The joys of English literature

To The Times

The English literature degree may have fallen out of fashion, as James Marriott claims (“Eng Lit is doomed by lack of prestige”), but as a novelist I wonder whether some of the blame for this can be laid at the door of the media. The BBC has decided that contemporary fiction is fit to adapt only if it features lissom teenagers having rampant sex. Book coverage in most newspapers has shrunk to a quarter of its number of pages in the 1980s. As most of us earn less than the minimum wage, to write literary fiction in Britain takes a level of resolve that approaches lunacy. Literature is not about entryism into a social elite, as Marriott suggests, or forming “the tolerant, self-critical, ‘morally mature’ citizens of a liberal democracy”. It is about joy, and these days there is little of that left. Amanda Craig, author, The Golden Rule

To The Times

Regarding all the fuss about closing down English literature courses, reading should be for pleasure, not something to study and be moralistic about. Second only to the uppishness of English literature professors is the unpleasantness of the writers themselves. Kingsley Amis boasted to Philip Larkin about how the point of pushing words around was to admit to and explore the average human being’s shadiness, dishonesty, cowardice, brutality, arrogance, snobbery, lechery, perversity and other “generally shameful things”. I love all that, of course. Dr Roger Lewis, former junior research fellow in English language and literature, Oxford University; Hastings

To The Times

Frank McCourt gave perhaps the most robust defence of English literature courses when asked by his students why they should read Chinua Achebe’s Things Fall Apart. “You will read it for the same reasons why your parents waste their money on your piano lessons,” he replied. “So you won’t be a boring little shite the rest of your life.”

Andrew Copeman, teacher of English,

Latymer Upper School, London W6