lots of characters, but the satire (especially in the characterizations) is literally laugh-out-loud funny. There’s a reason this guy was so popular!
That said, I am interweaving it with a first read of Metamorphoses—some light(er) witty verse!
But I always recommend widening one’s tastes culturally. Regardless of brow position; you can find gold everywhere, though some areas (“the classics”) are better for prospecting.
Shit, I had a buddy show me how he fixes cars over one summer. I respect knowledge and expertise wherever I find it.
I try (try, mind you) to be anti-narcissistic about it, too. As in, when I don’t respond to a cultural object, I try to say to myself, “Hey—maybe it’s your fault, dude.” Just as a check on our species’ well-known failing.
But I am not going to apologize for finding high art great—let alone high. I’m a near-anarchist lefty (not of the let’s-break-windows wing!) but see no issue in labeling English lit great—as great as Larry Bird could pass, or my buddy can fix a car (he’s recognized as good; not like I’d know). Same rules for everyone.
Sure, sometimes “classics”aren’t so good; there is some subjectivity allowed! I can’t get into the film of Arsenic and Old Lace. Maybe it’s me, but it just ain’t happening. My wife loves Austen. I admire…but don’t have the same attachment. It’s free therapy to try to find out why—without guilt or anything. Art is like an ongoing MRI of your psyche; discuss it with a loved one, friend, and you enrich that relationship, too.
Does that mean art has utilitarian value? Sure, if you insist on such a thing, but it’s like asking if faith has value—and that’s coming from a lifelong atheist! Like, become a nurse or electrician—but read good books! Fiction, nonfiction. Watch good films, like Bicycle Thieves. Watch old Larry Bird games on YouTube (perhaps a more niche taste for those who wrongly elevate Beethoven above Bird). Along with the other stuff. I like watching Tom Cruise run fast across an airborne ICBM as much as the next person. But just add in some Renoir and shit, just for variety’s sake.
In conclusion, yes, I had too much coffee. 😊
What a delightful piece! I will now approach every new novel or poem as an act of resistance.
I hadn’t realised the extent of English Literature’s collapse at A Level. It’s astonishing to see that the number of students taking it has halved in ten years.
But allow me to be contrarian. Marriott mentions his enduring condescension for those in factual disciplines. He is outnumbered many times over by people with the same view of English Literature. English is seen as a doss subject by many. Ten hours of lectures a week, pretend to read the book, waffle your way through the exam (or, nowadays, get ChatGPT to do your coursework) and come out with a middling 2.1. That is of course not true of Oxbridge, where perhaps the brilliant students writing an essay a week do indeed learn ‘what it means to be human’. But by the time you’ve reached the third tier of universities (Birmingham, Liverpool, Sheffield…) that experience is increasingly rare. The Guardian dedicated an editorial recently to the closure of the English department at Canterbury Christ Church University. But is it really to be lamented that students at one of the lowest-ranked universities in the country are doing something practical instead of a degree in English?
And all of this before mentioning what has become of English literature degrees in recent decades. I don’t want to exaggerate it, and it’s certainly not as bad as in America, but English departments have been captured by an ideology that sees works of literature as canvases onto which to paint progressive politics, or as relics to be deconstructed. There’s a good argument to be made that the postmodern virus encapsulated by the likes of Foucault and Judith Butler escaped not the sociology departments but the English ones. The more we eulogise English Literature as the bastion of civilisation, the more I think we should resuscitate Classics (the language, literature, history, philosophy and art of the ancient world instead) instead, which English Literature supplanted.
All that said, I’m troubled by the decline. I wonder do British people realise just how odd it is seen abroad to study only three subjects from the age of sixteen? Under the International Baccalaureate (the French Baccalaureate is even broader) students take six subjects, three of which must be native language, foreign language and maths. They then have three optional subjects - equal to the entire choice at A Level. If the popularity of English is to be restored, the only way is to lessen the opportunity cost of taking it by enlarging the number of subjects, or by making it compulsory. Even when it was the most popular subject, only a third of students studied English at A Level. In Ireland, for example, it’s a hundred percent.
Fifty years ago, when I was studying English, a 2:1 was considered pretty good, and only the exceptional got firsts. Now, firsts seem to be commonplace, and to differentiate yourself at all, more money must be invested in securing a Masters, and there seem to be plenty of those around. To say that education has become transactional is to put it mildly; it’s an absolute shakedown. One more reason to feel very sorry for this generation of kids.
Yes, the 2.1 has become the de facto pass grade. A 2.2 is basically identical with a Third or Pass and might prevent you getting a job. Firsts still remain reasonably challenging, I think, but they seem to have shot up to around 30%.
We've come a long way since the British post-apocalyptic television film, Threads, was first broadcast in 1984. For me, the most poignant scene in this dramatic account of the consequences of a nuclear war comes when the child Jane, born after the fall, responds with apathy to her mother's death and takes the last of her possessions, leaving behind her dead father's bird book, which Ruth had resolutely kept with her. The abandoned book, its illustrated pages fluttering in the breeze, signifies the death of culture in Jane's unschooled, illiterate world.
It is sad to think that four decades later, we may have reached the same end without firing a single ICBM.
And with the loss of reading and writing the ability to speak is being eroded as well
My partner and I, both Literature graduates of a certain age, can sometimes despair and then hope that reading and writing will endure. I am a freelance editor/writer in the gig economy and there are less jobs advertised for work on text these days than on video and social media content. I have no intuitive love of either forum. Words and me belong. I can only pray that a subculture of readers and writers will live on. Thanks for your wonderful post James :)
Dare I say, that should be "fewer jobs" not "less jobs"? To be more constructive, I don't think that you need to pray for a subculture of readers and writers truly appreciative of literature to live on, that is surely bound to be the case even if the minority in question is tiny.
Thanks Michael! My grammar is not so great, I appreciate the correction. I hope we are not so diminished as to become a tiny minority. That would be so sad. I wonder what evolutionary pathway humans are on. Words are symbols that mean more than I can describe. To lose the ability to communicate via long-form word arrangements would be a backward step on our path.
“George Eliot was no match for the iPhone.” I know what you mean but will offer this small counterpoint: I have this week just finished reading Middlemarch, which I downloaded onto my iPhone thanks to the Gutenberg Project.
Yes, Gutenberg Project is fantastic. I suggested a book they might like to digitise and within 48 hours they'd done it! Sent me a really nice email too. Big Tech gets a lot of kicking but Google Books and whoever else is putting all these old books online for free is doing a public service to us cash-strapped researchers.
I believe that we are at an extreme swing to the dull and numbing screen culture that already is starting to backlash. I myself never was into poetry. Now in my late 40s I realized that the issue was mainly that I did not understand its value i e. create emotions and inspire reflection. I was simply not taught in school why poetry matters and how I can make it worth my time. Only learning what a jambus is and ihow to identify oxymorons and metaphors did not do the trick. But being a very fact oriented and technical person I am starting to find out how to tickle my emotions by music and literature. This was in part driven by the emptiness I felt after 5 minutes of doom scrolling on Insta. I strongly believe I am not the only one. How many else will jump on the backlash train I do not know but I do believe literature and non AI music as well will always stay alive weather in a nieche or in the mainstream or somewhere in between we will see.
I love your work & very much look forward to your weekly column & recommendations.
I’m also very pleased you survived your school days as I know what would have happened to me had I been discovered to have had a love of poetry during mine…🫣💥😀
Driver Andy
Good piece, glad to see it here as well. I think the related decline of English Language plays a bigger part in this story, which after all brings a different kind of rigour and intellectual toolkit to bear for students of English. It also looks at language in its great, diverse totality. I’m sad to say a lot of English departments themselves have been the first ones to ditch this side of their subject when given an opportunity.