What Does It Mean to Study English Now? We're Figuring That Out Too

Most English lectures have a moment, somewhere between a close reading of Jane Austen and a seminar debate about narrative voice, when someone asks the question nobody quite knows how to answer yet: what does literature even do in a world being rewritten by algorithms?

That is the right question. And increasingly, it is one that English departments are acknowledging as well as actively building into the curriculum.

Studying English at undergraduate and post-graduate levels today means something richer and stranger than it did a decade ago. The texts have not gone away, nor the rigor in reading them carefully. We still read Milton, Shakespeare and Dickens. What has changed is that the contexts around them have changed dramatically. We live and work inside digital systems that generate, distribute and even co-write stories. To ignore that would be to ignore reality, and it would be its own kind of intellectual dishonesty.

The BA Honours English programme reflects this honestly. Courses like AI and English Literary Studies ask students to think critically about what machine-generated language has to do with literary meaning-making and what it does not. Is a language model doing something when it generates a sentence, or is it just predicting a sentence? What is important to understand is that it is not a question only for computer science students. It is a question of intention, of voice, of what we actually value when we call something writing. Alongside this, Digital Humanities, which is another course at bachelors’ level, introduces students to the methodological tools and approaches, such as text mining and data-driven reading, that have reshaped literary research. These research practices become an extension to the traditional literary practice of close reading a text and enable readers to extend what they can notice and ask.

At the MA English level, the questions deepen and branch outward. Courses like Narrative Design for Gaming, Branding and Entrepreneurial Storytelling treat interactive storytelling as a serious literary form, one where the power shifts into the hands of the reader, who can alter the story's shape. Therefore, the writer must now anticipate multiple possible readings simultaneously. Similarly, storytelling in branding and entrepreneurial settings needs to examine how narrative functions as cultural and commercial capital in the contemporary world. In the MA English programme, there is another course, AI and Digital Humanities, that takes literature beyond physical textbooks and novels into the domain of computational research practice. It helps students explore how humanistic inquiry can engage with computational methods without losing what makes it humanistic.

The adaptability of English literary studies at both undergraduate and postgraduate levels is central to these newer courses. It is about the realisation that the questions English has posed all along, about power, voice, representation or meaning, go beyond the boundaries of time. These questions are relevant, even more so in a digital age when the ways and methods of storytelling are changing in real time. When a student studies literature, they evolve from being passive readers into enquirers and critical thinkers. They get equipped to shape the narratives of tomorrow.

So, what does it mean to learn English today? It is an evolving question and will always be. But one thing is certain: it is a pretty good moment to study English, perhaps more than ever.

Dr. Shivangi Chaturvedi
Assistant Professor
Department of English and Humanities
School of Humanities, Social Sciences and Liberal Arts