"When Theory Killed Literary Truth, It Doomed the Discipline"

"Fifty years ago, a university couldn't call itself 'Tier One' unless it had a renowned English department. No more: Abysmal enrollment numbers in the humanities at such universities prove the irrelevance of literary study. My colleagues around the country bemoan the decline, but they blame the wrong things. English did not fall because a bunch of conservatives trashed the humanities as a den of political correctness. It didn't fall because it lost funding or because business leaders promoted STEM fields. It fell because the dominant schools of thought stopped speaking about the truth of literature. Once the professors could no longer insist, 'You absolutely must read Dryden, Pope, and Swift—they are the essence of wit and discernment'; when they lost the confidence to say that nothing reveals the social complexity of the colonial situation better than Nostromo; if they couldn't assure anyone that Hawthorne's sentences showed the American language in its most exquisite form, they lost the competition for majors. Students stopped caring about literature because the professors stopped believing in its promises of revelation and delight."

Mark Bauerlein at First Things criticizes the state of English Literature.