When the Nineteenth-Century British Cultural Studies group meets to discuss Victorian literature, the conversation goes far beyond the literary merits of a text. As Berkeley students and faculty from multiple disciplines scrutinize the political and psychological undertones of a particular work, the prose becomes a vehicle for fascinating lines of inquiry into an array of subjects. Social history, psychoanalysis, and feminist theory often come into play. A talk about Oscar Wilde, for instance, expands into a provocative consideration of aesthetics and the history of sexuality. This particular working group -- one of more than 50 supported by Berkeley's Townsend Center for the Humanities -- connects graduate students and professors in English with those in fields such as comparative literature, rhetoric, history, and art history. It is a formula for a rich exchange of ideas, and it illustrates the highly interdisciplinary and innovative nature of literary studies underway at Berkeley. The Department of English, consistently ranked among the top in the country, has long benefited from the department's practice of hiring exceptional recent graduates and then nurturing their talent. Many of these faculty draw on perspectives and methodologies from other disciplines. In doing so, they produce significant new insights into critically important works while bringing new light to bear on lesser-known texts. Faculty in literature may be critics, translators, cultural historians, or creative writers. Their work in interpreting texts is often both reflective and reflexive: the researcher reads, looks, thinks, relates, connects. This is a dynamic process. New pictures and narratives emerge when a long-existing piece of literature or other cultural product is viewed in the context of the contemporary world and the current state of research. We see the past as we may not have seen it before. The continual movement between past and present (and projecting insights into the future as well) deepens our understanding of the human condition. The art of writing and studying literature deserves recognition perhaps now more than ever, during this time when visual media catering to short attention spans increasingly pose a challenge to deliberative, text-based works. In the midst of a future-focused information revolution, in which a writer might be called a "content provider" and a reader might judge a story by its brevity and utility, it's worth reminding ourselves of the value of literature and the active role it plays both in shaping and reflecting a society's culture and politics. It is also important to recognize that the value of literary study is not restricted to academics in literary circles. The ability to read a text carefully, and then to think and write clearly, requires a fundamental skill that the study of literature sharpens for students of all fields.
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