Is studying great authors doomed to failure as fewer students take English literature courses at university? | Rachel Cooke

Ah, A-level results week, and how strangely nice it is not to do them yourself, not to have children in the game, and nieces and nephews who are not yet old enough. Out walking with my headphones on, I listen with pleasure to a triumphant candidate appearing on the BBC The world in unison: Evie from Southend, who seems delighted as hell. What will she do now, asks the presenter, who also has a smile on his face. She doesn’t waste a second. Everything is sorted. In the autumn, she will go to Durham University to read… English literature.

This makes me stop in my tracks. What? Surely everyone knows that English literature is dying. Since 2012, the number of students reading it at university, as I once did, has fallen by more than a third; staff are being laid off, departments are closing, scholarships are absent. I have just read a new “major” study of the poet WH Auden, and, as I write in my review, its size is gargantuan – you could more easily fit a hardback edition of Delia Smith’s Complete Cooking Class in your purse than this book – heralds it as a relic before it’s even published. No, STEM subjects are where they’re at now, and my amazement at Evie’s “passion” for her course is going to take a full circle around the park to fade.

What effect will such a disappearance have on our culture? It is probably beyond my ability to answer this question, but I will say this: the academic novel is doomed – and I am not alone in thinking so. The New StateJohn Mullan, professor of English at UCL, mourned his passing in an essay that begins with the recent Caledonian Routeand dates back to Mary McCarthy’s 1952 satire, The Groves of the Academy. Beyond the painful commemorations – RIP David Lodge’s Professor Zapp, one of my favourite characters in all of literature – it’s quite funny to listen to an academic lament that no one really knows how to make fun of him.

How to shop in 2024

In midlife, we’re told it’s good to have new experiences: advice I kept in mind when my middle niece, Edith, took me shopping last week. Oh, what a brave new world, full of retail stores! First, a place called Brandy Melville, where clothes only come in one size (which is about the size of a handkerchief). Next, Glossier, where mascara and lip gloss are ordered via iPad and delivered to the customer via an endlessly spinning wheel. And finally, Subdued, whose basement gave me a brief feeling (no more handkerchiefs).

In return, I also offered her a new experience in the form of chocolate ice cream, a treat unknown to this 13-year-old girl, and one that we both immensely deserved after our hot and sweaty fieldwork at the end (Also (late, for me) capitalism.

Instant

At the Courtauld Gallery there is an exhibition by the British photographer Roger Mayne. I love his work: his human subjects have a warmth that always leaves me feeling uplifted, even if their surroundings are dark. For us, this exhibition turned out to be a particular pleasure. Years ago, we bought a print of a Mayne photograph called Children in a bombed-out building, Bermondsey, 1954 – and suddenly, the same image was in front of us, on the wall. What to do? How to mark this amazing moment? You guessed it. After looking over my two shoulders, I lifted my phone and… One more for the cloud, if not for posterity.