The paper focuses on the study of English literature and the question whether literature studies should be central to the curriculum of modern education. The author theorises there are attempts to make the literature the object rather than the subject of study, to use literature in order to derive further meanings rather than to question what it has to say for itself. The results of this approach, whether in the form of linguistics or of structuralism in its many varieties are of great value to the study of literature, but the method itself can lead us away from literature as such.