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proudly presented to me as the biggest and finest university in South Asia I think, by the Vice Chancellor who
was pointing to his various pet projects and buildings and so on, and I said ‘what kind of critical studies are you
involved in?’ and he looked at me as though I had said ‘do you do PhDs in lap dancing?’ or something – he had
no conception of what I was talking about. That really is a dramatic moment, isn’t it, in that at least for all their
remoteness and ineffectualness, universities traditionally provided a centre of critical studies. If that’s now
being managerialized out of existence, then there is a real problem about criticism in the wider sense. In the
narrower sense of literary criticism, I think that’s in trouble too, I mean partly, as I’ve argued elsewhere, habits
of close analysis have suffered from the kind of technological culture we live in. Language itself has suffered –
do you know my favourite example of Steve Jobs’s last words? Hamlet’s dying words of course were ‘Absent
thee from felicity awhile, /And in this harsh world draw thy breath in pain, / To tell my story ,’ Steve Jobs’s last
words were ‘Oh wow. Oh wow. Oh wow.’ This master of communication, you know. Something’s gone wrong.
It’s not just with criticism, it’s not just with literature, those things are dependent on a broader linguistic
context, and obviously a visual or technological culture will take its toll eventually. So in terms of the general
shift we’ve been discussing, it wasn’t only a shift from theory to other cultural trends, to a certain extent it was
a shift from criticism as understood in a certain way, a certain focussed analysis,
CB: Close reading, those types of skills?
TE: Yes, I think it was a shift away from that as well.
CB: This links to our next question really, we wanted to ask you about a comment you made in the Guardian a
few years ago now about the ‘death of universities as the centres of critique.’ From your answer, then, it seems
that you do feel that the humanities are still struggling within the academy to have their vital role recognised.
TE: Yes. I wouldn’t be too defeatist about it, I wouldn’t say that we should give up or that we have been
defeated, but it’s an eleventh hour situation. It’s the old point that anything which to some extent exists for its
own sake, for its own delight, its own enjoyment, is a scandal to a utilitarian society that can see nothing
valuable in anything that doesn’t have an immediate function or end. So it’s a very old story, really.
RH: I was wondering how significant you find it in this context that Grayling, Dawkins, and the rest have
developed what is essentially a privatized ‘New college of the Humanities’ in this country?
TE: Oh yes. The Guardian asked me to write against that, which I did. I then had a radio programme that I was
on with Grayling, and I kept trying to raise the question of his new college and he kept avoiding it. I really
wondered, given the enormous backlash, whether he would actually go ahead, but he has hasn’t he? Grayling is
officially a liberal – he’s not a militant right-wing ideologue; he just doesn’t understand these issues. He’s just
very privileged. He just thinks ‘oh, what a good idea it would be to get all these posh people together in a
college,’ and the economics of it or the social implications or the egalitarian implications are not things that will
occur to a man like him, I think.
RH: Might it be relevant to this discussion to consider the fact that scientific discourse plays a relatively central
role in their humanities syllabus?
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