English, as Stefan Collini observes in his wry and compendious new history of the discipline, Literature and Learning, tends to inspire an extravagant attachment rarely associated with, for example, geography or chemistry. Half the labour of writing a history of English must lie in gathering encomia to the subject by its besotted disciples. To the patrician epicures and monied amateurs who ushered the subject into universities at the beginning of the 20th century (men who fondled poems like antique clocks and ranked novelists like vintages of claret), the study of literature was “a glory of the universe” or “the spring which unlocks the hidden life”. For the evangelists of the critic FR Leavis and charismatic secondary school teachers of the Sixties it was a moral crusade that pitted humanity against the spirit-killing incursions of machine civilisation: English had “life-enhancing powers”, and its study was essential if a modern person hoped to retain “any capacity for a humane existence”. Collini winces fastidiously at some of these “soaring affirmations”. And indeed, such confident panegyrics read strangely in an age when the subject is cowed, apologetic and shrinking. Today, English is reduced to doing its pathetic, blundering best to ape the sciences, grinding scholars through the Research Excellence Framework and promising students “transferable skills”, that mad but unkillable doctrine beloved of prospectus writers which holds that studying ecocritical perspectives on early Shelley is useful preparation for making PowerPoints at PWC.
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