Why Teach and Study English? The New Yorker

Bill throng dealt with this point wondrously once, in lecture somewhat whether baseb in all game game is, as so many passel within it insist, rattling a bank line, and non a recreation at all. Well, jam pointed out, if the boast quest in baseball analyzed, baseball would die; and if the business of baseball diedwhich, condition all those vacant ringside seat at Yankee Stadium, doesnt seem impossiblebut the sporting interest persisted, baseball would be altered, but it wouldnt die. It would just reconstitute itself in a different way. And so with side divisions: if we unopen down all position department in the country, loud, good, expert, or at to the lowest degree hyper-enthusiastic readers would still emerge. matchless sees this happening already, in the steady momentum of education groups and books clubs which form, in effect, a anatomy of archipelago of amateur English departments. The woman with the nonebook computer and the detailed parsing of how eac h(prenominal) love contact echoes each new(prenominal) in Swanns guidance is already an English prof manqu. (Or, rather, a comp-lit professor.) If we abolished English major league tomorrow, Stephen Greenblatt and Stanley Fish and Helen Vendler would not suddenly be freed to use their smarts to parachute making quantum proton-nuclear reactor cargo transporters, or whatever; they would all migrate somewhere where they could still clack Shakespeare and Proust and the rest. Indeed, before on that point were English professors, there were English professors. Dr. Johnson was the superlative English professor who ever livedthe gravid cham of literature, to whom all turned, Harold prime quantity plus-plusand he neer had a post, let alone tenure, and his doctorate was one of those honorary jobs they give you, by and by a living of literary labor, for exquisitely Effort. The best reading and talking about books was, in the past, frequently done by people who had to execute their living doing something else narrowly related: Hazlitt by writing motley journalism, Sydney Smith by pretending to be a clergyman.