A couple days back, I watched this discussion from someone I subscribe to about the purpose of reading and studying literature. It made me laugh when she brought up the claim that lit study has been inundated by identity politics, since what is writing about even if not identity and our place within the world. I came of age while New Criticism was gasping its last few dying breath and more cultural studies based approaches were sneaking in. While many of my white and male professors, though not all, were reluctant to look much beyond what was there in the text, my abundance of amazing women undergrad lit profs (as well as some theater history instructors) were bringing more progressive discussions and criticisms into the classroom. I got to take courses from people who taught seminars like Psychology and the Novel or Southern Women's Writing. It continued in grad school, where my focus continued on women writers--mostly novels and drama--culminating in one of the most rewarding classes, Writing as a Woman's Profession.
In classrooms, we weren't just talking about he texts, but the world and the persona that created them. The movements and structures that supported or destroyed them. It was much more holistic than the experience other English majors I've encountered here and there who were my chronological peers in the mid to late 90s.
With the dwindling of humanities departments and decisions to cut majors like creative writing, even in arts-focused colleges (ahem, Columbia) due to funding, the English major is a dying breed. And yet, studying literature as a subject is how we study stories we tell about and to ourselves (I feel its very similar in the same ways we study art history or cinema, just in different forms with different tools. ) Columbia is also axing the Cultural Studies major which I remember was new at one point in the mid aughts, which sees artists art and media more a larger mass in which all of it--literature, art, mythology,, music, entertainment--is all something we can take something from (and actually seems even more ripe for study with the rise of internet culture and social media.)
I've always believed that if I hadn't studied lit, I'd have probably wound up in something like history or folklore, which scratches many of the same itches and has a lot of overlap with the literary arts. These subjects are also about stories, though one "unofficial" and the other "official" (depending on who is writing and telling the story, which is also a subject worthy of study.) I think now i have greater understanding of texts--be they written, oral, visual, or purely for entertainment purposes only (though this is also suspect.) Some of the greatest pieces of art were meant as entertainment --Greek tragedies, Shakespeare, a lot of poetry and more literary writing (I'm thinking the Romantic poets, who were the rock stars of their time, or someone like Dickens who had a huge serialization readership during his lifetime.)
So if everything is text, the pursuit for studying them, whatever medium, is a gesture toward meaning making and understanding, something which it seems would be even more necessary now than it was nearly 30 years ago when I entered college and enrolled in my first lit classes.
