Are studies of great authors doomed as fewer students take English literature at university? | Rachel Cooke

Ah, A-level results week, and how weirdly enjoyable it is when you’re not doing them yourself, have no children of your own in the game, and nieces and nephews who aren’t yet old enough. Out for a walk with my headphones, I listen delightedly as a triumphant candidate appears on the BBC’s World at One : Evie from Southend, who sounds as pleased as punch. What will she do now, asks the presenter, who also has a smile in his voice. She doesn’t miss a beat. It’s all sorted. In the autumn, she’ll go to Durham University to read… English literature .

This stops me in my tracks. What? Surely everyone knows that English literature is dying . Since 2012, the number of students reading it at university, as I once did, has fallen by more than a third; staff are being laid off, departments are closing, scholarship is missing in action. I’ve just read a “major” new study of the poet, WH Auden, and, as I write in my review, its gargantuan size – you could more easily slip a hardback edition of Delia Smith’s Complete Cookery Course into your handbag than this book – announces it as a relic even before publication. No, Stem subjects are where it’s at now, and my amazement at Evie’s “passion” for her course is going to take a full circuit of the park to fade.

What effect is such a demise going to have on our culture? Answering this question is probably beyond my pay grade, but I will say this: the campus novel is doomed – and I’m not the only one to think so. In the New Statesman , John Mullan, a professor of English at UCL, has mourned its passing in an essay that begins with Andrew O’Hagan’s recent Caledonian Road , and goes all the way back to Mary McCarthy’s satire of 1952, The Groves of Academe . Painful memorials aside – RIP David Lodge’s Professor Zapp, one of my favourite characters in all literature – it’s pretty funny listening to an academic bemoan the fact that no one knows properly how to take the piss out of him any more.

How to shop in 2024

In mid-life, we’re told, it’s good to have new experiences: advice I bore in mind when my middle niece, Edith, took me shopping last week. O brave new world, that has such retail outlets in it! First, somewhere called Brandy Melville, where clothes come in only one size (ie about as big as a handkerchief). Second, to Glossier, where mascara and lip gloss are ordered via iPad and delivered to the customer via an endlessly revolving wheel. And then, finally, to Subdued, which is how its basement briefly made me feel (more hankies).

In return, I also gave her a new experience in the form of a choc-ice, a treat unknown to this 13-year-old, and which we both deserved immeasurably after our hot and sweaty field work in late ( too late, for me) capitalism.

Snap shot

At the Courtauld Gallery , there is an exhibition by the British photographer, Roger Mayne. I love his work: his human subjects have a warmth that somehow always leaves me feeling uplifted, however bleak their surroundings. For us, this show turned out to be a special thrill. Years ago, we bought a print of a picture by Mayne titled Children in a Bombed Building, Bermondsey, 1954 – and here the same image suddenly was before us on the wall. What to do? How to mark this astonishing moment? You guessed it. Having looked over both my shoulders, I lifted my phone and… One more for the cloud, if not posterity.

• Rachel Cooke is an Observer columnist