What’s Wrong With English Literature?

There’s a lot wrong with English Literature. It’s pretentious and exclusionary, it misunderstands the creative process, and it ignores the indefinable aspect of all good literature. Those problems have an affect on students like me.

Like most people who liked reading and writing more than math and science in high school, it seemed inevitable that I would major in English Literature in college. But the English classes I took left me frustrated and unfulfilled. 

I often found myself so irritated during an English lecture that I stopped taking notes. Sometimes, I just wrote, “whoops, forgot to listen,” in the Google Doc and played Wordle until the hour was over.

During discussions, I had to force myself to pay attention to my classmates. In almost every class, I just barely scraped the bottom of the participation barrel—and only because I needed the points.

By the end of my first year of college, I knew that an English major was not right for me. Since then, I’ve fallen in love with Ancient Greek and Roman History and have declared it as my major instead of English.

But recently, I’ve been wondering what it is about English that bothers me so much. I still love reading and writing. My professors were good. I liked my classmates. I enjoyed most of the books we were assigned.

Yet I was still unhappy with my English classes. They made me angry. It’s taken some time, but I think I know why.

Misunderstanding the Creative Process

In every English class I’ve ever taken, deep symbolic and thematic meaning has been attributed to tiny textual details. Many of those meanings are legitimate. The green light that Gatsby sees represents the American Dream. Frankenstein’s monster is like the biblical Adam, a creation spurned by his creator. Ahab’s white whale is a symbol of the destructive force of nature. All of that makes sense.

But the instinct to attribute great meaning to small details goes too far when the details just aren’t that important. Sometimes, the red dress isn’t a suggestion of the character’s power of sexual manipulation. Sometimes, it’s just a red dress.

A big part of studying English Lit is finding small textual details and using them to support abstract theories. It’s like a game to see who can suggest the most interesting interpretation. But by playing that game, we detach ourselves from the reality of the literature.

We keep forgetting that real people write books, people who don’t have every single detail planned out in their heads before they start writing. Even if a writer has an extensive outline, their first draft will be very different from their final draft.

Writing, particularly novel-writing, is a non-linear and erratic process. Like all creative endeavors, it develops organically from the bottom up: one part grows, another withers, a third needs to be completely cut off.

But we never consider the nature of the creative process when we study English. The assumption that every detail in a piece of literature holds deep, hidden meaning ignores the reality of writing.

Of course, it’s still important to look for hidden meanings in literature. There’s a lot to gain from analyzing little details. But we should also remember that writers are human, the creative process is fluid, and not every detail is a secret code.

The Intellectual Club of English Lit

In my Freshman Year 18th and 19th Century Lit class, we were discussing the synecdoche (suh-nek-duh-kee, a figure of speech where a part represents the whole) used in Alexander Pope’s poem “Rape of the Lock.”

But when a student who hadn’t studied English Lit before raised his hand to give his opinion, he mispronounced synecdoche as “synec-douche.”

People chuckled and he quickly fixed his mistake. Class moved on. All things considered, it wasn’t an important moment. But it made an impression on me.

The word “synecdoche,” like so many English Lit words, isn’t part of the average person’s vocabulary. It’s only useful in the context of studying literature.

Like most people in that discussion, I laughed at his mistake. But I wasn’t trying to make fun of him. I didn’t think he was dumb.

If somebody had mispronounced “synecdoche” outside of an English class, I doubt I would have laughed as hard as I did. That trivial mispronunciation was only funny because of the nature of the English Lit community.

The problem is that English Lit is its own, insular intellectual club. It operates with a specific kind of jargon and shared patterns of speech. 

For example: “The protagonist’s arc is underscored by a pervasive intertextuality,” is a jargon-filled way of saying that the journey of the main character is shaped by references to other books.

Synecdoche. Aphorism. Bildungsroman. Antihero. Pastiche. Someone is always “struck by that moment when…” Something is always “really interesting because…” That phrasing always “suggests a sort of a Biblical effect in which…” and so on.

Being in the club of English Lit means speaking that jargon and presenting thoughts in that pondering, hypothetical structure. That’s how English operates.

The jargon is often useful. It would be impractical to say “a small thing that represents a larger whole” every time you wanted to discuss synecdoche.

But it’s also dense, overcomplicated, and overused. And it builds walls around the intellectual club of English Lit.

If you don’t speak the jargon by the time you’re in college, it’s hard to learn it. And if you do try to learn it, but make a little mistake like mispronouncing the word “synecdoche,” people might laugh.

Not Recognizing the Indefinable

On September 16th, 2024, around 5 PM, I was in my Modes of Writing class. We were analyzing the short story, “No One’s a Mystery,” by Elizabeth Tallent.

I was feeling frustrated that day, so I wrote in my lecture notes: It’s just a good story—if you think too hard about it, and break it down, you ruin it.

We study literature from the top down. First, we read it on our own. Then our professor breaks it into digestible pieces. Then, in discussion sections, we work with our classmates to separate one or two of those pieces into their components. In an essay, we break down the pieces of a particular line or moment.

The top-down method is effective. We learn a lot by picking a piece of literature apart. But we lose something too.

It’s almost impossible to define why a piece of writing is good. You can point to its broken-down components—rich metaphors, intriguing diction, symbolic weight. But a piece of writing can have all of those components and more, and still be bad. 

Even more strangely, most people, whether they’re students of literature or not, can tell the difference between a bad piece of writing and a good one.

There’s something indefinable, but completely recognizable, that makes quality literature quality. When we study literature exclusively by breaking it into pieces, we ignore that indefinable quality and miss something vital—in the same way that you’d miss something by describing the parts of a joke instead of telling it.

The broken-down pieces are important and worth studying. But to really understand what we’re reading, we have to look at more than that. We have to take a step back and recognize the indefinable quality which all great literature has.

How This Affects English Lit

In August, 2018, The National Center for Educational Statistics reported that the number of English Lit majors between 2013 and 2018 had declined by 25%.

That decline is part of a larger trend: students are progressively finding English Lit a less interesting major, and English departments are shrinking.

This might be due to the generally held belief, even among English majors, that an English degree is useless in the modern job market. There’s a running joke that all English majors will become English teachers because that’s all they’re suited for.

There are clearly a lot of complicated things at play in the shrinking of the English major. Many of them may be difficult to change.

What we can change, though, is how English Lit works. As we have it now, English Lit frustrates and alienates people like me. But if we reformed it to better address the problems I’ve outlined, we might be able to slow down the decline of the English major—or at least keep it from worsening.

When we study literature, we shouldn’t ignore the ineffable, indefinable quality which makes a good literature good. We should cut down on our technical jargon so newcomers can participate. And we should incorporate an understanding of the complexity of the creative process into our analyses.

If we do all that, maybe the doors will open a smidge wider. And maybe people like me actually will major in English, like they always thought they would.