THE CRITICS: RADIO: How the Scots invented English Lit

Let me make a shrewd guess about you. Yes, you - sitting there, reading this column. (I bet you're not even reading it on a Sunday - you just found the paper lying around while doing something more useful.) If you went to university, then you definitely have an idea about Eng Lit graduates: "feckless, posturing dolts", as a friend of mine once memorably summed them up.

As an English graduate, I have heard it all before, and I can take it. I even acknowledge there may be a grain of truth in the description. But still, it was nice to turn on the radio last Sunday and hear, in The Rise and Fall of English Literature (R3), a professor saying that the brightest and best students still tended to study the subject. They're "too smart to do it if they didn't think it was worth doing," Jeremy Treglown, professor of English at Warwick University, said. And there is this to be said for English students: they are experts - or swiftly become so - at rationalising their indolence. When Martin Amis, interviewed over the phone, said that "I sometimes think now that I should have read astronomy or history, and got all the English read on the side - but I wouldn't have read it," one knew what he meant. "You know, human beings aren't very thorough about these things unless they have to be."

John Carey's programme was, for a 45-minute tour of an academic subject (well, borderline academic), fairly sprightly; although at one point, when the spotlight turned towards structuralism and Theory-with-a-capital- T, the programme managed to recreate the authentic lecture experience by clearing a large space in the mind for daydreaming.

It was nicely humbling to know that Eng Lit as a - ho ho - "discipline" began in Scotland, after the Act of Union, when it was seen as a means of "purifying", that is, anglicising, the dialect and cultural idiom. According to Robert Crawford, professor of modern Scottish literature at Stirling University, it was a course in learning what we no longer call "proper English". When the subject reached London, it was for people who had no Latin or Greek. Women, often. You know, inferior types. (For a programme which at one point affirmed that far more women than men studied the subject, it was interesting that the only woman Carey could get to talk was Hermione Lee. Still, it was nice for once not to have to listen to that most ubiquitous of meeja dons, Lisa Jardine. And what heroic restraint on her part not to demand a microphone.)

It wasn't until this century that I A Richards, and then F R Leavis, turned English into a subject that, in Carey's paraphrase, "refined your sensibility and gave you a sense of values to live by ... essential for cultural and moral health". Although earlier in the day you could have heard Imogen Stubbs, in Sentimental Journey (R4), talk about her days studying English at Oxford and submitting an essay on Beckett which used tin foil, audio, and colourings-in instead of the more traditional words. Her tutor rejected it and suspected drug abuse. I salute that tutor.

It was a shame that the programme did not touch on the wonderfully unedifying tendency of English dons in particular to try to rubbish each other at every possible opportunity. (See Howard Jacobson's very funny first novel, Coming From Behind, for chapter and verse on this.) And yet, the future of the subject is bright, or bright-ish. "Because both imagination and language are fundamental human resources," said one professor, slipping into the language of the personnel department for a moment, "it remains a very important subject, and it's not going to go away."

One of the best introductions to a work of literature is that by Christopher Ricks, in the little Penguin Syrens edition of Samuel Beckett's First Love. It opens with these words: "First, read First Love." There was something of such hortatory brevity in Piers Lane's programme about Beethoven's "Hammerklavier" sonata. The Piano (R3) began with five minutes' talk on the origins of the piece and how it came to be named. The title has nothing to do with the way it begins by bashing out the opening B-flat chords - although Beethoven reduced the sturdiest pianos virtually to matchwood just by playing them, and when he said the piece was for "50 years from now", you feel he was not only referring to how avant-garde he knew he was, but that it would take that long to produce a piano that could take that kind of punishment. Hammerklavier is simply the German for "pianoforte", and the German is what his anti-Napoleonic nationalism demanded.

Anyway, this preamble went on for a little bit, and then Lane simply said, "Here is Beethoven's `Hammerklavier' sonata"; and there it was, all three-quarters of an hour of it, played superbly by Nikolai Demidenko. There was a little post-amble, as it were, while your ears were still ringing, in which we were promised a programme on the French school of piano-playing, or what the French pianist Jean-Phillippe Collard called "the diggy-diggy-dee" school. I hope next week's programme is done with as little fuss.