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Commentary
Language and literature in the information economy: the state of English, English and the state
Abstract
The impact of colonialism and empire and then of transport, logistics, advertising, media, cinema, radio, tourism, and the internet extended the global reach of English. With 1.13 billion speakers, one in seven in the world now has some English competence. Within this global circulation of English, we have the global teaching of English language and literature, most recently captured for Britain in a June 2023 British Academy report, the relevant findings of which are the decline in the information age and under neoliberal governments of university students reading English Literature and the rise of Creative Writing and world literatures in translation. I distinguish global from world Englishes as the hegemonic language of global trade and finance from more bottom-up Englishes mixed with other languages on the streets; discuss the state of English studies globally; and propose decolonising and denationalising the curriculum. The notion of national languages, identifying a language with national unity, is a very modern idea, only about three centuries old and arising with the formation of modern nation-states. We might use the lived histories of global and world Englishes to transcend both romantic revolutionary and far-right exclusionary nationalisms in literary and language studies in favour of more cosmopolitan, multilingual, and convivial approaches.
Keywords
global Englishworld Englishlanguageliteraturetranslationworld literaturescreative writingdecolonisingcosmopolitanisminformation age In summer 2023, under the auspices of the International Association of University Professors of English (IAUPE), I used the occasion of two British Academy publications, the field-defining Rethinking Multilingualism: Education, Policy and Practice in Africa (Gibson & Reilly 2022), and the British Academy’s report English Studies Provision in UK Higher Education (British Academy 2023), to bring together leaders of English Language and Literature Studies around the world in a conference and publication on the futures of English studies internationally (Gagnier 2023). English Studies emerged in Britain as an honours degree in 1859 at the University of London, but it had been preceded in India in the 1830s by the Raj’s programme to create an Anglicised native elite. In India, they taught Shakespeare, Milton, Johnson, Richardson, Goldsmith, Gray, Addison, and Pope, among others. In Britain, the degree was well established by the early 20th century as focussed on particular texts and authors, the Practical Criticism associated with I.A. Richards, William Empson, and F.R. Leavis (or the New Criticism, in the US, associated with Cleanth Brooks, John Crowe Ransom, and others). From the mid-century, text- and author-based close-reading was challenged by Marxist (Workers Educational Associations (WEAs) associated with Raymond Williams), feminist, structuralist, poststructuralist, and postcolonial theoretical approaches. And from the 1960s Creative Writing courses began to appear (British Academy 2023: foreword, pp. 3–6; see also Guillory 2022). Today, popular pathways through English degrees include Creative Writing, world literatures in English and in translation, ecocriticism and environmentalism, gender and sexuality, digital humanities, and medical humanities.
These fluctuations in the discipline are simultaneous with the explosion of English as a global and world language, both discipline and language imbricated in geopolitical forces. I use the term global English to refer to hegemonic processes driven by first colonial and then neoliberal or market-driven, profit-oriented expansion and world Englishes for more inclusive, bottom-up processes that linguists call translanguaging or multilingualisms.1 Rosemary Salomone’s The Rise of English: Global Politics and the Power of Language provides useful statistics: in terms of global numbers, the first language learned at home is (1) Mandarin Chinese, (2) Spanish, (3) English, (4) Hindi. But English’s 1.13 billion speakers worldwide is greater than Mandarin’s 1.11 billion, and English exceeds on the internet with 1.19 billion users compared to Chinese 888 million (Salomone 2022: 13). The adult market in English learners is estimated to be worth 61 billion US$ with 1.4 billion learners worldwide, and 400,000,000 English learners in the People’s Republic of China (PRC) alone (Salomone 2022: 343).
Since 2000, global or corporate English has grown as the leading language of trade and finance, and it is interdependent with multilingual world Englishes on the streets. Lenovo (PRC), Samsung (South Korea), Honda (Japan), Audi and Lufthansa (Germany), Nokia (Finland), Heineken (Netherlands), Electrolux (Sweden), and Renault (France) have English as their ‘neutral company language’ (Salomone 2022: 347; see Phillipson 2008, 2009). Salomone cites Rǻkuten, Japan’s largest online retailer, who shifted to global English like this:
In 2010, the company’s celebrity CEO, Hiroshi Mikitani, announced that from that day forward, workers at all levels would gradually move toward English. All meetings, presentations, training sessions, documents, and emails would be in English. The following day, all cafeteria menus and elevator signs switched from Japanese to English. Rakuten sent some of its employees to the United States or the United Kingdom for English immersion classes. Others attended multi-week language programs in the Philippines. Most of the 7100 workers attended onsite language training during the workday. Within two years they would have to score above 650 on the 990-point Test of English for International Communication (TOEIC) or risk being demoted or dismissed. In the meantime, the company would monitor their progress through test scores and monthly reports from managers. (Salomone 2022: 348)
The critical perspective on this global story might be called the field of world Englishes, as it is articulated by linguists sympathetic to decolonising both empire and postcolonial neoliberalism and to provincialising English. Global English for such critics is a Western agenda-setting combination of nationalist and corporate funding. Their view is that after colonialism as an explicit political order was destroyed, an ideology of modernity (progress, development, growth) has sat uneasily with continuing coloniality (massive inequality, poverty, misery, racism, sexism, exploitation of nature and the environment). Within this view, the accumulation of English linguistic capital amounts to the dispossession of other linguistic capital and other speakers (Pennycook 2017; Pennycook & Makoni 2019). Rather than a triumphal global English, these critics promote decolonising cocktails of mixed languages in the lifeworld, English with local characteristics, translanguaging, principled polycentrism, and resourceful multilingual speakers.
In light of such data and such histories, on behalf of the IAUPE, I asked leaders of English Studies in their respective countries to address the following questions about the global futures of English:
Will students raised on social media still read English literature?
What is the role of English literature in the PRC, India, Australasia, the USA?
What is the role of English language in relation to other global and local languages?
What is the role of decolonising efforts?
How do our respective state apparatuses affect language and literature teaching?
The respondents included outgoing and incoming heads of departments at wealthy private universities (Shiv Nadar, University of Tulsa), public institutions like Australian Catholic University (and my own University of Exeter), and very large public institutions like Hunan Normal and Delhi Universities. Their responses were fascinating in both their distinctiveness and their convergences. The decrease in English Literature studies and upsurge in Creative Writing in Britain, the US, and Australia seem to point to a new emphasis on individual expression and subjective consciousness. Yet born-digital students’ appetite for global communication and cosmopolitanism seems universal. Paul Giles from Australia referenced the recent pandemic with ‘It makes no more sense to circumscribe literary scholarship within national boundaries than it would to contain medical research within national parameters’ (Giles 2023a). Due to its history and largely through its openness to English language and literature, the PRC knows much more about the West than the West does about China, probably to all our costs. China is taking the lead in IT-based learning, freely mixing machine translation with the expertise of professional translators. With advances in IT, including AI, virtual reality, and social networking, Wei Ruan, Director of the Centre of Western Studies at Hunan Normal, speculated that foreign language learning may be obsolete in two or three decades but that English literary studies will continue in the PRC because, unlike in the West, there is no rhetoric of economic disadvantage in pursuing them at university (Wei 2024). In the US, extensive decentralisation of education policy and funding, high student debt, and opposition to DEI (Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion) policy appear as ideological battlegrounds, including recent legislation in Texas and Florida banning DEI support. Dennis Denisoff and Laura Stevens argued that critical thinking and subjects aligned with DEI are the enemy of a totalitarian agenda and that they can foster a sense of cosmopolitan citizenry (Denisoff & Stevens 2023). In India/Bharat, the history of English’s relation to regional languages; students’ desire for English language proficiency in conjunction with tutors’ literary training; and the politics and aesthetics of canon formation have given rise to an efflorescence of multilingualism and translation. Sambudha Sen discussed the effects of government interference compromising the very diversity that had energised the universities in the recent past (Sen 2023). If we are no longer educating elites but rather thinking citizens/subjects in technologically enhanced societies, then the global and cosmopolitan perspectives, expertise in language and communication, and cross-disciplinary dialogue typical of English Studies today must surely be worth fighting for.
English studies in Britain today, English and the state
I shall return to the macro-picture of global and world Englishes, but first I summarise the micro-scene of English studies in Britain today, for some of the trends we see in Britain, such as the decline in English Literature BA degrees and growth in Creative Writing and postgraduate studies, are evident elsewhere. In June 2023, the British Academy published English Studies Provision in UK Higher Education (British Academy 2023). It is noteworthy that the report emphasises the international, cosmopolitan nature of current English degrees. It cites the British Quality Assurance Agency benchmark that today in the UK English studies students learn ‘to interpret and interrogate past and present cultures, to anticipate future cultural transformations, and to enhance their ability to understand themselves, other people and our shared world’ (page 19, citing QAA 2023: 3). It also cited a 2022 piece that had resonated with many in the academic community, when the critic and cultural historian Joe Moran characterised the study of English as teaching students to ‘handle stories with care, not just to accept without question their declared intentions and surface features’ (page 19, citing Moran 2022: 9). ‘Those working in English studies in higher education’, the report said, ‘recognise their disciplines as global, deeply interdisciplinary, and engaged with the world’ (19). English Language, as differentiated from English Literature, students and researchers investigate and analyse spoken, written, and multimodal communication and culture and explore the ‘origins and historical development of English, its regional and national expressions, its contemporary global circulation and potential future forms’ (19–20). The sudden and noticeable growth of Creative Writing seems to indicate a new interest in self-expression and creativity, often in the context of Critical Theory. Examples include auto-fiction and creative nonfiction, mixing personal experience with fact or fiction in what Critical Theorists call the self-clarification of the struggles and wishes of the age. At this point in history, an English degree in Britain appears to provide a robust and meaningful degree for participants in the global information economy. Some universities are even developing courses in the communication skills of Influencers and ‘Content-creators’.
Characteristically thorough, the BA report concludes that English graduates in Language and Literature and Creative Writing develop eight of the top ten skills declared as essential for 2025 by the World Economic Forum, including advanced critical thinking and communication skills, problem solving, comfort with ambiguity, creativity, and self-expression. It comprises 100 pages of facts, figures, and graphs, but the key findings are that currently English Literature is the most popular undergraduate degree within English Studies, with 38 per cent of English Studies students enrolled in literature programmes. Creative Writing is the most popular postgraduate subject in English Studies, with 49 per cent of English postgraduates in Creative Writing. Yet while ten years ago English A-levels were the most popular A-level subjects in the UK, in 2022 English dropped out of the top ten.2 This is probably due to the overt promotion of STEM (Science, Engineering, Technology and Mathematics) subjects by instrumental Conservative governments whose ideology is that only the latter increase productivity (hence ‘low-value’ degrees in the Humanities). This ideology has been consistently debunked.3 Yet the corrections are probably ignored because responsible studies also indicate that educated students, as in the USA, are much less likely to vote conservative (Hillman 2023). During 2012–19 the number of first-degree English Studies undergraduates fell by 20 per cent, though they increased in Scotland, with a devolved government, by 12 per cent (see also García et al. 2022). English Literature was the sixth most popular subject in 2017 but twelfth in 2022.
Since the 1990s’ rise of IT, there have been pressures from national governments in the UK, USA, India, the PRC, and Australia for universities to produce graduates adept at gathering and organising data, with all developed nations rapidly expanding their student populations in the interests of supporting economies heavily engaged with digital information technologies. This has been most intense at centralised publicly funded universities where vice-chancellors and presidents respond with ‘managed professionals [who] are employed to execute research agenda dictated by a university’s upper administration in line with government funding priorities’, as Paul Giles states with his customary succinctness (Giles 2023b: 33). According to Giles, genuine liberal education—critical, tolerant, diverse, cosmopolitan—is less threatened in devolved Oxbridge colleges than in such institutions dependent on vice-chancellors responding to government-driven agenda.
Three decades (in the UK) of this kind of instrumentalism have resulted in many Humanities departments closing, especially Modern Languages, with simultaneous threats to English Literature, or at least the replacing of literature degrees with Digital Humanities and Communications courses and the rise of Creative Writing, where students can learn how to express themselves as the aforementioned Influencers and ‘Content-creators’. Yet we see that English Language and Literature, though the latter to a lesser extent, are priorities in Delhi and Beijing. The issue for many of us in English Studies, as we host more international students, is the extent to which (global) instrumental interest in the language translates into the more liberal (worldly) interest in the study of literature and culture. As we see Modern Language and Literature departments in Britain threatened with closure (including departments with Gaelic in Scotland), and as English Literature declines in the face of new media even while English Language and Creative Writing grow, might we combine them for precisely the kind of cosmopolitan, international degrees that might prepare students for the globalised, cosmopolitan world that they are facing and towards which they appear to be more receptive than are many of their elders?
That world is not only globalised, but, sadly, it is also violent, and we might educate students with more tolerant, convivial attitudes than the warmongering of their elders. Just as universities have shifted to high-tech management practices and methods, marginalising liberal education for informed citizenries, so have national militaries and state departments such that the 20th-century military–industrial complex is now a military–industrial–high tech complex. Sociology Professor Anthony King, a specialist on war in the 21st century, is chronicling how global armies are now driven by high-tech and private structures, funded by the likes of Elon Musk (SpaceX), Peter Thiel and Alex Karp (founder and CEO, respectively, of Palantir). While they promise, thanks to data mapping, warfare at the speed of light with laser precision, what is evolving as likely models for the 21st century are rather continuous brutal attritional fights among small forces in cities controlling roads and bridges with high civilian casualties (see Ukraine and Gaza) (King 2023). Like universities, the military are being managed like businesses promoting profit-making technologies. How do we prepare our students for this?
A thought experiment in languages and literatures
Here is a thought experiment. As our students are living in a world of precarity, from unemployment, to housing crisis, to war, to climate change; and as they themselves seem rather to tend toward convivial cosmopolitan internationalism and social networking, might we combine all our languages and literatures (including English) in one department of Languages and Literatures, and revive a now-decolonised liberal education? Here Confucius could meet Socrates, Shakespeare’s Renaissance could meet the Ming dynasty’s (1368–1644 CE) desire (yu) and urban consumerism, the Beautiful and Sublime in Western aesthetics could meet Arabic jamāl and jalāl, the Western Middle Ages the Golden Age of Islam, and all modern literatures could meet in their respective but intertwined processes of modernisation. All taught by language and literature experts in their fields in dialogue with one another. Some of the most stimulating seminars I have attended recently are those in Translation Studies, where the students might work in Chinese, English, isiXhosa, Italian, Kurdish, and Spanish. This is the world we live in, in which English functions in such diverse capacities as linguistic capital and auxiliary in corporate and neoliberal economic processes; as a mixed language in multilingual provincialising, decolonising and cosmopolitan environments; as an official or national language; as a neutral language between another former coloniser and an indigenous or regional language, as in Algeria; as a regional language; as a medium of instruction (MoI). We have national literatures in English but also national literatures in multilingual countries, such as India, for which English translation is typical.
Current infrastructures are against a unified Languages and Literatures faculty in schools and most universities. But there are twelve supercentral languages with over 100 million speakers: Arabic, Chinese, English, French, German, Hindi, Japanese, Malay, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, and Swahili. As teachers become more ethnically and linguistically diverse, and universities more globalised, we might experiment with models that teach in multiple languages and also use translations, in which specialists teach their own languages and time periods but might combine them with other languages/cultures in courses like Global Modernisms. Some Comparative Literature and Culture programmes do something like this, with some even including Communications and Film. If universities want more international students, we can use these principled polycentrisms and resourceful multilingual speakers to nurture a better informed, more cosmopolitan world. Call this World Literatures, de-nationalising, decolonising—the effects might be more peaceful, more worldly, and more humanly productive than the instrumentalism and tech-driven management that has informed recent university management. Historians of technology and economics are turning their attention to ‘machine usefulness’ (MU) as an antidote to our current obsession with Artificial Intelligence or intelligent machines, which throw people out of work without providing alternative forms of training or support; increase already gross inequality of wealth; and often provide only mediocre services:
We should focus on how useful [digital technologies] are to human objectives—what we will call ‘machine usefulness.’ Encouraging the use of machines and algorithms to complement human capabilities and empower people has, in the past, led to breakthrough innovations with high machine usefulness. In contrast, infatuation with machine intelligence encourages mass-scale data collection, the disempowerment of workers and citizens, and a scramble to automate work, even when this is no more than so-so automation—meaning that it has only small productivity benefits. Not coincidentally, automation and large-scale data collection enrich those who control digital technologies. (Acemoglu & Johnson 2023: 299–300).
Human language is and always has been the greatest technology we have on this planet, and we should use ours, including but not limited to digital languages, for human flourishing.
Conclusions
Whether or not schools and universities alter their infrastructures to accommodate multilingualism and multiculturalism, this is where English Literature Studies are likely to go: world literatures in English and world literatures in translation, in addition to the pathways noted above: ecocriticism and environmentalism, gender and sexuality, digital humanities, medical humanities, and the kinds of Creative Writing and self-expression students need in a globalised, digitised world. As one of my colleagues said, ‘We’re actually in an incredibly dynamic department, albeit stuck with a label (“English”) that tends to suggest the opposite.’ It is certainly clear that born-digital students today have an appetite for international literatures and global communications generally. Yet this may not be so different, a Chomskian might observe, from a British literature that already includes Welsh, Cornish, Scottish, and Northern Irish, much less Cockney, London Jamaican, Geordie, Scouse, Glaswegian, Estuary English, Brummie, and what has parochially been called ‘Received Pronunciation’. Multicultural London English (MLE)—originally a mixture of Jamaican patois, Cockney, and elements of French Africa, Greek, and Turkish—is used by young Black British and increasingly by London youth at large (Owolade 2023: 25, 200). Or an American literature that includes California Valley Girls (Barbie speak), rural Appalachians, Southerners, New Yorkers, Bostonians, African Americans, Latinx, Cubans, Puerto Ricans. It may be, says a Chomskian, that all languages, not just national ones, are political rather than natural categories, and that there are only idiolects. (Chomsky always quotes the Yiddish linguist Max Weinreich: ‘A language is a dialect with an army and a navy.’)
English is technically a product of Roman, Scandinavian, German, and French invaders over the course of many centuries. The idea that there is a single thing, ‘English’, which is associated with a national identity (presumably entailing that citizens/subjects in other countries who adopt English, even as a first language, are in some way imperfect copies) is a very recent product of nationalism. We might take the lived histories of Englishes to transcend both romantic revolutionary and far-right exclusionary nationalisms in literary and language studies and try a more convivial approach to English through translation and transnation. For good or ill, the futures of English language and literature will be adequate to the societies that use them. Whether they will be used for liberal tolerant or repressive exclusionary ends is, at least in part, down to us as educators.
Acknowledgements
A shorter version of this paper was presented on a panel ‘The Civic Importance of the Humanities’ organised by Professor Isobel Armstrong during the British Academy’s Engagement Week October 2023, and I am grateful to Professor Armstrong for the invitation. I am also grateful to my colleague Prof. and Dean Andrew McRae for stimulating and creative conversation on the possible futures of inclusive Departments of Languages and Literatures, and, as always, grateful to John and Gabe Dupré for equally stimulating conversations at home.
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1
I use the term ‘neoliberal’ to mark the shift especially in Western governments since the 1980s away from sympathy for New Deal and state-supported welfare and regulation toward ‘free markets’ and anti-state agenda. I do not accept that this signifies a shift from equality to freedom. Most modern humans value freedom. The differences lie in freedom for what: freedom of consumption, or deeper notions of a free human being, with all the material and epiphenomenal implications that that entails. A free human being is able to weigh fully accounted alternatives, to make a considered decision, and to act on it. Left libertarians want individual freedom among equals in a materially safe and secure environment. Left libertarian educators want universal education, healthcare, housing, and transport for autonomous individuals. For the history of neoliberalism, see Gerstle (2022) and Gagnier (2018, esp. 37–59, 2000); for a current debate in education on neoliberalism, see Brown & Hillman (2023).
2
The most popular degree was Mathematics then in descending order were Psychology, Biology, Chemistry, Sociology, History, Art and Design, Business, Physics, and Economics (see García et al. 2022).
3
See British Academy (2019); and the websites: Study the Humanities https://www.studythehumanities.org/; The Humanities Indicators https://www.amacad.org/humanities-indicators; Humanities Works http://humanitiesworks.org/; Dear English Major http://www.dearenglishmajor.com/; 4Humanities https://4humanities.org/; Humanities for all https://humanitiesforall.org/ [all accessed July 2023].
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DOI: 10.5871/jba/012.a11
Published on: 22 May 2024
Volume: 12
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Gagnier, R. (2024), ‘Language and literature in the information economy: the state of English, English and the state’, Journal of the British Academy, 12(1/2): a11 https://doi.org/10.5871/jba/012.a11Crossref
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Language at school: literature or linguistics? Richard Hudson
This opinion piece argues that the education system in England suffers from a lack of KAL (Knowledge About Language) which is so extreme that it deserves the name KAL desert because children are taught virtually nothing about the languages that they study, whether English or a foreign language. The dominant view of language sees it merely as a skill, rather than as something interesting which is worth exploring, and the only content taught and tested in language lessons comes from literature rather than linguistics. This desert is to be found not only in our schools but also in our university departments of English and of foreign languages, so future teachers of English and foreign languages are not equipped to teach about language; modern linguistics has very little impact on the school curriculum apart from the Advanced Level exam in English Language. I also show that the present decline in both English and foreign languages actually started about 1970, and may arguably be due in part to the KAL desert. However, I also report evidence from three recent initiatives that a lot of children enjoy exploring language and learning about it, so I suggest that the decline in languages, both English and foreign, might be halted by teaching more KAL. Finally, I suggest a roadmap for achieving this by increasing KAL first in universities and then in schools.
15 July 2024
The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—introduction Isobel Armstrong
This kaleidoscope of short pieces derives from two Fellows Engagement Week sessions (2022, 2023) in which speakers from across the British Academy—Theatre Studies, Anthropology, Modern History, History of Science, English, Philosophy, Music—gave ten-minute talks on the civic value of the arts and humanities. The British Academy’s SHAPE acronym, answering the Royal Society’s STEM formulation, understandably stresses the economic importance of arts and humanities in today’s challenging technological world (E is for Economy). The remit of this forum, however, was to remake and reclaim arguments for the civic importance of arts and humanities, recognising that accounts of the arts are often based on 19th-century arguments that no longer have force today. Three themes emerge from this forum: the importance of collaboration, the non-instrumental significance of aesthetic experience, and the centrality of language to civic life. (This article is published in the thematic collection ‘The arts and humanities: rethinking value for today—views from Fellows of the British Academy’, edited by Isobel Armstrong.)
10 September 2024
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