Why Study English? (opinion)

In the fall of 1980, I joined the Department of English at Emory University as a new assistant professor. Then, as now, jobs for Ph.D.s in English were scarce, and then, as now, to get one you had to be good and lucky. The good part was in my control. I had a handful of publications, six years’ experience teaching writing and literature, and one of my degrees was from Yale—always eye-catching for members of a search committee. But none of that would have mattered if a job in my field, theater history, had not opened unexpectedly that year.

Emory’s undergraduate curriculum in English was then typical of most departments of that era; faculty taught courses in Chaucer, Shakespeare, Milton, the Romantic poets and William Faulkner; in British and American authors from the 19th and 20th centuries; and in poetry and prose from the Middle Ages, the Renaissance and the Victorian and modern eras. With each successive term, students filled gaps in their knowledge like numbers on a Sudoku card—century by century, writer by writer.

A listing of courses taught during a recent semester shows that much change has come to the teaching of English at Emory. In the spring of 2025, for example, faculty taught one course in Chaucer and one in Arthurian literature; three courses in Shakespeare (including Shakespeare: Comedy After Me Too); two courses in Victorian studies; and numerous courses in 20th- and 21st-century literature (Modern Irish Literature, Global Modernisms, Theater and Feminism, Cute Studies, Black Girl Magic, and Satire).

Faculty also taught many one-off courses such as Digital Humanities, Techno-Orientalism, Black Ecologies, Literature and the Environment: Planetary Futures, The Undead South, Poetics via Translation, Food Narratives, Youth Literature and WNDB [#WeNeedDiverseBooks], and The Poet’s First Book.

Why study English? What’s an English major good for, anyway? When I ask that question online, AI promises that “an English major equips individuals with strong communication, critical thinking and analytical skills.” This is assuredly true; I was a better writer after college than before it. But when anyone can use AI systems to generate sensible written responses to a specific prompt, it no longer seems sufficient to emphasize this skill set to prospective English majors. If English studies are to have a future, they must turn away from composition and “critical thinking” and bend instead toward art and ethics.

Once, in the middle of a sluggish class on Robert Frost’s sonnet “The Oven Bird,” someone blurted, “Wait—he’s talking about a Thanksgiving turkey, right?” That wasn’t the first time I’d heard a 19-year-old say something stupid about a poem, but it was the only time I’ve ever laughed out loud. I apologized to the young man for my rudeness, then asked everybody to search “ovenbird” on their smartphones. It was hugely satisfying to see 15 young men and women discover that Frost wasn’t being elliptical or obscure. There really is a creature called an ovenbird (scientific name Seiurus aurocapilla), a migratory species of small warbler common to mid- and northeast America.

It’s a small, indistinctive bird, and there’s not much reason to write an entire poem about it (Frost’s is unique) except that the ovenbird is one of only a very few species of American songbirds that sing not just during the spring mating season but continue trilling into the hot summer months. The ovenbird’s strident, repetitive call can be heard in deciduous forests all through July and August when most other birdsongs have vanished. Its persistence in warbling after springtime is gone, as well as its peculiar, seemingly instructive call—guidebooks and websites say the ovenbird seems to be chanting “tee-chur, tee-chur”—made the ovenbird perfect for the characteristically melancholy Frost to use in framing a lesson about life. Here’s the poem in full:

Frost’s poem is straightforward: He simply described a real bird and a practical lesson to be learned from it in the most concise and appealing way he knew. “The Oven Bird” is emphatically instructive, and it ought to be read and taught accordingly. You don’t have to have a rural, New England upbringing to make sense of the poem and to learn from it. It’s especially relevant to a room of 20-year olds who might use it to begin a serious conversation about the springtime of their own lives, so to speak, now recently past, and to ponder how best to spend the “diminished thing” of adulthood.

It may sound simpleminded to ask students to read Frost for the moral rather than, say, to critique his sexism (as does Joyce Carol Oates in her short story “Lovely, Dark, Deep”) or to interrogate his brash American exceptionalism (“The land was ours before we were the land’s”), but lyricism is itself a mode of learning.

At the end of Aristophanes’ comic drama Frogs (405 BCE), the character Euripides gives the audience two reasons to value poets. We need them, he says, “for skill and instruction” (dexiotes and nouthesia) and “because they make people better members of the community” (polis). Nothing in Euripides’ speech would have sounded controversial to Aristophanes’ audience; on the contrary, being told that poets were teachers would have seemed unsurprising, probably even superfluous. One imagines them responding like a crowd of voters at a Trump rally, murmuring some Attic equivalent to “Right on!” And why would they not have thought that? Of course, poets are entertaining; of course, they’re instructive. Otherwise, why bother with them?

“None of the great precapitalist classical civilizations,” says Fredric Jameson, “ever doubted that their art harboured some fundamental didactic vocation.” Yet through more than four decades of conversations about literature and literary study in four different universities, I never heard any of my colleagues openly profess anything similar.

If we believe that nurturing and guiding thought and emotions can be an important part of creating happy, civil persons in a happy, civil society, then literature, along with the other arts—music, dance, painting and sculpture—should be advertised to students for its educative potential. Here’s part of an email from a student in another introductory poetry class:

“Of Mere Being” may have been the final poem Stevens wrote. In the poem, a lone palm tree stands in a fantastic landscape, while in the tree sits a mysterious, “gold-feathered bird” singing “without human meaning,/Without human feeling, a foreign song.” Bird, song and landscape exist, Stevens is saying; even though they have nothing to do with us. However, our rapture is no illusion:

Stevens’s poem can’t be read within a sociopolitical milieu or matched with students’ personal experiences. Reading it won’t teach them anything about sexism in early modern comedy or climate change in the Anthropocene, but that doesn’t mean the poem lacks nutritive value. On the contrary: Its combination of legend, sensuality, philosophy and celebratory, lyrical expressiveness communicates both pleasure and ethics. Little else could be so joyous, yet so starkly lucid regarding beauty and sentience; one is happier and wiser for reading it.

Great art is mesmerizing, enchanting and above all transformative; it works its changes even at the cellular level. Researchers from the growing field of neuroaesthetics are developing arts-based prevention and wellness programs as part of mainstream health care. The arts, says British epidemiologist Daisy Fancourt, “have a profound effect on our mental and physical health, both on the prevention of problems but also in managing and treating symptoms.”

Opening up the literary canon has too often led students to a disingenuous relativism among authors and literary works. To insist that some writers are better than others is no shame; undergraduates themselves can tell the difference between what is inspirational and what’s not. Once, in an upper-level class on European theater history, after reading John Dryden’s The Conquest of Granada by the Spaniards and George Lillo’s lachrymose The London Merchant, we read Georg Büchner’s drama Woyzeck. Said one student, “It makes everything up till now seem like it was written by a child.”

If the study of literature is to have a future, students must return to those foundational works that (as Camille Paglia once described them) are “so complex and elusive that they have haunted generation after generation.” We all know their names; they’re not hard to find. One can debate whether undergraduates should read George Eliot or Thomas Hardy, Ernest Hemingway or Toni Morrison, for any of these authors would qualify as “foundational” in their time and place. But Anthony Bourdain or J. K. Rowling? How could those in charge of undergraduate education ever think that a 20-year-old who reads Kitchen Confidential or Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone will profit as widely and deeply as one who studies the poems of Robert Frost?

A good life must be based partly on empathy. I knew a young man, a graduate student, who’d had the awful misfortune to lose a child; for months afterward, he told me, the one thing he could read—the only thing he could read—was Samuel Beckett’s prose poem Lessness. He read it, he said, over and over and over again, hours and days on end—“Grey sky no cloud no sound no stir earth ash grey sand. Little body same grey as the earth sky ruins only upright. Ash grey all sides earth sky as one all sides endlessness”—finding in Beckett’s weird, bleak words neither answer nor absolution, no, certainly not those, but possibly some measure of solace, or something close to it: “True refuge long last scattered ruins same grey as the sand. Never was but grey air timeless no stir not a breath. Blank planes sheer white calm eye light of reason all gone from mind. Never but in vanished dream the passing hour long short. Four square all light sheer white blank planes all gone from mind.”

When you’re reading Lessness or Woyzeck, you’re learning to think and feel like somebody else. Even as medical students are being taught to study representations of people in paintings and novels in order to become better observers of real people with real health problems, the study of literature especially, with its extensive lore and legend, its vast landscape of heroes and villains, its sophisticated vocabulary and expressive subtleties, its implicit moral and social commentary, its mysterious power to make us laugh with Falstaff or weep for Hecuba, can help us practice better, more thoughtful versions of ourselves. We put down a novel or a poem, and for a few hours afterward, things seem more sharply in focus, or we are moved to empathies or a sensibleness that would otherwise have been dormant.

The astonishing thing about literature is that the people we meet there, the settings and circumstances we encounter, have an appeal and an intensity that shape our deepest sense of self. “Have I ever loved a human being,” wrote the novelist and poet John Updike, “as purely as I loved Mickey Mouse?” To promote the study of literature in this way might not bring students flocking back to the major, nor set them on a single career path, but—no small thing—it might at least promise them (as Harold Bloom once put it) training in “the augmentation of consciousness, perhaps the most authentic of healthy modes.”