In the 21st century the place of literature in university language programs is a dubious one. Its usefulness is questioned, even among the well-educated, and even among language professors themselves. For in the digital age the prevalent notion seems to be: If it’s not quantifiable, it’s not worth a damn.

I disagree with this current assumption. All knowledge is not reducible to mathematical data, or the scrutiny of scientific inquiry, or its direct value to the corporate/technological/political bottom line. For first and foremost, literature teaches students about what it’s like to be human. It articulates the life experiences of those who are like ourselves as well as those who are different than us. It instructs us about “the other” -- other people, other places, other times, other life experiences.

Our times are complicated, and people are complicated as well. We laugh, we cry, we sing, we shout, we love, we hate, and in the end we die. All of us. We are in part a sentient species and literature can teach us something about human sentiments -- the complexities of romantic love, for example -- even before we experience such a complicated emotion ourselves. Think Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.

Literature can let us know about death and people’s reaction to it, as in Tolstoy’s story about Ivan Illyich. Or a story which deals with both love and death, Irish writer James Joyce’s “The Dead” in which one Gabriel Conroy’s wife Gretta weeps openly after a party the couple attended, and admits to her husband it was a song she heard at the party, the same song her first love who died at seventeen sang to her near the time of his death, that brought her tears. She falls asleep and Gabriel, at the end of the story, watches the snow at the window and contemplates the nature of “true love,” and his, as well as all humanity’s, mortality.

Human relations are only one of the reasons literature should be included in ‘language majors,’ I repeat ‘language majors,’ programs. After all, aren’t human relations at the roots of the world’s major problems today?

If it’s not quantifiable, it’s not worth a damn?

As my Irish ancestors would say, ‘Tain’t so, McGee.”


Kenneth Parsons
Assistant Professor
General English Education Program
SeoKyeong University