"AI and the Death of Literary Criticism"

A very interesting piece by Prof. Thomas Balazs in Quillette. An excerpt:

When ChatGPT can analyse Hamlet as well as any grad student, we might reasonably ask, “What is the point of writing papers on Hamlet?” Literary analysis, after all, is not like building houses, feeding people, or practising medicine. Even compared to its sister disciplines in the humanities (e.g., history or philosophy) the study of literature serves little practical need. And, besides, when machines can build houses as easily as people, we won’t need people to build houses either.

So, why do we teach English literature (or “language arts,” as some secondary schools now call it) at all? According to the nineteenth-century British literary critic Mathew Arnold, the purpose of studying and teaching literature is “to know the best that is known and thought in the world, and by in its turn making this known, to create a current of true and fresh ideas.” … English literature was, in truth, a substitute for religion. We wanted people to be good, but we no longer believed in God. Instead, we believed in Shakespeare, Milton, and eventually Toni Morrison. Until we didn’t.

It’s always been problematic, though, this idea that literature makes you a better person. Besides the obvious counterfactuals—the allied soldiers allegedly found copies of Johann Wolfgang von Goethe’s works in the desk drawers of Nazi prison guards when they liberated the camps—there were the problems that always arise when you try to push your religion on other people.

Our religion was literature, and like any people of true faith, we deeply believed in it, thought it was essential, thought everyone must be saved through it. The remarkable thing was that we somehow convinced American college presidents of the idea, but then again, many of them, like University of Chicago president Robert Hutchins, creator of the “Common Core” and advocate of “Great Books,” were members of the same religion. Not all countries make students of mathematics and engineering take literature courses, but in the United States we do. So for nearly a century, we evangelised our religion to college students, some of whom were already in love with reading and therefore happy to worship at the Temple of Literature. Many were not, but, nonetheless, we rammed Shakespeare, Herman Melville, and Toni Morrison down their throats—to make them better people.

That doesn’t mean that it necessarily stayed with them…. Some students of the right temperament and with the right intellectual predilections are drawn to the Temple of Literature, but most are not. For most, it is like going to Sunday school—they endure it reluctantly and quickly forget any lessons learned.

But that’s just an excerpt; here’s the whole thing.

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