Funds for Bookworm are provided in part by Lannin Foundation.

Boots!

Where would we be without boos?

Where would we be without good?

No, Timberg.

It's a rhetorical question, sir.

But where would we be without books?

From KCRW and KCRW.com, I'm Michael Silverblatt, and this is Bookworm.

I'm very pleased to have as my guest today, Marjorie Garber.

She's a scholar who teaches literature at Harvard. Her books on Shakespeare,

including Shakespeare after all, and Shakespeare in modern culture, are well known. She did a lot of

work in cultural studies, and now she's published a book called The Use and Abuse of Literature. She and I are

people who've both given our lives to literature. If we have some basic disagreements about it,

it's not a basic disagreement about the core thing, how we came to love what we love.

Tell me, my impression is that it's

become very difficult teaching literature in college, that people from high schools come

unprepared to read, and that the number of English majors has reached a colossal all-time low.

Numbers of English majors are down, but I don't think it's difficult to teach English in college.

And in fact, I think it is one of the most pleasurable and gratifying things in the entire world.

My experience teaching at Harvard and at other places and being a guest at other places is that students are uniformly enthusiastic, that they actually know a great deal and that they want to know more.

Insofar as the numbers are down, it's because of the economy, it's because of expectations about vocational training. It's because of anxiety about

getting a job in the world. It's because of the rush to professional training or pre-professional

...