James Marriott, New Statesman, June 11 2025, review of Stefan Collini's book 'Literature and Learning: A History of English Studies in Britain':
"...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....
...The screen is replacing the book. Studies show dramatic and unprecedented drops in literacy and reading, especially among teenagers. A recent survey by the National Literacy Trust found time spent reading books “at a historic low”. In this environment, the study of literature is far from an obvious use of three crucial years of young adulthood. And if the slew of viral journalistic reports from universities – “The end of the English major”, “The elite college students who can’t read books” – are to be believed, even students who choose to study English are unable to actually force themselves through novels. “Most of our students are functionally illiterate” runs a characteristic de profundis wail. A gloomy young Oxbridge academic I spoke to recently described “a collapse of literacy” among his students....
... Literature’s prestige has declined precipitously since then. To many students in the 21st century, English seems not a liberal discipline but a positively anti-democratic one, with its cultural hierarchies, decaying canons and excessive reverence for the scribblings of dead white males....
...“In time,” Collini writes, “it may become possible to be accepted as a cultivated person (whatever that archaic term will by then have come to represent) without having an acquaintance with any literature written before one’s own era, or perhaps with any literature at all.” I agree but with one qualification: “May become possible?” To anybody under 40 it is clear that time is already upon us. Whether this heralds catastrophe – the fate of literature being coterminous with the fate of civilisation – remains to be seen. But when those of us raised in the faith survey the darkness of the modern world, the thought is a hard one to avoid."
म्हणजे तुम्हाला तुमच्या आधीचे लेखक वाचायची गरज नाही , किंवा साहित्यच वाचायची नाही ....
Holiday Reading,1916 by Carl Larsson
