“It may be hard to justify in financial terms [...] having students spend 3+ years becoming expert in only one very narrow field of the Humanities, but in intellectual and cultural terms, that is, the real reason that we have an education system in the first place, specialism is surely an essential part of research training. I’m all for interdisciplinarity and being a renaissance jack-of-many-trades, but it is precisely the hyper-specialism of focusing on a single genre of nineteenth-century literature, or a particular feature of one ancient culture’s art that allows a person (even one who is never going to use this specialism directly) to understand the concept of in-depth research and understanding of a literary object in its full context. (Maybe we can’t sell Humanities education in those terms at the moment, but we should never forget that that’s what it’s about.)”

The term “literary object” in the above quote refers, of course, to any piece of text or information in the world, from a newspaper article or television commercial, to a piece of propaganda or an international treaty. These all have to be read in their context and they all require critical attention and patient, skeptical thinking.