The Decline and Fall of the English Major

Someone else already said it, but I do believe that that the biggest reason for the difference in quality between old art and new art is that old art has had the benefit of the filter of history; for the most part, the bad stuff got thrown out and good stuff survived. In geek's terms, you might say that the old stuff that remains is sturgeon's 10%, but that 90% of the new stuff is, in fact, crud.

Not so much. Bach and Mozart were employed by quite wealthy individuals to compose and perform pieces for nobility and aristocracy. The only way the proletariat population would have heard their work would have been in a church-setting of some sort, probably performed by someone with very little skill or training.

>"we never got to hear Bach's time crap music"

More than you might imagine, actually. While folk songs were rarely written down in any sort of musical-notation there were (and doubtlessly still are) scholars who worked tirelessly at uncovering these old works as best they could and those were the real 'dance music' of the era. Songs written on the same 4-chord pattern we use this very day and age. Songs about love, loss, friends, family, etc. Typically upbeat and always set to a beat that you could sway your hips to. Instrumentation would have been based on either a piano, flute, or that century's particular flavor of stringed instrument.

It's been a good while since I studied this subject, I'll see if I can dig up a source for this info tonight.

Studying a language (with its multiple aspects, i.e. culture, literature, linguistics) opens up a variety of uses, from a cultural planning and administration perspective, a way into publishing, academia, teaching, consulting etc.

If you think all of the humanities is bullshitting your way through by espousing hollow phrases about "the bourgeoisie's consumerism", then you, frankly have not gotten the point. The interesting thing isn't "what the author believes" or even "what the author meant". This already shows the fundamental limitedness of the insights gained, which are the insights of "having taken a course in literature as an undergrad once".

> "After you've mastered the pseudointellectual bemused sneer"

Maybe this is just me being pseudointellectually bemused and sneering, however, I think we should probably think more about the bourgeois consumerism and might even come to the point where we can make the leap from "once upon a time an author wrote..." to our own life and our own time and society.

Your use of anecdote is certainly well chosen for HN and will resonate with the "innovating crowd" here, most of which do not see that there is a difference in approach and method between "appreciating a book" and studying it. At the very least since the 70s (and arguably earlier, depending on place and orientation), a study of literature or language is a study of a culture. There is a good reason why many of the more eminent philosophers that are still regarded as meaningful today dedicated so much time to literature, music or the arts. Literature lets us gain a deeper understanding of the social forces at a given time, prevalent and deviant opinions, habits, everyday life and social experience.

What you know as English class is a class in close reading, which bears little resemblance to research and the knowledge gained.

I am well aware that this is going to be unpopular here, especially given your position. Yet I find it slightly worrying how HN brings together the arrogance of engineering with a wider disregard not just for the academy (which is fine), but cultivates a particular form of anti-intellectualism that is all to prevalent in the US (and also elsewhere, though the US seem to particularly stand out). At least I would like to voice my dissenting opinion and try to convey that things might not be quite so simple.