How to Justify the Study of Literature

In a widely discussed and very disheartening New Yorker piece this spring, Nathan Heller reported on the state of the English major and found it wanting. Perhaps the most alarming moment in the long essay came during an interview with James Shapiro, a professor at Columbia University and a prominent Shakespeare scholar, who confessed his doubts about the future of the English major based on his own declining reading habits. “I probably read five novels a month until the 2000s,” he told Heller. “If I read one a month now, it’s a lot. That’s not because I’ve lost interest in fiction. It’s because I’m reading a hundred Web sites. I’m listening to podcasts.” When even a prominent scholar acknowledges not only the difficulty of teaching literature to undergraduates, but also the decline of his own reading habits, the state of literary studies is dire.