When I began offering a series of literature courses for paid subscribers to my Substack last year, I chose, more out of whim than careful calculation, to name the initiative The Invisible College. The phrase refers historically to an unofficial group of 17th-century proto-scientists who corresponded to keep up with one another’s research. In that sense, it has little to do with my remarkably unscientific project of trying to perpetuate discussion of the best classic, modern, and contemporary literature in the age of the declining or dying English major. But inasmuch as the natural philosophers of the original Invisible College were attempting to produce modern knowledge outside a still-medieval university system, the name fits. When the visible college fails to meet the needs of the moment, an invisible one must take its place.
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