When I teach lit, I begin the semester by asking students why the University of Wisconsin pays tens of millions of dollars requiring every student to pass a class in English literature. Over the years my students have offered career-affirming answers:
- literature teaches us how to understand what happens in someone else’s mind
- literature gives us a sense of context in history, language, and thought
- literature offers new ways of thinking about communication, and communication is at the center of what the University is being paid to teach its students
Once the students establish this framework they seem surprisingly comfortable spending the next four months poring over the work of writers who lived on the southern half of a Wyoming-sized island 100 to 200 years ago.
Other experts in the field seem less comfortable with this reasoning:
“To the question ‘of what use are the humanities?’, the only honest answer is none whatsoever. And it is an answer that brings honor to its subject. Justification, after all, confers value on an activity from a perspective outside its performance. An activity that cannot be justified is an activity that refuses to regard itself as instrumental to some larger good. The humanities are their own good.” Stanley Fish, The New York Times.
“It may simply be the case that many Americans prefer to learn about the world and to entertain themselves with television and other streaming media, rather than with the printed word, and that it is taking a few generations for them to shed old habits like newspapers and novels.” Caleb Crain, The New Yorker.
“I would say that the Humanities in the last ten, twenty years somewhat lost its way in becoming overly focused on critique. The real function of the Humanities is to engage in the act of creativity, moment by moment, to improve the quality of the world we live in.” Richard E. Miller, Rutgers University.
In his follow-up essay Fish argues against “turning humanities departments into service departments and cutting funding for humanities research,” but it might be decades too late for such an argument: Michael Wesch, of Kansas State, suggests that even at our best we fail to teach students the sort of language work they will need to participate in the modern knowledge economy.
Tellingly, both Wesch and Miller use videos riddled with the written word to argue that language can work in ways that few of us incorporate into our teaching.
I have begun to ask how my work in the literary critical industry will benefit the students I hope to teach over my career. What can the dissertation accomplish that goes beyond other forms of knowledge work? Could I boil it down to a 5-minute video that would attract 1.5 million views? How can we argue for the continued relevance of work that is, at its heart, little different from the monastic margin-scribbling of the 13th century?
