30 January 2001
In Response to My Roommate, the Lover of the Scalpel
One of the many selling points of a major university is that it offers so many majors, in so many areas of study, with such a variety of classes - not the least of which is biology, your chosen major. Yes, from the brochures it seems like all the knowledge of the world is available to you through only four short years of study. Yet one of the first things you must do upon arriving at the university is to quickly pick one or two areas of study to the exclusion of almost every other field, save whatever courses some mysterious, phantasmal dean decided were required for a certain major. These requirements rarely extend past a couple of semesters of a foreign language, the same of a science, a few social sciences, a couple of history courses, some English, and the requisite math or logic course. Otherwise, your four (or five or six) years will be dominated by classes from the chosen major. Quite often, this field will continue to be the driving force in your life beyond college and in the workplace. More than your family connections, more than your birthplace, more than what you wore to the senior prom, this one aspect of your life - your major - will shape your world in unimaginable ways, anywhere from winning a Pulitzer or Nobel Prize, to becoming a homeless alcoholic, to doing both. With such importance riding on one decision (and where each year of study adds a few thousand dollars’ worth of debt), it's extremely important to find a major that will be challenging, worthwhile, and, above all (at least to some people, particularly pre-med students, it seems), marketable. So you probably want to know why I chose to major in English.
To many students, particularly those involved with such odious fields as chemistry (nothing more than alchemy, really), biology (it's sadistic, the way they enjoy cutting up things), and engineering (let's just say the Egyptians didn't have degrees from MIT when they built the pyramids), English is something of a "soft" major, full of "fluff" courses that "anyone" can do. What is deceptive about this line of reasoning is that many of these same students in their self-professed "sciences" (from the Latin scientia, meaning "knowledge") find reading a novel or writing an essay dull, tedious, and, well, difficult. Yes, it's all English, but it may as well be Greek to the average biology major. That's because English is something more than just a language used by Americans, Canadians, Britons, Australians, and Kiwis; as a discipline, it's the study of the language, the study of things written in that language, and the writing of things in the aforementioned language. And "things" is a pretty inclusive term; anything from novels and poetry to advertisements and diaries is fair game. As such, the discipline has its own technical language, its own jargon, replete with comma splices and gerund phrases and split infinitives (well, the jargon includes those things; a well-written piece shouldn't). In this way, English as a discipline melds art and science. It's predicated on an understanding of the language that goes beyond simple comprehension of it and on the ability to manipulate the language to create new things from existing materials. This isn't always easy; in fact, it rarely is. Just ask any aspiring novelist or professor or even John Updike himself (he's a novelist, in case you didn't know). It's not a cakewalk to be able to take words and put them together in ways that are new and fresh and exciting and that touch people and capture pictures and emotions and life. For instance, that last sentence was pretty difficult to piece together. And yet every student of English must try to reach out and grab the right words. Luckily, writers like Milton, Stendhal, Hemingway, and Balzac have provided excellent examples. For these examples to be useful, however, you have to read them. And re-read them. And study them. And examine them. And that’s only if you want to be able to understand the writers themselves; writing something of your own is an entirely different ballgame. Any person who thinks reading James Joyce (another novelist, by the way) and writing an essay on "Joyce’s Use of Mimicry, Ambivalence, and Hybridity when Describing Gardening Tools: A Hoe Is No Laughing Matter" is as simple as picking up a newspaper and reading the headline story is, to put it mildly, wrong. English, with its emphasis on both creation of new things and study of old, is as challenging as any field of science or art or math.
With all the difficulties facing the student majoring in English (not the least of which are failing eyesight from years of overuse), it may appear that English is not a "fun" major, that it is void of "interesting" classes, that it is geared toward the "morosely-inclined" student. On the contrary, English offers many opportunities both for personal enjoyment and intellectual enrichment. For instance, porn comes in print! For those not so sensually-minded (or for those in oppressive societies such as the fine public schools of our not-so-progressive state), the study of English literature encompasses all sorts of disciplines, such as politics, philosophy, religion, history, sociology, and, yes, even science. It's almost impossible not to deal with World War II when reading Catch-22 (yes, that's a novel) or the Roman Empire with I, Claudius (another novel). From writers like Ayn Rand and Albert Camus, philosophies have been dissected and discarded, invented and refined (and all without harming even one guinea pig). You can get the best of all possible worlds (including extraterrestrial ones) in the literature of Huxley, Orwell, and Bradbury. In short, English literature covers the panorama of disciplines, but just the parts in print. By studying literature, you're almost forced to learn about lots of other things. And as a result, you know more, i.e., you have more knowledge (remember that Latin word scientia?).
In fact, a rather common truism in certain brochures is that students of liberal arts are "learning how to think." There are some who believe that you should have mastered that ability well before you go to college, but the overall message is a good one. It's not always easy to be creative and come up with new ideas; an even more difficult task is to discern which of the new ideas are good ideas. English majors are generally good at doing both. Writing their essays provides fodder for creativity, and revising (and more revising) helps discern the good ideas. That's not something that can be taught; that kind of discrimination is a skill acquired through years of practice. And future employers – not to mention coffee shop regulars – should recognize and appreciate that ability. Unlike you, we don’t have obvious test tube colors to show that our experiments haven’t worked; time is our only judge, and in cases like John Keats and John Kennedy Toole, we die thinking our names are writ only in water.You, on the other hand, do not have to wait for posterity to grant you fame and fortune – the measly "scientific method" does all that for you. But I’d be willing to wager that William Shakespeare has better name recognition than Jonas Salk.In short, the study of language and literature - the study of English - provides you with a hodgepodge of skills and information, not the least of which is being able to use words like "hodgepodge." Every book, every poem, every essay you read adds to your knowledge of a myriad of subjects; every book, poem, or essay you write imparts some information or emotion (hopefully) to your readers (and maybe even a little spare change for the writer). Sure, an English major isn’t curing cancer, but then again, neither are you.