Author: Amory Crane

That English Literature as an endeavour of formal study is dying — is, in fact, already dead — has been obvious to anyone with the slightest intimacy with the subject as it is studied in the university for some time. It was teaching briefly on such a university course only a few years ago that executed what was, in hindsight, perhaps the final blow to what had been at one time the apogee of all my aspirations for gainful work. Beside such things as the Research Excellence Framework (the single most impressive means of destroying scholarship since the Mongol hordes), peer-reviewed journals (a collective exercise in back-scratching and score-settling masked as technical process — sound familiar?), and the frankly fraudulent marking criteria, designed so that no one, no one, could be given a failing grade without the department first having to move heaven and earth to obfuscate, pile on mitigating circumstances, and otherwise just lie about the pitiful quality of the work; beside such things, it was standing in front of my undergraduate class, copy of Milton or Ben Jonson in hand, and gazing over the smattering of bored, apathetic, or otherwise thoroughly absent visages of those who I was attempting to induct into the gentle art of fondling, then caressing a text, so that it might finally disclose access to its subtler charms and delights, that I came to realise the whole edifice which I had once looked upon, even with an occasional roll of the eyes, as a temple to learning, was, in fact, nothing more than a dreary sepulchre.

In such moments I had cause to reevaluate all the disconcerting signs which had presented themselves to me during my progress through the petrified groves of academe. It is true I was not entirely alive to them at the time. For years the smell of putrefaction was subtly concealed by my own assorted sentiments and yearnings, fed by such lingering depictions as found in Lucky Jim, such esteemed figures as Frank Kermode and Tony Tanner and their work, and such earnest desires as wishing to dedicate my life to the study and teaching of Literature in my mother tongue — all of which, with attendant variations, such institutions are quite happy to leave unmolested. Yet certain instances nevertheless remained unassimilable. For instance, when I first arrived as an undergraduate, I was astounded to find out all that was expected of me was an essay mid-way through each term, and either a further essay or an examination at its conclusion. Having come from a school in which, during my time in the upper-sixth, I was obliged to turn in somewhere between two and three essays a week, I couldn’t quite believe what on earth I was paying for. Yet while my fellow undergraduates complained, even seethed, about the workload, my quibbles were quickly assuaged by access to the university library — by far the greatest asset paid for by one’s tuition, as well as being among the cheapest — where I swam amidst the great pool of all those writers who did not make it onto the courses, as well as those great attendant critics and scholars who peopled the history of my chosen subject.

It was another time, later, when I was affronted by an anomalous measly grade appended to an absurd form of assessment in which we were told to keep a ‘diary’ of a few hundred words recording our thoughts of each week’s texts, that the seed — long in its germination — was likely first sown. Was this to be informal and opinionated, as the word diary suggests; or was it to be rigorous, as one would assume given the general context in which it was being set? I still do not know the answer to that question. For the first and only time in my life I went to see the professor responsible for this ignominious assessment and its corollary grade. The old, rotund woman, whose bluestockings had worn grey from lack of use, replied to my assertion that such an absurd assessment could have only been set in a misguided attempt to ensure students had at least opened the books in question, by saying:

‘Well we have had a problem with students reading the set texts. What would you have us do?’

‘If they haven’t read the text,’ I replied, ‘then it will show in their work. Fail them.’

‘But then we slide down the rankings. It’s very difficult.’

It is true to say the absurd nature of the university’s predicament very quickly opened itself up to me after this exchange, and what had before been the simple backdrop to my university experience quickly came to the fore of my observations. New accommodation blocks when my and many other departments had already seen drastic cuts in the wake of 2008 and after were not evidence of the university’s success or even an isolated instance of mismanagement, but incapsulated the Ponzi scheme that is university admissions policy, where by trains, planes, and automobiles, institutions bring hordes of students into their bosom and never hand them a failing grade. The reason for this is simple: with a large share of universities’ income linked to the money brought in by student loans, every university in the country is reliant on an ever increasing number of students to keep the show on the road. The result is that the relationship between student and university, student and tutor, has changed. Students are now consumers, tokens even, who with their allotted loans prop up the machine, and who if you fail, take their £9,000+ tuition with them, along with the money spent on food, coffee, and accommodation on campus. This is why in recent years you have found an increasing reliance on student satisfaction surveys (often repackaged as teaching excellence surveys and awards) as a means to coverup the inevitable dive in standards. Tutors can no longer, with any meaningful force, reprimand their students. In fact, to do so in a seminar — arguably when it is most successful and just in instilling shame — would result in inevitable repercussions. For the customer, even if they cannot write grammatically coherent sentences, is always right. Money, indeed, has an eloquence of its own.

Despite their reputations, all this is true even at Oxford and Cambridge, though to a lesser extent, where tutorial groups have steadily grown in size, though nothing like the 20 person ‘seminars’ which are now as common in universities across the land as they are in schools. Tutorials, when you bring an essay each week and read it aloud in front of your peers and tutor, before then having to defend it from criticism, simply does not exist in the majority of universities in Britain. Indeed, as I have indicated, having a tutor openly criticise a piece of work would likely be regarded as a potential issue of safeguarding — what if the student can’t handle the criticism? Yet this is exactly what a university education is. No, the worry that tertiary education has increasingly become an extension in secondary education is not only incorrect but charitable. Much closer to the truth in many universities is that it is a bizarre and surreal exercise in attempting to read and explicate — in my case for instance — Paradise Lost with students who in many respects would benefit from primary school level instruction in comprehension and grammar.

Now, any parents reading this who have aspirations for their children will know that there exists no greater class of ignorants today than teachers. If you have been mystified in recent years at parents’ evenings when you ask quite innocently a question which requires some implicit knowledge on the part of the teacher, only to be met with a vacant stare and outright abrasiveness, then know simply that these were recent graduates from institutions such as I describe. Yet, the destruction of the university and its standards in itself mightn’t have been as bad as it has proved if it had not also been contemporaneous with the end of primary and secondary education in all but some select institutions (and even these pale in comparison to the recent past). That I can recall results of school examinations being posted on the notice board at my school, teachers handing back essays in class, loudly proclaiming the granted mark, makes me wonder whether or not I existed in a parallel universe to the students I rubbed shoulders with when I first arrived at university. Of course, I did. Yet such things fostered a twin sense of competition and an urgent desire to avoid the shame of being at the bottom of the class. In other words, it made us work. Yet ask today where your child ranks among their peers in their class and you will be met with an unfathomable resistance. Not because they don’t rank them — they do — but to admit so would mean having to admit some responsibility for your child’s failure to read at the age of eleven. (Admittedly, parents share some blame for this too).

If then you catch an academic of a certain age in the right mood, usually over a drink after a day sat in a conference, as I did increasingly into my twenties, you will find them lament the quality of students arriving for their first year as undergraduates as against those of even just a decade ago. That they are lazy, that they are entitled, and that they are ignorant — more so than undergraduates of the past — is a given. Yet the single biggest problem is they simply lack the aptitude to study anything academically. I maintain that this aptitude exists in no more than 5% of the population at any time, which would account in itself for the damage done to the university by its woeful expansion in the past fifty years. Yet the single most tragic thing to have happened in that time is that those students who make up the 5% who belong in academia today have been nothing short of scandalously mistreated, and mistreated to the extent that when you find such an individual in your classroom, who shows some inchoate desire and aptitude for the calling, they have been so woefully prepared by their formative years that a one hour seminar once a week is simply not going to make up for it. They lack the requisite knowledge and skills which are necessary for an inculcation of scholarly practices, even if they do actually read the texts, have something thoughtful to say in the seminars, and can write, for the most part at least, grammatically.

To ask then why English Literature is dying, as has recently come to the attention of publications like The New Statesman, and to talk about matters such as its shift from the centrality of the culture, its elision with certain claims of liberal humanism, and the much derided (until now it appears) view that it had become more and more a slave to the social sciences, all seem more an exercise in self-deceit than a meaningful attempt to reach to the root of the problem. For to measure the health of a subject by the number of students taking it for A-level and then as an undergraduate degree, as is suggested in Mr Marriott’s piece, is precisely the kind of token equation redolent of the bean-counters who don’t care what the university teaches just so long as it brings in the money from those students’ loans. That Mr Marriott recognises the more extravagant claims for literature’s study in his review of Stefan Collini’s new book all the while yearning to have been around when such extravagant claims were taken seriously is both touching and is indicative of a sincere love of the subject. And yet the reading and study of literature, as anyone who has spent anytime considering the matter seriously must conclude, has no special claim to bring moral clarity to the life of the individual. That the Nazi guards in the death camps read Shakespeare and Goethe in the evening with a tear in their eye is enough to dispel such a myth. Anyone still holding on to the idea that they simply misunderstood or misconstrued the texts are, of course, merely defending what is sacred to them. Yet what is more sacred to me — what Literature does and is worth a lifetime of serious exertion in intimate consideration — is that it makes us alert to the texture of life. When we read a description, a passage in which two people interact, close the final page of a book, or hear in the cadence and rhythm of a line or so of prose or verse something which moves us, it is, in a process of subtle instruction, picking apart the aggregated data which makes up the habituation of our vision of life, and makes us see it more fully for what it is, given that it is produced in this particular moment, inflected by this or that shade of meaning, or swathed in a particular situation. In the last analysis it makes us live more fully our iniquities, our basenesses, our brutalities, just as much as any loves, virtues, or generosities. If we do not care to examine the former — and if literature does, in some cases, effect this then no one will complain — then they will continue yet more vividly than before. For the sadist such a thing is as great a boon as it is for the moralist.

The study of Literature then is simply the study of the ways and means by which men conspire to produce by the deployment of words a greater fullness of life in their readers. If that isn’t the sexiest manner by which to spend one’s life then I don’t quite know what else one can say to convince people. Yet the death of the subject is, frankly, nothing to do with the failure to impart this understanding of its aims. That more students now take A-level Psychology and Sociology than English literature is as much to do with the idea that such subjects are better career choices, and require one to learn only ‘concepts’ rather than have to read a whole book cover to cover (absurd, of course, but true enough for the level required of them) which is nevertheless entirely impossible in literature. A breakdown of the plot of Romeo and Juliet is as removed from that text as is the latest show trending on a streaming-service platform. To think you can condense a great poem or novel into a summary is to prove yourself so blind, so without a sense of taste, sound, or smell, so without a sense of heart, bowels, sinews, and breath — in other words, so oblivious to the texture of life as to be living in a blank landscape of two-dimensional white. No, the reason English is dying is the same reason why Psychology and Sociology and every other subject is dying. The students aren’t bright enough, and those who are have been so let down by their education they will never meet the heights they by all rights ought. That more students are getting pumped for loan money in one subject than another makes not a jot of difference to the health of either subject.

Looking back at my time teaching then, I cannot help but think of one girl who, after reading Middlemarch, clearly moved by the ordeals of Dorothea Brooke — baffled, of course, by her taste in Ladislaw — came to discuss the book in my office hours. She was earnest, interested, driven by more than getting a passing mark. I wonder whether she, in a different time and life, would have been the stuff for real literary study. That we are unlikely to ever know. For even if she pursues a PhD in Literature today it is unlikely she will be inducted into the kind of pursuit which existed, even with its exaggerated claims, sixty or so years ago. And the same is true for essentially every worthwhile subject. This, really, is our loss. For in times gone by it was common for a student to arrive at university and be astounded when confronted by all which he did not know. Now, those who by rights belonged in institutions for higher learning will look back on their degrees and wonder why they were taught so little. That these institutions are just now beginning their inexorable journey to dissolution is just then, even if it causes many pains along the way. Yet the greatest pain, of thwarted ambitions and a generation of indebtedness for a managerial design, was caused by pretending that academia, of any subject, was ever anything more than an elite pursuit.

— Amory Crane

Amory Crane is Editor-in-Chief at Decadent Serpent. He covers such topics as Art, Literature, and the more broadly Cultural, reporting straight from the chamber of what Shelley once called the ‘unacknowledged legislators of the world’. You can follow him @LaughingCav1 on X or on Substack. He also writes fiction.