If it wasn't addressed in much depth or detail, was it really seen as important? I don't mean this as a criticism of you @Gamma Gamaliel since obviously you weren't controlling the syllabus at all, but I do feel that it's not possible to truthfully say that you think that something is important without really going into depth about why it's important.
It was deemed historically important and ground-breaking.
We had a lot of feminist emphases coming into academia at that time, alongside all the debates about structuralism and semiotics.
I thought it was axiomatic that Wollstonecraft was significant, which is why I didn't feel the need to spell it out. Besides, we are talking 40-odd years since I read any of her work.
That doesn't mean I'm being in any way dismissive. It's just that I can't remember that much of the detail.
I'm confused. You said that she wasn't discussed in any depth or detail, not that you couldn't remember the details - I was referring only to what seemed to me a contradiction between the *course* saying that a person is important but not spending any real time talking about them. I was talking about the syllabus, not your own personal take on her.
Two things strike me about this;
First as we regularly hear on In Our Time, experts spend decades on a particular text. The idea that the time spent on an undergraduate course is proportionate to the importance of that text is quite strange.
Second, there are plenty of scientists who know the importance of particular scientific texts without having ever read them. As I have said here before, my wife is an academic with a background in statistics. She never once read the seminal papers by people like Fisher. Not once over several degrees.
The latter point is, in my experience, replicated over all of biological science, where the tendancy is to, at best, nod towards a pivotal piece of work. More often this is going to be because they reproduced a method that is considered to be useful going forwards, it is highly unlikely that the person referencing the paper in a lecture or paper has fully read it if it is more than a few years old.
But we're not talking about scientific papers or anything related to STEM, so why is that relevant? When studying literature you do have to spend time reading the work in question, that's the entire point.
Well you might think that's the case, but it is not. I cannot explain this to you your satisfaction because I have not actually experienced it myself. However the idea that literature students spend a lot of time studying in detail the text - rather than examining all the secondary texts about the work, the lenses, the commentaries and so on - appears to be wrong.
Incidentally going back to my initial post about Mortimer Adler this was a pre-occupation for him and also a reason why reading the "Great Books" has become a feature of the anti-woke far-right.
In another context I was listening to the Last Night of the Proms the other night. One could say it is harmless nonsense and fun. That is one reading of Land of Hope And Glory.
But it seems that if one actually listens to the words then there's a legitimate point to be made about the slaver-state and jingoism reflected in it.
FWIW, when I got my English lit (Renaissance period) PhD, the emphasis was almost entirely on reading primary texts and understanding the milieu in which they came to be--only a fool would waste the majority of their time on criticism, which is ever-changing and new heaps of it come out every year. I mean, the critics are there when you want them, but the primary texts are front and center. This was in America in the late 90s , at a Jesuit university. It may be different elsewhere, but our program was very well regarded.
If it wasn't addressed in much depth or detail, was it really seen as important? I don't mean this as a criticism of you @Gamma Gamaliel since obviously you weren't controlling the syllabus at all, but I do feel that it's not possible to truthfully say that you think that something is important without really going into depth about why it's important.
It was deemed historically important and ground-breaking.
We had a lot of feminist emphases coming into academia at that time, alongside all the debates about structuralism and semiotics.
I thought it was axiomatic that Wollstonecraft was significant, which is why I didn't feel the need to spell it out. Besides, we are talking 40-odd years since I read any of her work.
That doesn't mean I'm being in any way dismissive. It's just that I can't remember that much of the detail.
I'm confused. You said that she wasn't discussed in any depth or detail, not that you couldn't remember the details - I was referring only to what seemed to me a contradiction between the *course* saying that a person is important but not spending any real time talking about them. I was talking about the syllabus, not your own personal take on her.
Two things strike me about this;
First as we regularly hear on In Our Time, experts spend decades on a particular text. The idea that the time spent on an undergraduate course is proportionate to the importance of that text is quite strange.
Second, there are plenty of scientists who know the importance of particular scientific texts without having ever read them. As I have said here before, my wife is an academic with a background in statistics. She never once read the seminal papers by people like Fisher. Not once over several degrees.
The latter point is, in my experience, replicated over all of biological science, where the tendancy is to, at best, nod towards a pivotal piece of work. More often this is going to be because they reproduced a method that is considered to be useful going forwards, it is highly unlikely that the person referencing the paper in a lecture or paper has fully read it if it is more than a few years old.
But we're not talking about scientific papers or anything related to STEM, so why is that relevant? When studying literature you do have to spend time reading the work in question, that's the entire point.
Well you might think that's the case, but it is not. I cannot explain this to you your satisfaction because I have not actually experienced it myself. However the idea that literature students spend a lot of time studying in detail the text - rather than examining all the secondary texts about the work, the lenses, the commentaries and so on - appears to be wrong.
Incidentally going back to my initial post about Mortimer Adler this was a pre-occupation for him and also a reason why reading the "Great Books" has become a feature of the anti-woke far-right.
In another context I was listening to the Last Night of the Proms the other night. One could say it is harmless nonsense and fun. That is one reading of Land of Hope And Glory.
But it seems that if one actually listens to the words then there's a legitimate point to be made about the slaver-state and jingoism reflected in it.
FWIW, when I got my English lit (Renaissance period) PhD, the emphasis was almost entirely on reading primary texts and understanding the milieu in which they came to be--only a fool would waste the majority of their time on criticism, which is ever-changing and new heaps of it come out every year. I mean, the critics are there when you want them, but the primary texts are front and center. This was in America in the late 90s , at a Jesuit university. It may be different elsewhere, but our program was very well regarded.
I was not talking about a doctorate, which by definition is study in detail about a topic of very small width. We were discussing undergraduate English literature degrees.
I should have added this: if it's necessary for PhDs to be in touch with primary sources, it's all the more important for undergrads and even high schoolers. They have less time to give to the subject.
Most of us would skip or scrimp on reading all the set texts and focus on those that took our fancy. I also read around and more widely which stood me in good stead as I got a First.
But I can't pretend to have read every single text on the syllabus.
@Basketactortale confidently pronouncing on something that you haven't yourself experienced seems like a strange way to engage with a subject. I have first-hand experience of undergraduate humanities degrees - you definitely have to spend time reading the texts. I never said anything about not reading the secondary texts, commentaries etc, just that the texts themselves do form a key part of the syllabus. It would be bizarre to not read both.
@Basketactortale confidently pronouncing on something that you haven't yourself experienced seems like a strange way to engage with a subject. I have first-hand experience of undergraduate humanities degrees - you definitely have to spend time reading the texts. I never said anything about not reading the secondary texts, commentaries etc, just that the texts themselves do form a key part of the syllabus. It would be bizarre to not read both.
I do not need to have studied the subject to observe how others talk about it. There exists a narrative that English literature degrees are too concerned with the secondary texts to spend much time reading the actual texts.
Nobody above said that they did not read books that were seen as important during their undergraduate studies, they just indicated that there was not time to read them in forensic detail.
That's all part of the debate, and I will thank you for not trying to gatekeep whether I can have an opinion on it based on the fact that I am unqualified due to my lack of a degree in English literature. I can read and think and observe what others say.
I do not need to have studied the subject to observe how others talk about it. There exists a narrative that English literature degrees are too concerned with the secondary texts to spend much time reading the actual texts.
And then you cite the Telegraph as evidence in support of a narrative that the Telegraph would promote even if it weren't true.
Is the Telegraph going to put the boot into "woke" Humanities degrees without troubling about the full picture?
It's one thing to have an opinion on a subject; it's another to think that an opinion uninformed by primary experience is more reliable than one that is regardless of one's sources.
I do not need to have studied the subject to observe how others talk about it. There exists a narrative that English literature degrees are too concerned with the secondary texts to spend much time reading the actual texts.
And then you cite the Telegraph as evidence in support of a narrative that the Telegraph would promote even if it weren't true.
It's one thing to have an opinion on a subject; it's another to think that an opinion uninformed by primary experience is more reliable than one that is regardless of one's sources.
Instead of commenting on sources you could also look for yourself. This is discussed in the New Yorker and many other places.
From a long New Yorker piece
Students lacked a strong sense of the department’s vaunted standing. “I would never say this to any of my English- or my film-major friends, but I kind of thought that those majors were a joke,” Isabel Mehta, a junior, told me. “I thought, I’m a writer, but I’ll never be an English major.” Instead, she’d pursued social studies—a philosophy, politics, and economics track whose popularity has exploded in recent years. (Policy, students explained, was thought to effect urgent change.) But the conversations bored her (students said “the same three things,” she reported, “and I didn’t want to be around all these classmates railing on capitalism all day”), so she landed uneasily in English after all. “I have a warped sense of identity, where I’m studying something really far removed from what a lot of people here view as central, but I’m not removed from these cultural forces,” she told me.
English professors find the turn particularly baffling now: a moment when, by most appearances, the appetite for public contemplation of language, identity, historiography, and other longtime concerns of the seminar table is at a peak.
“Young people are very, very concerned about the ethics of representation, of cultural interaction—all these kinds of things that, actually, we think about a lot!” Amanda Claybaugh, Harvard’s dean of undergraduate education and an English professor, told me last fall. She was one of several teachers who described an orientation toward the present, to the extent that many students lost their bearings in the past. “The last time I taught ‘The Scarlet Letter,’ I discovered that my students were really struggling to understand the sentences as sentences—like, having trouble identifying the subject and the verb,” she said. “Their capacities are different, and the nineteenth century is a long time ago.”
I do not think, and cannot imagine that, anyone disagrees with you about people who elevate second hand opinions over primary materials. It is one of several things E.M. Forster satirised as far back as 1909 in The Machine Stops. However, I cannot help thinking that citing an article in the Daily Telegraph - of all predictable sources - entitled 'Has wokeness killed the English Literature degree?', is counter-persuasive, an almost definitive demonstration of the maxim, 'when you sense you are in a hole, stop digging'.
I do not think, and cannot imagine that, anyone disagrees with you about people who elevate second hand opinions over primary materials. It is one of several things E.M. Forster satirised as far back as 1909 in The Machine Stops. However, I cannot help thinking that citing an article in the Daily Telegraph - of all predictable sources - entitled 'Has wokeness killed the English Literature degree?', is counter-persuasive, an almost definitive demonstration of the maxim, 'when you sense you are in a hole, stop digging'.
Or the maxim that if you do not want to discuss a topic, attack the sources rather than find your own.
Nobody forced you to comment. If you do not like the discussion, find another.
I do not think, and cannot imagine that, anyone disagrees with you about people who elevate second hand opinions over primary materials. It is one of several things E.M. Forster satirised as far back as 1909 in The Machine Stops. However, I cannot help thinking that citing an article in the Daily Telegraph - of all predictable sources - entitled 'Has wokeness killed the English Literature degree?', is counter-persuasive, an almost definitive demonstration of the maxim, 'when you sense you are in a hole, stop digging'.
Or the maxim that if you do not want to discuss a topic, attack the sources rather than find your own.
Nobody forced you to comment. If you do not like the discussion, find another.
But many of the contributors to this thread have sources @Basketactortale - the best possible sources - they have themselves experienced studying English Literature! It is completely reasonable for them to regard their own lived experience as more reliable than the secondary source you suggest.
I do not think, and cannot imagine that, anyone disagrees with you about people who elevate second hand opinions over primary materials. It is one of several things E.M. Forster satirised as far back as 1909 in The Machine Stops. However, I cannot help thinking that citing an article in the Daily Telegraph - of all predictable sources - entitled 'Has wokeness killed the English Literature degree?', is counter-persuasive, an almost definitive demonstration of the maxim, 'when you sense you are in a hole, stop digging'.
Or the maxim that if you do not want to discuss a topic, attack the sources rather than find your own.
Nobody forced you to comment. If you do not like the discussion, find another.
But many of the contributors to this thread have sources @Basketactortale - the best possible sources - they have themselves experienced studying English Literature! It is completely reasonable for them to regard their own lived experience as more reliable than the secondary source you suggest.
What do you think I'm disagreeing with? Please tell me.
You think that in English literature undergraduate degrees that people spend a long time examining important books in forensic detail and that there is no narrative suggesting that such degrees spend too much time on "woke" secondary sources, frames and critical narratives?
Even if someone here had been at a university course which is nothing like that and focussed only on examining a single book for three or four years without reading the commentaries opinions and critiques of the book, that's a) not saying anything about the majority of other university courses and b) hardly disputing that there's a narrative around how English literature degrees have strayed from the texts.
I am as "woke" as it is possible to be. I think frames are incredibly important. But it is undeniable that there is a discussion about reading the texts rather than the secondary sources in university courses. Whether or not you have been to Cambridge to study English Literature and whether or not you consider the Telegraph to be toilet-paper, the narrative exists.
Well you might think that's the case, but it is not. I cannot explain this to you your satisfaction because I have not actually experienced it myself. However the idea that literature students spend a lot of time studying in detail the text - rather than examining all the secondary texts about the work, the lenses, the commentaries and so on - appears to be wrong.
So you were not just saying that there exists an "anti-woke narrative" - you implied that narrative was correct! So it is understandable that others should rush to correct that from their own first-hand experience.
Also, framing the discussion as if I suggested that reading the actual text in question to the exclusion of secondary texts, which is not at all what I said. I just pointed out that studying the actual text is part of an English Literature degree.....which it is.
Also, framing the discussion as if I suggested that reading the actual text in question to the exclusion of secondary texts, which is not at all what I said. I just pointed out that studying the actual text is part of an English Literature degree.....which it is.
No, you were saying that the university of someone else, who it turns out has a first-class degree in the subject, cannot have considered a book important if they did not study it in detail.
I was making that point that students read many books (or perhaps more accurately bits of books) during undergraduate degrees and normally spend a lot of additional time on secondary sources including commentaries, frames etc as part of the course. Hence there is simply not sufficient time to be forensic about any one book and hence the amount of time spent on any one book cannot be a measure of how important it is considered to be at the university in question. An academic could have spent years on a particular work during a doctorate and a lifetime thinking about it (hence presumably thinks it very important to them) but there still be limited time during the undergraduate degrees that the university offer to study it.
And further that some degree do exist where the focus is solely on the text without the secondary sources but these are a minority. And further to that, a narrative exists that universities that are largely including within the course studying frames and critical responses to English literature (which are the vast majority of course) are somehow reducing the value of said courses.
The anti-woke narrative exists and it is true to the extent that the vast majority of said courses now include teaching on various ways to understand the context of English literature in addition to reading the texts. It is certainly true that there is less direct reading of the texts than there would be in the 19th century Oxbridge degrees. It appears to be true that there is less prescribed reading of the source text than there was in most English literature degrees 25 to 50 years ago.
That in itself is not a statement I am qualified to make, given I do not have a degree in the subject, but there appear to be many academics and media articles and academic papers discussing the phenomena. Undergraduates, including English literature undergraduates, do not read many books in detail or possibly at all.
As a very woke person, I think it is important to consider context. At the same time if it is true, which it appears to be, that undergraduates are not reading the texts in detail then that seems to me to be problematic.
In July, Rose Horowitch wrote an essay called, “The End of Reading Is Here”, which appeared in the August print edition of The Atlantic, which was titled, “The Age of Reading Is Over”. (She also wrote the 2024 essay, “The Elite College Students Who Can’t Read Books”.)
The two pithiest quotes are references to Marshall McLuhan:
In 1962, Marshall McLuhan, the patron saint of media theorists, predicted that the Western world would become what he called “post-literate.”
In a 1968 Fordham University lecture, McLuhan said: “the liberal world is by definition literate.”
Here's a short extract illustrating Horowitch's argument:
According to the National Endowment for the Arts, which conducts the most comprehensive survey of the nation’s reading habits, fewer than half of all adults reported having read a book of any kind in 2022. Only 38 percent read a novel or short story. A study analyzing 236,000 responses to the American Time Use Survey found that the proportion of Americans who read for pleasure on any given day fell from 28 percent in 2004 to 16 percent in 2023. (The study looked at people who had read a book, magazine, or newspaper; listened to an audiobook; or read an e-book.)
…
The books that people do read are simpler than they used to be. New York Times best sellers today have sentences that are about one-third shorter than they were a century ago.
…
In 2024, in a national test, just 35 percent of high-school seniors were “proficient” at skills such as analyzing complex fictional themes and evaluating the effectiveness of an author’s argument. About the same number scored below “basic,” meaning that they may struggle to draw conclusions from concepts explicitly included in a text, or to use context clues to determine the meaning of an unknown word. Adult-literacy scores have also dropped: Nearly 30 percent of American adults cannot paraphrase or make inferences from a multipage text. In 2017, that number was less than 20 percent.
And yet, strangely, Americans are probably reading more words than ever before. What has changed is what they read, and how. People are bombarded with emails, text messages, X posts, Reddit threads, Instagram captions. This explosion of textual fragments has come at the expense of devoting sustained attention to longer written works that convey rich and complicated information. Maryanne Wolf, a cognitive neuroscientist at UCLA, argues that people are losing the ability to think deeply about writing. That doesn’t mean they are forgetting how to decode individual words. Rather, they are losing the higher-order abilities of comprehension and synthesis. America, in other words, isn’t illiterate. It’s postliterate.
However, coming back to the writing on this thread: for me, the narrative suggested *on* this page of this thread is not the same as the narrative illustrated *by* this thread. This extract from Horowitch's essay struck me as being pertinent:
Reading has come to seem extraneous even to some of the best-educated members of society. Margaret Rennix, Harvard’s assistant director for humanities and social-sciences support, told me she’d spoken with a student who was struggling to read a book written in Old English. The culprit: Anthony Burgess’s 1962 novel A Clockwork Orange. (The student used ChatGPT to “translate” the book into easier language.) Not long ago, a Harvard sociology professor, troubled by course evaluations in which students said they resented the amount of dense reading they were assigned, asked Rennix to speak to his class in defense of reading. She had to explain—to students at America’s most elite university, taking a course in a discipline rooted in written observation, argumentation, and analysis—that excerpts and summaries cannot capture the depth and sophistication of a complete primary text. Rennix told me that some students now view reading as an unnecessarily burdensome way of acquiring knowledge. “By asking them to read,” she said, “professors are arbitrarily withholding information from students by forcing them to get it through this more difficult medium.”
I think it is pertinent because "information content" is being seen as something that can be divorced from the medium.
It reminds me of something my brother, a polyglot and lover of languages, says about English as a lingua franca. He is a working scientist and finds that many colleagues (and not just UK/US ones) are reluctant to learn languages and feel it is "easier if everyone just speaks English". But, he maintains, this reduction of language to a carrier of essential information impairs personal relationships and cultural awareness. You can touch someone's heartmore easily in their native tongue.
Analogously if you think the medium is unimportant, then reading is a utilitarian skill which might be replaced by pictograms, video explainers or telepathic download, for example. But it seems to me that if you think literature is a worthy object of study, treating the medium - which is the literature - as unimportant and arbitrary seems a very odd thing to do! If you were studying French, you wouldn't say: "Well I could get the same information content by using German instead"... would you??
Possibly tangential but I've always felt that for English speakers the advantage gained by any one foreign language is much smaller than the advantage a non-English speaker gets from learning English, because it is so common as a second language.
When faced with the question of which foreign language to learn, for an English speaker the answer is far from obvious.
I think this actually underlies the notorious lack of foreign language knowledge amongst first language English speakers.
I mean, I picked Welsh to learn but for reasons far removed from the normal reasons people have for learning a language. The other languages I'd be interested in are similarly obscure or extinct - Icelandic, Old English, Latin...
My brother controversially maintains the reverse. His view is that because so many people learn English for purely utilitarian motives, they miss out on many of the joys of language learning as a result. So, he says, if he speaks Czech, most Czech people are delighted because they (correctly) infer that he has an interest in Czech language and culture, enough to invest effort in learning Czech. So learning and practising Czech is a highly rewarding experience both for him and his conversation partner. But someone learning English receives no such buzz because people assume (again, often correctly) that the motivation was not an interest in Anglophone culture but rather a perception that this is a route to employment and self-saleability. He therefore says "I am lucky to be a native English speaker because that means I do not have to learn English, the most boring language to learn!"
I am absolutely convinced that there are topics in ecology, and in biological science as a whole, which would be framed in a completely different way if the dominant language of the discipline had been something other than English.
It is also unfortunately true that many scientific concepts have not been translated into other languages, even some quite well used languages, because speakers of those languages only ever use English in professional settings. I was talking to a professor from a university in India a while ago who told me that there were a large number of concepts in the science which had no equivalent term in any of the other languages he knew, even his own home language.
The potential for misunderstanding is therefore high.
My brother controversially maintains the reverse. His view is that because so many people learn English for purely utilitarian motives, they miss out on many of the joys of language learning as a result. So, he says, if he speaks Czech, most Czech people are delighted because they (correctly) infer that he has an interest in Czech language and culture, enough to invest effort in learning Czech. So learning and practising Czech is a highly rewarding experience both for him and his conversation partner. But someone learning English receives no such buzz because people assume (again, often correctly) that the motivation was not an interest in Anglophone culture but rather a perception that this is a route to employment and self-saleability. He therefore says "I am lucky to be a native English speaker because that means I do not have to learn English, the most boring language to learn!"
But the same would be true of many other languages - so how to choose? I mean, I'm nearly 60 and have never met a Czech speaker that I'm aware of so that'd be a poor return on learning Czech.
Having said that I picked Welsh partly because I do have a chance of meeting Welsg speakers. All of whom speak English of course.
When faced with the question of which foreign language to learn, for an English speaker the answer is far from obvious.
That depends on where that English speaker lives. It may be far from obvious in the UK, but where I live in the US, it’s very obvious that Spanish is the useful language to know. I’m guessing English speakers in eastern Canada would say it’s obvious that French is the language to learn.
As suggested by TurquoiseTastic's point, just lifting information content out of a piece of text without being able to process the contextual arguments doesn't do much to engage or develop our critical faculties.
First I am interested to think about the blacklash against "wokeness" in studying humanities and in particular English Literature. I have seen some people complaining that Marxism is taking over.
I'm really not sure what this blacklash [sic] is, whether it amounts to anything of critiqued substance, or is just a disparaging expression of discontent.
In my initial response to the OP, I raised the issue of literary criticism, which, along with literary theory, continues to seem relevant to the subject of this thread. More generally, developing our own critical faculties would seem to be beneficial when it comes to assessing what we read and write, including here on these forums.
I'm an engineer. Regarding what is taught in English Literature, I would expect it to include at least some elements of literary criticism and/or literary theory. These strike me as being skills with a wider relevance, but also the kind of skills that some people might want to disparage and discredit.
In that context, that the Telegraph article's writer was harking back to the time of F R Leavis didn't come as a big surprise. But the article seems to be more nuanced than you were suggesting:
Some, however, argue that the impact of today’s so-called culture wars is overstated. “Literature has always been viewed through an ideological lens according to a set of shared, unspoken assumptions about what was right or important or true,” says Fulford.
Being able to identify and critique these ideological lenses seems to me to be a skill worth developing.
My brother controversially maintains the reverse. His view is that because so many people learn English for purely utilitarian motives, they miss out on many of the joys of language learning as a result.
I would never say any language is a joy to learn, including English. Possibly rewarding, but never a joy.
Possibly tangential but I've always felt that for English speakers the advantage gained by any one foreign language is much smaller than the advantage a non-English speaker gets from learning English, because it is so common as a second language.
When faced with the question of which foreign language to learn, for an English speaker the answer is far from obvious.
I think this actually underlies the notorious lack of foreign language knowledge amongst first language English speakers.
I mean, I picked Welsh to learn but for reasons far removed from the normal reasons people have for learning a language. The other languages I'd be interested in are similarly obscure or extinct - Icelandic, Old English, Latin...
For most English speakers, their local signed language(s) seems like a good logical option - BSL [British Sign Language, for those unaware] for instance isn't just signed British English, it is its own separate language. But also as @Nick Tamen says, in many areas there *is* an obvious second language choice for native English speakers.
I think learning another language is a joy, or can be. If you get far enough, it gives you another way of thinking--another human window on the world--and your vision becomes greater, both into people's hearts and into the world itself. And you see things you never saw before. That's what's behind all those articles about "languages that have a word for x but English can't express it , at least in a single word". we get to look through our neighbors' eyes, and that is fascinating.
I think learning another language is a joy, or can be. If you get far enough, it gives you another way of thinking--another human window on the world--and your vision becomes greater, both into people's hearts and into the world itself. And you see things you never saw before. That's what's behind all those articles about "languages that have a word for x but English can't express it , at least in a single word". we get to look through our neighbors' eyes, and that is fascinating.
That’s my feeling about it.
But like with most things, some people are going to enjoy it more than others. And I suspect the amount of joy one gets from learning another language often correlates to how easily learning another language comes. For some people it comes easily, while for others, not so much.
As suggested by TurquoiseTastic's point, just lifting information content out of a piece of text without being able to process the contextual arguments doesn't do much to engage or develop our critical faculties.
First I am interested to think about the blacklash against "wokeness" in studying humanities and in particular English Literature. I have seen some people complaining that Marxism is taking over.
I'm really not sure what this blacklash [sic] is, whether it amounts to anything of critiqued substance, or is just a disparaging expression of discontent.
In my initial response to the OP, I raised the issue of literary criticism, which, along with literary theory, continues to seem relevant to the subject of this thread. More generally, developing our own critical faculties would seem to be beneficial when it comes to assessing what we read and write, including here on these forums.
I'm an engineer. Regarding what is taught in English Literature, I would expect it to include at least some elements of literary criticism and/or literary theory. These strike me as being skills with a wider relevance, but also the kind of skills that some people might want to disparage and discredit.
In that context, that the Telegraph article's writer was harking back to the time of F R Leavis didn't come as a big surprise. But the article seems to be more nuanced than you were suggesting:
Some, however, argue that the impact of today’s so-called culture wars is overstated. “Literature has always been viewed through an ideological lens according to a set of shared, unspoken assumptions about what was right or important or true,” says Fulford.
Being able to identify and critique these ideological lenses seems to me to be a skill worth developing.
Yes and this is why it is interesting to think about it as a criticism. I absolutely think that the texts have always been read in a certain context with a certain lens so for me the "anti-woke" narrative is nonsensical on its face. I also think that students have always been racing through the set texts in English literature courses, so the question of whether an important text has been studied for sufficient time has always been an issue.
What appears to be new is that students in 2026 read less than they would have done in 1980 or 1990 or 2000.
For me it is an interesting thing to think about whether a focus on the secondary sources has reduced the engagement with the texts itself coupled with the apparent recent phenomena of reduced reading of the hard set texts.
It seems plausible that knowing the critical views means that students are well-versed in the criticism and frames and lenses but less familiar with the text itself.
Another point I was thinking about is that the "traditional" view might be that an education is gained and personal growth is obtained by students when they wrestle with understanding the texts and themes.
Which might suggest that this is not happening if students are not doing the direct engagement work with the text itself.
It could also mean the reverse, if the study of the frames and criticisms and lenses are more important than knowledge of the text.
I think it also leaves open the idea that Adler and his "great books" curriculum is not only perpetuating the myth of white male heroic dominance, but is wrong in kind. That one grows not by studying the correct collection of books in the "Western canon" or whatever we want to call it but by studying any hard collection of books that challenge students to develop understanding and wrestle with new ideas.
I think learning another language is a joy, or can be. If you get far enough, it gives you another way of thinking--another human window on the world--and your vision becomes greater, both into people's hearts and into the world itself. And you see things you never saw before. That's what's behind all those articles about "languages that have a word for x but English can't express it , at least in a single word". we get to look through our neighbors' eyes, and that is fascinating.
I agree about the effect that language has on our thinking (although I'm not convinced about it giving us insight into other people's hearts).
I had been thinking about verbal-only languages but, as Pomona pointed out, BSL (or prevalent sign language) is worth considering. A number of non-verbal aspects of BSL still make more sense to me than the verbal-only languages that I've learned (to at least some degree).
I think it also leaves open the idea that Adler and his "great books" curriculum is not only perpetuating the myth of white male heroic dominance, but is wrong in kind. That one grows not by studying the correct collection of books in the "Western canon" or whatever we want to call it but by studying any hard collection of books that challenge students to develop understanding and wrestle with new ideas.
Putting aside Adler's list it's not clear to me that any 'hard collection' is as good as any other. If one is putting a high premium on the types of ideas and skills that you hope students would take away, that speaks for rather careful construction of the list. Indeed this is what appears to happen in many literature degrees where at least some attention is paid to various literary and cultural theories and thence different sorts of readings one may make of a text (with some impact on chosen texts).
I think learning another language is a joy, or can be. If you get far enough, it gives you another way of thinking--another human window on the world--and your vision becomes greater, both into people's hearts and into the world itself. And you see things you never saw before. That's what's behind all those articles about "languages that have a word for x but English can't express it , at least in a single word". we get to look through our neighbors' eyes, and that is fascinating.
I agree about the effect that language has on our thinking (although I'm not convinced about it giving us insight into other people's hearts).
I had been thinking about verbal-only languages but, as Pomona pointed out, BSL (or prevalent sign language) is worth considering. A number of non-verbal aspects of BSL still make more sense to me than the verbal-only languages that I've learned (to at least some degree).
Also - it's not necessarily obvious to those who don't encounter them regularly, but signed languages as a category don't necessarily equal "sign language" as is commonly spoken about. For instance, Makaton is a signed language but it's created for very different reasons compared to BSL or another form of signed language developed for Deaf people/Deaf culture.
For clarity, I agree with @Lamb Chopped and @Nick Tamen regarding learning languages for fun - I don't think that someone should have to follow a 'logical' order of language learning! Often people get interested in learning a language via some unrelated interest, eg learning Japanese due to an interest in manga or anime.
I think learning another language is a joy, or can be. If you get far enough, it gives you another way of thinking--another human window on the world--and your vision becomes greater, both into people's hearts and into the world itself. And you see things you never saw before. That's what's behind all those articles about "languages that have a word for x but English can't express it , at least in a single word". we get to look through our neighbors' eyes, and that is fascinating.
I agree about the effect that language has on our thinking (although I'm not convinced about it giving us insight into other people's hearts).
I had been thinking about verbal-only languages but, as Pomona pointed out, BSL (or prevalent sign language) is worth considering. A number of non-verbal aspects of BSL still make more sense to me than the verbal-only languages that I've learned (to at least some degree).
Re hearts: Languages and cultures grow out of each other. At least, there are cultural concepts that are woven through languages, and the languages enable (or don't) those concepts to exist at all in the first place. I can say from what little I speak of Vietnamese that there are ideas I can't easily express in English, and I routinely switch to the other language to express them when I can. I believe various studies have shown that certain differences in the world aren't even noticed by most people who speak languages that don't contain terms for those differences--for instance, slight color differences.
What a particular language does is create a cultural worldview that is very difficult to communicate to nonspeakers, certainly not in its fullness, and often not at all. And sometimes it takes all the trust you can work up to convey to a speaker of one language that they are misreading a term or sentence in another. For example, if you have a very hierarchical culture like Vietnam, where one cannot even say "brother" or "sister" without specifying which person is older--not even in the pronouns "he" or "she"!!! Well, just try explaining to such a person that siblings close in age in the United States are essentially equal, and the elder is NOT automatically in a quasi-parental role on all occasions, deferred to by the younger children, and expected to carry out a disciplinary role with them by the parents. I had to explain that to Mr. Lamb when we had only known each other a year, and he couldn't believe me. He was convinced that my younger sibs would listen to me and take seriously whatever I said (as if!). And that's a very minor example, though you can see how it might become a major frustration, especially after we married and he got to see sibling dynamics in action--and be horrified. (As a good Vietnamese youngest brother, he has deferred to his own older sibs up to and including the present day, though he is 79 now. Hasn't always obeyed them--notably when it came time to choose a career--which created a family rift that took years to heal.)
So yeah, I'd say learning a language offers a view into hearts. Certainly when two cultures are as far apart as the American and Vietnamese ones are.
Comments
FWIW, when I got my English lit (Renaissance period) PhD, the emphasis was almost entirely on reading primary texts and understanding the milieu in which they came to be--only a fool would waste the majority of their time on criticism, which is ever-changing and new heaps of it come out every year. I mean, the critics are there when you want them, but the primary texts are front and center. This was in America in the late 90s , at a Jesuit university. It may be different elsewhere, but our program was very well regarded.
I was not talking about a doctorate, which by definition is study in detail about a topic of very small width. We were discussing undergraduate English literature degrees.
But I can't pretend to have read every single text on the syllabus.
I do not need to have studied the subject to observe how others talk about it. There exists a narrative that English literature degrees are too concerned with the secondary texts to spend much time reading the actual texts.
https://www.telegraph.co.uk/books/authors/wokeness-english-literature-degree/
Nobody above said that they did not read books that were seen as important during their undergraduate studies, they just indicated that there was not time to read them in forensic detail.
That's all part of the debate, and I will thank you for not trying to gatekeep whether I can have an opinion on it based on the fact that I am unqualified due to my lack of a degree in English literature. I can read and think and observe what others say.
Is the Telegraph going to put the boot into "woke" Humanities degrees without troubling about the full picture?
It's one thing to have an opinion on a subject; it's another to think that an opinion uninformed by primary experience is more reliable than one that is regardless of one's sources.
Instead of commenting on sources you could also look for yourself. This is discussed in the New Yorker and many other places.
From a long New Yorker piece
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/03/06/the-end-of-the-english-major
Or the maxim that if you do not want to discuss a topic, attack the sources rather than find your own.
Nobody forced you to comment. If you do not like the discussion, find another.
la vie en rouge, Purgatory host
But many of the contributors to this thread have sources @Basketactortale - the best possible sources - they have themselves experienced studying English Literature! It is completely reasonable for them to regard their own lived experience as more reliable than the secondary source you suggest.
What do you think I'm disagreeing with? Please tell me.
You think that in English literature undergraduate degrees that people spend a long time examining important books in forensic detail and that there is no narrative suggesting that such degrees spend too much time on "woke" secondary sources, frames and critical narratives?
Even if someone here had been at a university course which is nothing like that and focussed only on examining a single book for three or four years without reading the commentaries opinions and critiques of the book, that's a) not saying anything about the majority of other university courses and b) hardly disputing that there's a narrative around how English literature degrees have strayed from the texts.
I am as "woke" as it is possible to be. I think frames are incredibly important. But it is undeniable that there is a discussion about reading the texts rather than the secondary sources in university courses. Whether or not you have been to Cambridge to study English Literature and whether or not you consider the Telegraph to be toilet-paper, the narrative exists.
So you were not just saying that there exists an "anti-woke narrative" - you implied that narrative was correct! So it is understandable that others should rush to correct that from their own first-hand experience.
No, you were saying that the university of someone else, who it turns out has a first-class degree in the subject, cannot have considered a book important if they did not study it in detail.
I was making that point that students read many books (or perhaps more accurately bits of books) during undergraduate degrees and normally spend a lot of additional time on secondary sources including commentaries, frames etc as part of the course. Hence there is simply not sufficient time to be forensic about any one book and hence the amount of time spent on any one book cannot be a measure of how important it is considered to be at the university in question. An academic could have spent years on a particular work during a doctorate and a lifetime thinking about it (hence presumably thinks it very important to them) but there still be limited time during the undergraduate degrees that the university offer to study it.
And further that some degree do exist where the focus is solely on the text without the secondary sources but these are a minority. And further to that, a narrative exists that universities that are largely including within the course studying frames and critical responses to English literature (which are the vast majority of course) are somehow reducing the value of said courses.
The anti-woke narrative exists and it is true to the extent that the vast majority of said courses now include teaching on various ways to understand the context of English literature in addition to reading the texts. It is certainly true that there is less direct reading of the texts than there would be in the 19th century Oxbridge degrees. It appears to be true that there is less prescribed reading of the source text than there was in most English literature degrees 25 to 50 years ago.
That in itself is not a statement I am qualified to make, given I do not have a degree in the subject, but there appear to be many academics and media articles and academic papers discussing the phenomena. Undergraduates, including English literature undergraduates, do not read many books in detail or possibly at all.
As a very woke person, I think it is important to consider context. At the same time if it is true, which it appears to be, that undergraduates are not reading the texts in detail then that seems to me to be problematic.
The two pithiest quotes are references to Marshall McLuhan:
Here's a short extract illustrating Horowitch's argument: The article was reproduced on Reader Supported News.
It reminds me of something my brother, a polyglot and lover of languages, says about English as a lingua franca. He is a working scientist and finds that many colleagues (and not just UK/US ones) are reluctant to learn languages and feel it is "easier if everyone just speaks English". But, he maintains, this reduction of language to a carrier of essential information impairs personal relationships and cultural awareness. You can touch someone's heartmore easily in their native tongue.
Analogously if you think the medium is unimportant, then reading is a utilitarian skill which might be replaced by pictograms, video explainers or telepathic download, for example. But it seems to me that if you think literature is a worthy object of study, treating the medium - which is the literature - as unimportant and arbitrary seems a very odd thing to do! If you were studying French, you wouldn't say: "Well I could get the same information content by using German instead"... would you??
When faced with the question of which foreign language to learn, for an English speaker the answer is far from obvious.
I think this actually underlies the notorious lack of foreign language knowledge amongst first language English speakers.
I mean, I picked Welsh to learn but for reasons far removed from the normal reasons people have for learning a language. The other languages I'd be interested in are similarly obscure or extinct - Icelandic, Old English, Latin...
It is also unfortunately true that many scientific concepts have not been translated into other languages, even some quite well used languages, because speakers of those languages only ever use English in professional settings. I was talking to a professor from a university in India a while ago who told me that there were a large number of concepts in the science which had no equivalent term in any of the other languages he knew, even his own home language.
The potential for misunderstanding is therefore high.
But the same would be true of many other languages - so how to choose? I mean, I'm nearly 60 and have never met a Czech speaker that I'm aware of so that'd be a poor return on learning Czech.
Having said that I picked Welsh partly because I do have a chance of meeting Welsg speakers. All of whom speak English of course.
In the OP of this thread, you wrote I'm really not sure what this blacklash [sic] is, whether it amounts to anything of critiqued substance, or is just a disparaging expression of discontent.
In my initial response to the OP, I raised the issue of literary criticism, which, along with literary theory, continues to seem relevant to the subject of this thread. More generally, developing our own critical faculties would seem to be beneficial when it comes to assessing what we read and write, including here on these forums.
I'm an engineer. Regarding what is taught in English Literature, I would expect it to include at least some elements of literary criticism and/or literary theory. These strike me as being skills with a wider relevance, but also the kind of skills that some people might want to disparage and discredit.
In that context, that the Telegraph article's writer was harking back to the time of F R Leavis didn't come as a big surprise. But the article seems to be more nuanced than you were suggesting: Being able to identify and critique these ideological lenses seems to me to be a skill worth developing.
For most English speakers, their local signed language(s) seems like a good logical option - BSL [British Sign Language, for those unaware] for instance isn't just signed British English, it is its own separate language. But also as @Nick Tamen says, in many areas there *is* an obvious second language choice for native English speakers.
But like with most things, some people are going to enjoy it more than others. And I suspect the amount of joy one gets from learning another language often correlates to how easily learning another language comes. For some people it comes easily, while for others, not so much.
Yes and this is why it is interesting to think about it as a criticism. I absolutely think that the texts have always been read in a certain context with a certain lens so for me the "anti-woke" narrative is nonsensical on its face. I also think that students have always been racing through the set texts in English literature courses, so the question of whether an important text has been studied for sufficient time has always been an issue.
What appears to be new is that students in 2026 read less than they would have done in 1980 or 1990 or 2000.
For me it is an interesting thing to think about whether a focus on the secondary sources has reduced the engagement with the texts itself coupled with the apparent recent phenomena of reduced reading of the hard set texts.
It seems plausible that knowing the critical views means that students are well-versed in the criticism and frames and lenses but less familiar with the text itself.
Which might suggest that this is not happening if students are not doing the direct engagement work with the text itself.
It could also mean the reverse, if the study of the frames and criticisms and lenses are more important than knowledge of the text.
I think it also leaves open the idea that Adler and his "great books" curriculum is not only perpetuating the myth of white male heroic dominance, but is wrong in kind. That one grows not by studying the correct collection of books in the "Western canon" or whatever we want to call it but by studying any hard collection of books that challenge students to develop understanding and wrestle with new ideas.
I had been thinking about verbal-only languages but, as Pomona pointed out, BSL (or prevalent sign language) is worth considering. A number of non-verbal aspects of BSL still make more sense to me than the verbal-only languages that I've learned (to at least some degree).
Putting aside Adler's list it's not clear to me that any 'hard collection' is as good as any other. If one is putting a high premium on the types of ideas and skills that you hope students would take away, that speaks for rather careful construction of the list. Indeed this is what appears to happen in many literature degrees where at least some attention is paid to various literary and cultural theories and thence different sorts of readings one may make of a text (with some impact on chosen texts).
Also - it's not necessarily obvious to those who don't encounter them regularly, but signed languages as a category don't necessarily equal "sign language" as is commonly spoken about. For instance, Makaton is a signed language but it's created for very different reasons compared to BSL or another form of signed language developed for Deaf people/Deaf culture.
For clarity, I agree with @Lamb Chopped and @Nick Tamen regarding learning languages for fun - I don't think that someone should have to follow a 'logical' order of language learning! Often people get interested in learning a language via some unrelated interest, eg learning Japanese due to an interest in manga or anime.
Re hearts: Languages and cultures grow out of each other. At least, there are cultural concepts that are woven through languages, and the languages enable (or don't) those concepts to exist at all in the first place. I can say from what little I speak of Vietnamese that there are ideas I can't easily express in English, and I routinely switch to the other language to express them when I can. I believe various studies have shown that certain differences in the world aren't even noticed by most people who speak languages that don't contain terms for those differences--for instance, slight color differences.
What a particular language does is create a cultural worldview that is very difficult to communicate to nonspeakers, certainly not in its fullness, and often not at all. And sometimes it takes all the trust you can work up to convey to a speaker of one language that they are misreading a term or sentence in another. For example, if you have a very hierarchical culture like Vietnam, where one cannot even say "brother" or "sister" without specifying which person is older--not even in the pronouns "he" or "she"!!! Well, just try explaining to such a person that siblings close in age in the United States are essentially equal, and the elder is NOT automatically in a quasi-parental role on all occasions, deferred to by the younger children, and expected to carry out a disciplinary role with them by the parents. I had to explain that to Mr. Lamb when we had only known each other a year, and he couldn't believe me. He was convinced that my younger sibs would listen to me and take seriously whatever I said (as if!). And that's a very minor example, though you can see how it might become a major frustration, especially after we married and he got to see sibling dynamics in action--and be horrified. (As a good Vietnamese youngest brother, he has deferred to his own older sibs up to and including the present day, though he is 79 now. Hasn't always obeyed them--notably when it came time to choose a career--which created a family rift that took years to heal.)
So yeah, I'd say learning a language offers a view into hearts. Certainly when two cultures are as far apart as the American and Vietnamese ones are.