[yorwba]

Alternatively, the real problem is that articles like this one don't come with a short summary like "There is no crisis in the ability to read, nor is there a crisis in the practice of reading books, but there is a crisis in the status of Modernist literary studies." so that you have to read all the way through to the end to find out what it's trying to say and also click a bunch of links to learn statistics like "75% of U.S. adults say they have read all or part of at least one book in the past 12 months" https://www.pewresearch.org/short-reads/2026/04/09/americans...

In any case, as far as the crisis of Modernist literary studies is concerned, to be as adept at it as literature profs demand, students would have to get really into famous works of the nineteenth century, which was not that unreasonable to expect ca. 1950 but maybe a bit of a tough sell now. So the crisis will likely continue unabated until it is replaced by the crisis of post-modernist literary studies instead. (I guess it was preceded by the crisis of Classical literary studies, as the ability to read Latin and Greek did in fact decline.)

[watwut]

Except that moral panic around it has nothing to do with what actual profs in general say or think. Fairly often, it is panic about profs doing changes to courses non-professors find objectionable.

[yorwba]

At least this article is a reaction to other articles about a supposed decline in literacy that of late like to reference this study https://muse.jhu.edu/article/922346 conducted in 2015 but published 2024 where students were asked to read from Charles Dickens' Bleak House https://www.gutenberg.org/cache/epub/1023/pg1023-images.html... and explain the meaning as they went.