Why Study Literature?
A look at my discipline post-academe
Near the end of my tenure as a full-time professor I found myself turning into a kind of salesman for the humanities. Academics have been lobbying for their own turf as long as there have been formally recognized disciplines. But over the past ten years, my fight or flight instinct was repeatedly triggered as headlines about the future of literature and the arts beat a steady drumroll of doom.
Headlines like this one about the college majors that Americans most regret. There it is, right at the top: humanities/arts. (To be fair, 42% of survey participants regretted vocational/technical training, and business/management isn’t far behind, so no field of study comes off terribly well here.)
For many years English departments defended the practicality of the major with soulless language about communication skills. But there would be nothing worse than taking a Shakespeare course for the purpose of improving your memo writing. That would be like attending a Nebraska football game to improve your step-walking skills to and from your stadium seat.
There have been some inspired defenses of the humanities over the years. One of my favorites is Mark Edmundson’s “The Ideal English Major,” where he writes: “Becoming an English major means pursuing the most important subject of all—being a human being.” The English major, he says, lives not one life but hundreds of lives. Every book is the chance to step into someone else’s shoes.
There is a moral bent to many of these arguments. The influence of identity politics on the humanities has only deepened the sense that those devoted to exposing systemic racism, sexism, classism, ableism, and ____ are superior to the drudges crafting algorithms or the money-grubbing business majors.
I made a related argument once after two Black men were arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks simply for asking to use the restroom without having purchased anything. Starbucks tried to save face by closing its 8,000 stores for one afternoon and requiring its employees to participate in diversity training. But this approach, I argued, reduced racism to a depersonalized problem that an employee might learn to manage without caring deeply about it. Wouldn’t an English major, who had studied Toni Morrison and James Baldwin, draw from a more meaningful worldview when interacting with customers? Wouldn’t someone who had felt the power of “Sonny’s Blues” offer practical value to a company like Starbucks beyond mere communication skills?
This line of reasoning often feels like preaching. Some might sit in a church pew and drop a little cash in the offering plate after a tongue-lashing about their sinfulness. But few would keep coming back if they were going thousands of dollars into debt to have that experience. And so I’ve tried a different tack, touting the high premium on creativity in the workplace.
Take, for instance, this iconic scene from Mad Men, where the Kodak guys (presumably business majors) want Don Draper’s agency to market their new slide projector as “The Wheel.” They think they are clever by alluding to the first human technology. But Draper’s explanation of nostalgia and the sentimental bond that one might build with a product, a concept he illustrates with photos from his own life, blows their metaphor out of the water.
It’s a slick line of reasoning: major in English and you, too, can craft metaphors as powerful as Draper’s and make partner at your firm.
But Don Draper wasn’t an English major. He wasn’t even Don Draper. He was Dick Whitman, raised in abject poverty in rural Illinois by his alcoholic father, his stepmother, and sometimes by call girls. He later joined the Army and served in the Korean War, where he traded dog tags with his commander’s charred corpse after an explosion and lived thereafter as Donald Draper. And, as we often forget while reading or watching good fiction, he was not a real person. An invented character offers a flimsy rationale for why you should major in English.
Alumni sometimes offer more plausible storylines: Jimmy Jones graduated with a degree in English and is now Vice President at Acme International. So just look at what you can do with an English degree! But as in Draper’s case, we cannot say with any certainty why Jimmy Jones succeeded. Maybe he had an excellent mother who instilled the character qualities that rocketed him through the ranks. Maybe he was born with a winning personality that doubled its power when combined with privilege. Maybe Jimmy Jones would have been largely successful no matter what he majored in or what he chose as his profession.
Now that I no longer have to defend the humanities out of a sense of self-preservation within an institutional structure, I am rethinking the case for studying literature.
When I was a young person who found delight in books and sweet relief from my family’s religious fundamentalism, I had no thought of recruiting anyone else to share that private pleasure. The author’s voice offered all the companionship I needed. I enjoyed high school courses like AP English for the opportunity to respond to literature in essay form, where I could say what I really meant. It was nice to get a teacher’s praise, but I had no impulse to recruit others to do the same.
In fact, one of the reasons I never seriously considered teaching as a profession until graduate school was my dread of forcing young people to do something they did not want to do. A great deal of college-level teaching turned out to be exactly that. Maybe some dentists find satisfaction after extracting stubborn teeth, but if the statistics about suicide rates are to be believed, many dentists struggle with inflicting pain on their patients. Similarly, it was always difficult for me to accept that one of the chief sources of delight in my life could be torture for young people.
So part of me would like to say that if you do not come to the page for pleasure, or if you are merely seeking to scrape a skill from the book’s cheek and carry it away in your specimen jar, then please do not bother. I do not wish to make a case for literature that is roughly equivalent to “eat your veggies because they are good for you.”
Is literature good for us? According to Edmundson’s reasoning, we increase our understanding of what it means to be human every time we live between the pages. I believe this. Benjamin Franklin was trying to do that when he wrote “The Speech of Miss Polly Baker” (a phenomenal work of short fiction and satire that could be well adapted to the current Roe v. Wade conversation). I have felt my understanding of humanity broaden while inhabiting Milkman’s world in Song of Solomon and following Tayo’s path to wholeness in Ceremony.
But I do not agree with those who say that nothing teaches the human condition as well as literature does. A symphony, painting, or dance performance awakens our humanity without words. So far as we know, humans are the only life form capable of scientific discovery. Sinclair Lewis tried to capture the nature of scientific research in Arrowsmith, but I suspect that much escaped his grasp. When the great French scientist, Claude Bernard, wrote in one of his notebooks, “Physiology, physiology, you are mine,” he alluded to a rich intimacy in his own life that could only be known after years in the laboratory. I am well aware that my ignorance of advanced mathematics limits my sense of what it means to be human.
The case for literature as part of public education depends a great deal on what we believe the purpose of public education to be. If that purpose is getting jobs, then I suspect that literature will not be of much use. Not because a literary sensibility has no relevance to the workplace, but because its practical usefulness is unknowable (was English really the reason for Jimmy Jones’s success?) and unpredictable (can you read The Laramie Project knowing that it will shape your response to a real life experience?). And because reading Frederick Douglass to make you more employable at Wells Fargo will give both you and your teacher a nasty headache.
Literature can serve a practical purpose in fields such as medicine. Learning how to see a patient more as a poem than as a puzzle can make a real difference in diagnosis and in the doctor-patient relationship. Aspiring athletic trainers who admit to never having read a complete book in their lives find meaning in medical memoirs such Damon Tweedy’s Black Man in a White Coat. Margaret Edson’s Pulitzer-winning play Wit has been a hit with every medical humanities class I have taught, as has the film adaptation starring Emma Thompson. Perhaps there is a future for literary study in this more applied way. Though I doubt that reading Babbitt in an M.B.A. program would meet with much enthusiasm.
Literature also offers safe spaces to historically marginalized communities. It objectively matters that there are courses in queer literature and postcolonial studies and that many students take these courses because they are searching for belonging. There are good arguments for defending these courses as graduation requirements, as part of what anyone needs to encounter to be fully educated.
But this pulls us back to the question of whether literature really calibrates our moral compasses if we are not already receptive to being transformed in that way. A man who wants to deepen his understanding of female experience would benefit from reading The Yellow Wall-Paper. But, as I wrote last week, I doubt whether an unrelenting misogynist is capable of discussing content like this in good faith and being changed by it.
If courses in anti-racism or disability studies cannot draw enough demand, there are limits to what some institutions can support. In that case, the students who want professors to act like cashiers, pushing them through to the credential that gets them the job, are not going to voluntarily choose courses that make them feel uncomfortable or that pose a risk to their GPAs. It is a losing argument to tell these students to eat their literary veggies because it is good for them. That is equally true whether you are making a case for “the classics” or a case for literature as a standard-bearer for diversity, equity, and inclusion.
If the goal of public education is better citizenship, then literature offers a great deal. Those who can appreciate the irony in Jonathan Swift’s “A Modest Proposal” are better equipped to resist misinformation about public health. It is also civically useful to know that the term “melting pot” comes from J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur’s Letters from an American Farmer and that it was not an inclusive metaphor: “What then is the American, this new man? He is either an European, or the descendant of an European, hence that strange mixture of blood, which you will find in no other country.” Furthermore, I believe that both Phillis Wheatley and Nathaniel Hawthorne are national treasures, and that their art allows us to learn more than lessons about racism or sexism. Wheatley offers a timeless take on the Enlightenment in “Thoughts on the Works of Providence,” and I much prefer her image of Reason embracing Love to the bleaker forms of rationalism. Hawthorne’s parable “The Minister’s Black Veil” is as germane to our time as it was to Puritan New England. Have we not all become Parson Hooper in our outraged social media cabals?
Literature matters for many objective reasons, but the case for literature in public education or in general college curricula requires a consensus that may never have existed in American life, except among the most privileged. The New York Times recently convened a focus group of 11 parents with high school students to discuss what these parents wanted their children to learn about history, racism, and gender. The following response from Lloyd, a Black independent from Ohio, captures a widespread American belief that school is for skills, not breadth of knowledge.
Later in this discussion, Lloyd clarified his comment by revealing that his wife is white and that they have taught their children to accept everyone equally. But when his children began studying racism (presumably with examples from the 1700s), they began viewing their white grandparents more guardedly. Lloyd felt that this was a shame, and so he had a personal reason for wondering if learning about the past had done more harm than good in his family. But I suspect that literature would also fall under his view of “unnecessary information” that wouldn’t help his children succeed.
Parents like Lloyd wield an enormous influence over tuition-dependent colleges. It is now common for administrators to ask English programs to write strategic plans for recruiting students and winning over skeptical parents. My former dean frequently asked our department how we were preparing to teach today’s third-graders. When a question like that is posed, the case for literature is already forfeited because the institution itself has lost faith in the discipline. It requires enormous hubris to predict how to effectively reach today’s 8 and 9 year olds when they are 18. And one is simply a snob if one turns the question around to suggest that the real question is what those third-graders might need to make them capable of reading works like A Midsummer Night’s Dream with both pleasure and insight, as many generations before them have done.
My eldest daughter just finished fourth grade, and she is as bookish as any ten-year-old I know. She reads what she likes (books about dragons and wolves and Greek gods) and enjoys listening to the same podcast episodes a dozen times or more while crafting ingenious designs from cardboard boxes. I would like her to read Harriet Jacobs and Walt Whitman someday for a deeper understanding of who she is and what it means to be an American. But I suspect that her reading habits at age ten are not a reliable measure of how English programs ought to be preparing to teach her as a college student. If so, then the future will mean that we read less to inhabit hundreds of lives unlike our own than to affirm what we already are.
Ralph Waldo Emerson offers a compelling case for literature in “The Poet”: that we are half ourselves and half our expression. He believed that a great poet could unlock truths that we had always felt but had never really known because we could not articulate them. Like Emerson, I believe that literature can lift us above workaday life, that it can be a source of tremendous beauty and self-discovery, and that it can help us understand the complexity of our national and global histories. But I won’t try to convince you of that. I suspect that I could not persuade you if literature did not already taste good to you, too.
The discussions I had with teachers and classmates in my elementary through 12th grade years regarding what we were reading, whether Shakespeare or Dick and Jane, were important in forming my values, communication skills and observations of life and family. I would call that literature. And movies contributed too, especially in the 60's and 70's.