Learning + Literature

An End and A Beginning

As I sat contemplating a Hypothetical-Apocalypse and a Total-Obliteration-of-the-Human-Race— casual, breezy thoughts for a Tuesday afternoon— the most beautiful story I’d ever heard sprang into my mind unbidden.

It was just two words: “We learned.”

This story swam up to greet my thoughts of death and dissolution. I carry this phrase with me as a kind of talisman, because I am fairly convinced that not only is this the most beautiful story; it is also the only story. To learn is the one task we have here on earth, no matter how our individual stories conclude. When I consider literature, or any other field of study that calls upon us to learn more and deeper, I feel bolstered in my belief that humans find knowledge to be important, just, and beautiful: worthy in itself.

Yet a mounting pile of evidence suggests that education’s inherent worth is currently in question, at least within academic realms. Take Nathan Heller’s recent piece in The New Yorker entitled “The End of the English major,” or Merve Emre’s piece, also in The New Yorker, entitled “Has Academia Ruined Literary Criticism?” or the lively discussion about the worth of fiction on George Saunders’s “Story Club” Substack. These pieces ask whether literary criticism, or fiction writing itself, is a dying enterprise. I am— ahem— personally invested in these inquiries because I just completed a PhD program in English Literature (in the subset of Theatre and Performance) and am now experiencing my requisite “What was it all FOR?!” moment.

Because here is the cringe-inducing reality: most English Literature departments are out of touch. At its worst, academia— with its dense jargon and vague, hollow attempts to reach the outside world— has been justly accused of insularity. As a PhD student, I was required to read long theoretical monographs filled with sentences like this one:

"The move from a structuralist account in which capital is understood to structure social relations in relatively homologous ways to a view of hegemony in which power relations are subject to repetition, convergence, and rearticulation brought the question of temporality into the thinking of structure, and marked a shift from a form of Althusserian theory that takes structural totalities as theoretical objects to one in which the insights into the contingent possibility of structure inaugurate a renewed conception of hegemony as bound up with the contingent sites and strategies of the rearticulation of power."

Excuse me?! This is one sentence. One unwieldy, ungodly sentence that must be hacked through with a machete. This mind-melting morsel of academic jargon is written by Judith Butler, the reigning monarch of performance theory. I do not mean any particular offense to Butler and her essential contributions to the field, but yeesh! I cannot understand why academics feel compelled— almost against their will— to write in such a detestably alienating fashion.

This mode of writing contributes to literary studies’ plummeting public image. Yet if one can wade through these words— or better yet, transcend them— I believe there are four compelling “whys” behind the pursuit and preservation of the English major. I want to present them here. It is a classic on-brand move for an English major to compose a rambling essay defending her field, but alas, here I am: nestled cozily in the cliché. So, without further ado, here is my (one might say “desperate,” I shall say “fervent”) defense of a literary education.

ART = GRATITUDE

I believe the analysis and appreciation of any kind of art is worthy, valid, and essential to our human project. What are we here for, if not to appreciate beauty? What are we here for, if not to adorn our mere survival with a distinctly human panache? Goodness knows we have our malevolent and destructive excesses; our task is to combat and counter them with the curative properties of our artistic excesses. Our work, as Mary Oliver writes, is “mostly standing still and learning to be astonished.” This astonishment is the way to land in the glove of the world. This astonishment is the way to make something of our temporary and breathless life. Literary criticism— or any form of artistic analysis, for that matter— is at its best and most foundational an ode to appreciation and deep listening. My ambition in my own scholarly work has been to show readers aspects of books, films, and plays that they haven’t noticed before; thereby augmenting their appreciation of these pieces.

ART = INSIGHT

But a literary scholar does something more than marvel at beauty. She unpacks, she analyzes, she deconstructs— both to amplify her sense of appreciation and also to penetrate an object with rigor and precision. There are infinite lenses through which to perform this analytical practice; a practice whose multiplicity is foundational to its philosophical utility. The literary scholar can analyze a poem by looking at its rhetorical structure, its use of language, its author’s personal biography, or the era and culture in which it was written— and all of these vantage points reveal something new about the poem. This exercise is a beautiful allegory for life and humanity: it suggests that under the sunlight of scrutiny and curious attention, any object becomes richer and more interesting.

Understanding a piece of work (whether a product of human creation or that “piece of work” that Hamlet calls “man”) within a given context is no small feat. A literary scholar learns how to stand back and identify the myriad forces that shape a thing: a book or film, a tweet or meme, a flawed economic system or an oppressive political one. Scholars are able— O miracle!— to transcend their first, face-value reality of an object or experience through sustained attention and curious probing. This mode of analysis undergirds the deconstructive sociopolitical work that many societies undertake today: how did this (fill in the blank) come to be, and why? Again, this practice of contextualization can be accomplished through many artistic disciplines and indeed many psychological, scientific, and spiritual ones. Literary criticism is just one of many human technologies that allow us to embark on the always-exhilarating, always-illuminating adventure of gaining new perspective.

Like many other self-reflexive practices, such as therapy or meditation, literary analysis does not offer a value judgement on whatever emerges before its gaze. In fact, literary analysis seems to argue that content is neither good nor bad, but rich— because of what we get to do with it. To a literary scholar, an object is not static, but rather a dynamic opportunity for learning. I am loathe to conjure such an example, but for the sake of argument, let us consider a document that is malignant and harmful in its own right: Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf. Read at face value, this text can cause damage by perpetuating anti-Semitic, racist, and homophobic stereotypes and myths disseminated by Hitler. However, in the hands of an earnest English major with critical thinking skills, this objectionable text becomes an object of radical potential. Mein Kampf might offer a literary scholar the opportunity to explore the power of words as nefarious spells, to understand how totalitarianism is first constructed then tolerated, to note the flaws in judgment and morality that led to such horrific conclusions, and— in recognizing and naming them— to respond to future threats with greater alacrity and consciousness. Literary criticism teaches readers not to be afraid of what is before them; and instead invites them to lean closer and analyze how minds, contexts, eras, and world-views exist in friction with one another. (For a brilliant example of what a contemporary playwright can do with problematic source material in the name of a delightfully destructive and healing catharsis, read Branden Jacobs-Jenkins’s 2014 play An Octoroon).

So, to sum up thus far: being an English major will help you sharpen your attention, appreciate beauty, and think critically about the meta-circumstances at work behind everyone and everything.

(Being an English major may also give you a coffee addiction.)

WORDS = NOURISHMENT

Now let’s consider the benefits and affordances of literary criticism, in particular. I know that there are many modes of communication available to us: after all, Ursula the Sea Witch has urged me since the age of four never to “underestimate the importance of body language.” But whether signed, spoken, or sung; whether typed or tattooed; whether felt tactilely or heard orally; words are our primary means of moving through culture. They are nearly as dear and vital to our current state of evolution as opposable thumbs or fresh air. Language is the humble bread of our daily life, be it hifalutin or pedestrian. If we’ve chosen to make language the centerpiece of our connection with one another, we may as well deploy it in vivid, potent, and effective ways.

Words— as we learn from George Orwell’s 1984— can inhibit or expand the totality and diversity of the human experience. Language will never capture pure sensation, but damn does language give it the ol’ college try! Words are eager to be put to use; they are obliging and conciliatory. Words are modest construction workers, but they are also exhilarating craftsmen. And like all artisans, words can’t resist showing off… just a little. This inclination to show off does not demand grander or more ornate language— often, more “artful” words are simply words that feel more true, more astonishing in their familiarity. If words are hitched to the wagon of an idea and manage to carry it over the bright fields to its destination, then language can settle down contentedly for a well-earned rest.

Again, words are humble: they know their place. They bow in reverence to flowers and stars and death and love and music and tears and trees and valor. And yet—cheeky little devils! — they want to brush those spaces, caress them linguistically as best they can. Words glory in their attempts. If you have ever felt moved by a song lyric or a line in a novel or a snippet of a poem or a piece of dialogue, you know that the breathless recognition and transcendence of language— its surprise and its accuracy— is as close of an approach that we humans ever get to the divine. Beauty lays down its gauntlet, and Language leaps up in readiness: a dog with a frisbee endeavoring to catch Beauty in its mouth every damn time.

As word-wielders, we get to engage in this lifelong game of frisbee. I acknowledge that AI language tools like ChatGPT have aided many people, and that to deplore such technological advancements would be to fight the inevitability of things. Yet there is a singular kind of power gained from conjuring just the right word; arising in one’s brain with accommodating specificity exactly when one needs it most. In my view, the more granularity I bring to my words, the vaster and more nuanced my processing of an experience becomes. Precise words swoop down to claim me, and only after being visited by them does a formerly ineffable experience find new shape, span, and heft in my consciousness.

We have talked about appreciating beauty, we have talked about critical analysis, and we have talked about the power of language. Now let’s talk about story.

STORY = SALVATION

A story is a generous and elastic medium; one that grows fat and rich from the never-ending train of voices it wants to hear. Just as literary analysis becomes a bolstering philosophical practice that insists upon connection and sense-making and potential insight (as discussed above), so too does a story open its arms and cry out: “This, too! I can expand to include it all, artfully told!” Stories are the building blocks of the universe and the atoms of our collective consciousness. It is a story that Peter Pan hailed from Neverland, just as it is a story that Adam and Eve left Eden, or that we evolved from primates, or that the earth spins on its axis, or that I feel myself to be hindered or gifted in such and such ways. Story does not always imply fiction; it is simply a mechanism for information. It is a true universal language. So again, I say: why not be consummate storytellers, as is our birthright? Why not acknowledge all the stories cropping up around us like so many swaying poppies?

Beyond any academic realm, recognizing the presence of story as an ally or a hindrance is an essential part of our human work. For instance, one trope of New Age speak that I find useful is the phrase: “I have a story that—” (e.g., “I have a story that you’re judging me,” or “I have a story that you’d rather go to the movies with Wren than with me”). Emotion unmoored from story can be powerful and cathartic, but it is first helpful to acknowledge the omnipotent presence of story in determining our emotional experiences. In fact, if analytical practices like literary criticism help us track how meaning-making works, we can also use these practices to reverse-engineer our experiences, in order to detect where we ourselves may have generated meaning. A story can act as an offering to explain an emotion or outburst. Indeed, entrusting someone with your story is one of the tenderest acts I know.

Which brings me to a final story. It is called Frederick, and it is a children’s book written by Leo Lionni. In this book, a family of field mice prepare for the long, grueling winter ahead. Most of the mice hasten to gather grain and collect leaves for a stockpile, while Frederick gazes dreamily at clouds and sits under trees. When his fellow mice ask what he’s doing, Frederick replies that he is “gathering color” or “harvesting sunshine.” At this point in the story, readers may be giving Frederick the ol’ side-eye, as he seems content to ride the coattails of his industrious rodent kin. But the winter is long and hard and cold, and the stockpile of food inevitably runs short. In a moment of hunger and hopelessness, the mice fall into despair… but then Frederick begins to speak. He describes color and sunshine and warmth to his kinsmen, recalling them to beauty and meaning while giving them the strength to endure.

Frederick’s message about the necessity of art is one we can apply to our own stories. When we write and read and dance and paint and sing and yes, even engage in that apparently decrepit and dying practice of literary criticism, we are laboring not for capitalist production, but for a deeper kind of survival. In this current geopolitical era — which can feel like a long cold winter— we need our Fredericks more urgently than ever. The End of the English major? As a newly-minted doctorate of that field, emerging from its death portal to speak on behalf of my perishing academic brethren, and all beings who dare to peer deeper into life, I say: “We learned.”