Welcome to the English Department at Northeastern!
The rise of mass literacy in English was central to the creation of a modern democratic culture in which all members of society could have a voice. That meant having a say in shaping the values of a culture, being represented as vital members of society, and using writing to shape individual identities.
To create a canon of modern literatures in English—rather than ancient classics in Greek and Latin—was an act of severing adherence to the past and insisting that a new middle class would make its interests, stories, and words heard, supplanting an aristocratic culture of belles lettres. The arrival of this new world is written out in the 18th-century English novel Pamela, in which the chatty, slang-peppered voice of a servant girl insists on her right to control access to her own body. In the pre-Civil War U.S., Frederick Douglass’s Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass, An American Slave, Written by Himself, grounded hisjourney from enslavement to liberty in the process of learning to read and the accomplishment of the autobiography itself. Each book ties writing in English to the right of the individual to have a say in their own life.
Canonicity remains a fundamental issue because in English who and what should be read, remembered, and discussed is a perennial topic of debate, not a stone-carved record of authority. In the modern academy, the last decades of the twentieth century saw an explosion of arguments about who makes it onto a syllabus or into a curriculum, leading to a major expansion in the study of writing by people of color, women, queer and trans people, and of Anglophone writing outside of Britan and the U.S. Over and over, to have one’s writing preserved, interpreted, and discussed has been central to being recognized as part of a democratic world. The making of choices about what to read, what to think about a text, and how to create a history of writing is essential to the liberal principle that individuals are free to read, think, and write as they see fit—not as an authority has decreed. Hence the endless variety of interpretations and debate in the discipline!
Since the invention of the telegraph, the sense of modern humanity as fundamentally shaped in our verbal literacy has been in a complex dance with technology. In 1964, Marshall McLuhan wrote that we had entered an era of electric media which worked entirely differently from that of print (which he liked to call the Gutenberg era). He observed, “Our highly literate societies are at a loss as they encounter the new structures of opinion and feeling that result from instant and global information.” In some moments, he prophesied the collapse of the democratic world grounded in print; in others he argued that a culture founded in literacy could productively meet and engage electric culture and thereby live on into the future. Anticipating arguments today that in the world of A.I., humanistic education is more important than ever, he wrote: “Paradoxically, automation makes liberal education mandatory.”
McLuhan has had his boosters and detractors over the years, yet his account of the overlay of a print-based culture with a digital one remains useful. We live in a culture whose humanistic, democratic, and liberal values are tied not only to print and writing but to the existence of modern literature and the culture of debate about its meanings and values that forms the discipline of English. And yet, we also live in a culture of digital images, videos, and newsfeeds, all organized through platforms and algorithms that harvest data from our behavior and which operate in a realm beyond our human capacity to directly apprehend. Some theorists argue we are in a post-representational, even a post-literate, world, in which the experiences, thoughts, and self-understandings of human beings have become irrelevant in the operations of a digital world.
Whither, then, English and the humanities? We argue for the values of freedom, individual agency, and deliberation about meaning and value through words and representation. And we argue for finding ways to enhance and extend that verbal culture by building an ethical and meaningful relationship with the digital aspects of our world. We speak about how novels work, and how Tiktok videos work; we look at how writing is different when it comes off a printing press or a screen; and we think about the historical differences in cultures of English across geographic, political, and technological contexts. The humanities matter now more than ever, and in a whole new way we are charting together.
