What is literature good for, apart from providing employment to literature professors? How is it taught and how should it be? And why are enrollments in literature courses steadily declining? If you listen to the academics, you will discover that students’ decreasing interest reflects the pernicious values of capitalist society. In my experience, students offer rather different and less flattering explanations.

Often enough, undergraduates do not see the point of what their classes teach. To be sure, they know that they are supposed to be “well-rounded,” a term to which they can attach no clear meaning beyond a prophylactic against nerdity. They recognize that the social class to which they belong or aspire demands an antidote to cultural illiteracy. For such reasons, Shakespeare and Tolstoy have become entirely medicinal. They exemplify Mark Twain’s definition of a classic as something everyone wants to have read but no one wants to read.

The way literature is typically taught does not make students want to read outside class or even to finish assigned works without the aid of Spark Notes. Inasmuch as English professors typically structure courses on the implicit assumption that everyone either will, or at least should, become an English professor, students’ boredom makes sense. Instead of a lively encounter with ideas or a valuable lesson to consider throughout life, students learn to parrot platitudes and juggle jargon. As James Sloane Allen observes in Worldly Wisdom, they are taught to value not thinking, but a “kind