Literature Matters Today

Evidence for the United States is the reduction of English majors in colleges and universities in recent years from 8% to 4%, along with the reduction in language majors to 1%, the huge number of unemployed or underemployed PhDs in literature, the failure of our politicians ever to mention literature in their noble speeches about education (favoring science and math), and the transformation of so many departments ostensibly for teaching literature into departments that actually do "cultural studies," often with minimal attention to literary texts as anything other than one more or less minor cultural form among many others. The old model of a comprehensive liberal arts education as preparation for life as well as for a profession is rapidly being replaced by a concept of higher education as vocational schooling in science and math, in preparation for some technological or business position, for example in computer programming. [...]worrying about whether literature any longer matters seems a trivial pastime in a globalized and telecommunications-dominated world of financial meltdown, double-dip recessions, unemployment woes, rising poverty rates and crumbling domestic infrastructure. [...]the hidden political message, drummed in implicitly by ever-new versions of such stories, is that we do not need higher taxes on rich people and large corporations, better education, or regulation of banks, other financial institutions, and credit card companies, or stimulus spending by the federal government to create jobs, universal health care, control of carbon dioxide emissions, and so on. Most such commercials, by the way, have a large component of outright lies or at least of ideological distortions, as in my example of NBC's "Making a Difference" series, or in the many ads on behalf of oil, gas, and "clean" coal companies that neglect to mention that use of fossil fuels is bringing about irreversible and catastrophic climate change.