In Defense of the English Major

Picasso, "Two Girls Reading"

Picasso, “Two Girls Reading”

Adam Gopnik has written a spirited defense of the English major in a recent New Yorker article. Responding to expressions of panic about declining numbers of English majors (although it’s still a top major at my college), Gopnik tells us to relax. He says the English major isn’t going anywhere and will never cease to prove its worth.

He makes his argument, however, after first disputing two traditional defenses of literature: that it makes individuals better and that it makes societies better. Now, I believe it can do both, even though I will also concede that it doesn’t automatically do so. Therefore I don’t disagree with Gopnik when he makes the following point:

No one was better read than the English upper classes who, a hundred years ago, blundered into the catastrophe of the Great War. (They wrote good poetry about it, the ones who survived anyway.) Victorian factory owners read Dickens, but it didn’t make Victorian factories nicer. (What made them nicer was people who read Dickens and Mill and then petitioned Parliament.)

At least Gopnik allows for some social betterment coming out of literature. He could have been even more skeptical, as Terry Eagleton is in Literary Theory: An Introduction when he notes that there were concentration camp commandants reading Goethe during World War II to affirm their sense of Germany’s cultural superiority. Of course, Goethe would have been appalled at the Holocaust so they weren’t reading him well. But the point is that readers can read selectively through their own filters. I would argue that English upper class chauvinists and German fascists were not surrendering to literature but using it to confirm previously held positions.

In any event, Gopnik is looking for other ways to defend literature and the English major. He comes up with a fairly compelling one:

So why have English majors? Well, because many people like books. Most of those like to talk about them after they’ve read them, or while they’re in the middle. Some people like to talk about them so much that they want to spend their lives talking about them to other people who like to listen. Some of us do this all summer on the beach, and others all winter in a classroom. One might call this a natural or inevitable consequence of literacy. And it’s this living, irresistible, permanent interest in reading that supports English departments, and makes sense of English majors.

And further on:

If we abolished English majors tomorrow, Stephen Greenblatt and Stanley Fish and Helen Vendler would not suddenly be freed to use their smarts to start making quantum proton-nuclear reactor cargo transporters, or whatever; they would all migrate someplace where they could still talk Shakespeare and Proust and the rest. Indeed, before there were English professors, there were… English professors. Dr. Johnson was the greatest English professor who ever lived—the great cham of literature, to whom all turned, Harold Bloom plus-plus—and he never had a post, let alone tenure, and his “doctorate” was one of those honorary jobs they give you, after a lifetime of literary labor, for Fine Effort. The best reading and talking about books was, in the past, often done by people who had to make their living doing something else narrowly related: Hazlitt by writing miscellaneous journalism, Sydney Smith by pretending to be a clergyman.

Gopnik has one other objective, which is to defend literature as an academic discpline. He’s responding to those people who think that literature should be taken out of the classroom and put in the living room. There is value, Gopnik counters, to moving literature from just a pastime of elites to an activity open to anyone who goes to college:

To have turned the habits of reading and obsessing over books from a practice mostly for those rich enough to have the time to do it into one that welcomes, for a time anyway, anyone who can is momentous. English departments democratize the practice of reading. When they do, they make the books of the past available to all. It’s a simple but potent act.

Is it in fact the case that some English professors go down abstruse byways, writing articles that virtually no one outside the field can understand? Yes, this happens. But Gopnik has a response to this as well:

[T]he best answer I have ever heard from a literature professor for studying literature came from a wise post-structuralist critic. Why was he a professor of literature? “Because I have an obsessive relationship with texts.” You choose a major, or a life, not because you see its purpose, which tends to shimmer out of sight like an oasis, but because you like its objects. A good doctor said to me, not long ago, “You really sort of have to like assholes and ear wax to be a good general practitioner”; you have to really like, or not mind much, intricate and dull and occasionally even dumb arguments about books to study English.

As much as I enjoy Gopnik’s article, however, I don’t entirely agree with his grand finale. Here it is:

Even if we read books and talk about them for four years, and then do something else more obviously remunerative, it won’t be time wasted. We need the humanities not because they will produce shrewder entrepreneurs or kinder C.E.O.s but because, as that first professor said, they help us enjoy life more and endure it better. The reason we need the humanities is because we’re human. That’s enough.

Yes literature helps us enjoy life more. Yes literature helps us endure it more. But why dismiss its potential to produce shrewder entrepreneurs and kinder C.E.O’s? I’m not saying that monetary considerations should serve as the final defense. Think of them as a fringe benefit.

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