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
