Why You Should Study Literature

STEM isn't the only answer

Photo by Henry Be on Unsplash

This week, I watched The Chair on Netflix. If you haven’t seen it, it’s about a woman who becomes the chairperson of the English department at an Ivy League college. During the show, we see her trying to save the department. Enrollment numbers are dwindling, and the department is stuck between an outdated cannon, ancient bureaucracy, and a student body that wants to usher in more inclusive reading lists and leadership. The English department finds itself wondering, “Why do we study literature?”

This is a question that hits home for me. Not just because I have an undergraduate degree in Comparative Literature (circa 1992) but also because my daughter is studying Creative Writing and we both get judged for that. Other parents wonder why would pay all that money for a “useless” degree; fellow STEM students accuse the Humanities students of being “slackers.”

So why do we study literature? Because it can save us. We live in a divided world. Most countries are being torn into between conservative and liberal views. No one is willing to listen to one another, both sides refuse to see the other’s viewpoints.

I can’t help but think (and maybe this is just me and my literature degree) that one of the reasons we are so divided is because we have abandoned literature courses in school. One of the biggest complaints my fellow scholars and I had when we were in college was that our field of study was subjective, leading us to accuse professors of grading us based on their own pet theories. But guess what? That taught us to go to the professors and give them a well thought out argument, with research sources, that our theory was worth considering. Sometimes they agreed, sometimes they didn’t and sometimes we found common ground. Thesis, Antithesis, Synthesis was the name of the game.

Literary critic and theorist, Roland Barthes, published an essay in 1967 called “The Death of the Author”. In it he claimed that the practice of interpreting the meaning of a piece of literature based on the background and beliefs of the author should be pushed aside in favor of the reader’s interpretation. When we read a work, we should not try to figure out the author’s message, rather we should produce a personal meaning from the text.

We all come from diverse backgrounds, cultures, religions, and socioeconomic statuses, so to expect that we could read and interpret the text in the same way is a lesson in futility. It is much more exciting to come to class, hear a traditional interpretation (or a professor’s theory) and then combine that with our own interpretation.

I once had a professor explain the theory by asking each to describe what we see in our mind when she said the road. The answers ranged from dirt roads in the middle of nowhere, to suburban streets, lined with houses. None of us pictured the same thing when we read or hear the word road.

By practicing this, we learned the joy of not only occasionally agreeing with one another, but also the pleasure of experiencing discourse. We learned how to back up our interpretations, as well as listen to others. We didn’t always agree, but we could often see why a person thought a certain way and learned to appreciate another’s experiences. We learned about one another’s backgrounds and began to understand why we might interpret situations differently.

This doesn’t just happen in college classrooms. We can sharpen these skills in book clubs. We can bring new books to one another. Half the group can love a book, the other half might hate it. Sometimes, the haters begin to see the merits of the book despite their distaste for the text. After a few glasses of wine and a deep discussion about a book, we all leave as friends and maybe a few things we hadn’t thought about the first time we read the book.

So, my wish for the world today is to read more literature and talk about it with your friends. Read different books, from the classics to the latest best sellers. Learn how to argue your interpretations of the book in a way that allows for the idea that you may be right or wrong. Realize that somewhere in the middle is where the truth lies. Then go into the world and apply those skills to political discussions, social media posts, and news articles. We must continue to study literature, to learn how to think deeply, interpret text, and be open to alternate interpretations. The world depends on it.