I don't know what the general experience of English majors has been, but for me, specifically, I've typically been dealt with scornfully. My course-load is impressive, but only for someone of non-English major-hood. I may be smart, but only in an English major context. I think this attitude to English majors is mainly because we don't really LEARN anything in the modern-traditional sense; we don't memorize horrific amounts of detail (unless we happen to end up in a Mac-Hay class, in which case, God have mercy upon us), we don't acquire overtly practical skills, at most we could be said to bull-shit amazingly convincingly.
And it's true, to a certain point. English majors aren't exactly trained to be skilled in trivia. Not for the most part, at any rate - I mean, we're expected to know general causes and factors that influence the development of literature. We're not expected to know the kreb cycle, or the exact progression of Hitler's forces in Africa during World War II. No one quizzes us on the gestalt approach (unless we're working within an inter-disciplinary context), and no one asks us to give an equation for the velocity of rockets breaking through the atmosphere. Most of us aren't good at math; most of us can't do anything beyond very basic calculus.
And our lack of general ability in these fields, as a group and not an individual by individual basis, is what colours the perception that English is the default major. In a lot of cases it is. But this status isn't because English is an incredibly easy discipline. Enough people struggle with it to illustrate that it is, in fact, quite difficult to acquire the rules governing it; the only people who actually say that English is easy are those who have spent their entire lives speaking it, being trained to think in its system of associative bundles, of grammatical structuring. Speak to anyone who has had to learn English as a second language - I lived with one for my entire life, and around many others while I was a child. My mom is Japanese; a lot of my friends can't understand her English. They say her accent is too strong. They don't understand her sentence structure, they get confused by her seemingly strange linguistic leaps. They ask me to interpret my mom's English into their English. What about any of this is easy? English is not easy. English is the majority of North America's basis of communication, and it breaks down.
In the English study discipline, this is important - the study of how meanings are formed, and how they have changed, and what they have changed into, and why they changed at all. Language is the outward expression of thought; English can therefore be said to study thought. Maybe this sounds familiar; maybe I should be stopped and told, "You're thinking philosophy now, you're going down the wrong track." But English is a chameleon, it blends in with many if not all of the fields in humanities. Philosophy concerns itself with asking questions and seeking possible answers to those questions. This is what all other disciplines, from the hard sciences to the soft to the humanities, attempt to do - look at context, formulate hypotheses, test them, find answers or more questions.
See, I don't agree with casting English majors in a derogatory light. Maybe only because I am one, but still, I find that I'm being trained to analyze texts, to contextualize, to ask questions and deconstruct and reconstruct, to try to understand the thoughts of authors, of narrators, of characters, to continuously alter my framework of interpretation to gain new readings. The last point is the most difficult one for me - to actually and consciously change my value system, the way I perceive reality (without the aid of chemical substances), is hard for me to do. But that's what education is about - reformatting your brain, learning to think, learning to shift modes of thought.
An English education is a significant education. It is difficult to do well in the discipline, especially at an upper level. If anyone doubts, let them read Derrida, Said, Bhabha.
And wow, that's kind of a long rant. ...oops.
10 comments:
amen to that!
ah, dear michiko, I see your point about English. I was gonna say science rules, cus it does, but your fantastic rationalization has rendered my complains...well, void. So congrats, dude!
Good rant Petra: prescient, persuasive, particularly not petulant. And a good rant post deserves a good rant comment, I always say.
This is a rant I have had many times in my head. It is an ill-conceived debate that raises my argumentative hackles (which isn't hard to do, I admit) more than most ill-conceived debates do. You have made 2 points that I also hold when having this debate:
1. English is philosophical. It is arguably the most philosophical non-philosophy course. Actually, now that I think of it, UNBC categorizes some of its women's studies courses as philosophy course, and I would hazard a guess that some of them could also be used as English credits. More generally, Wittgenstein said (I overuse this quote, sorry) that all of philosophy is a word game, and he is only the most important philosopher of the 20th century-- suck it detractors of English!
2. "If anyone doubts, let them read Derrida, Said, Bhabha." I would also add Spivak to this list. I can't even remember her whole name ... Gayatri Chakravorty Spivak? Pronouncing her name is a class in itself.
In addition to the above 2 arguments that you have made, a more general rebuttal to the English-is-easy stance is that the comparison of 2 fields of study, ipso facto, is comparing two things that are so broad and varied that comparison between them is ill-defined to the point of being nonsensical. Arguing that a person is represented accurately by the lowest achievers within their group--and that is, at least implicitly, the form this argument usually takes--is not only pointless, but, in fact, prejudicial.
A more logical comparison would be the best cohort from a given group compared to the best cohort from another group, or the worst compared to the worst, etc. In this case, it may well be that the lowest-achieving cohort among English majors is larger than average, but, again, that doesn't reflect on everyone within the discipline; just as there is no ceiling on the "highest level" that science or math (etc.) can be practiced on, there is no ceiling on the "highest level" English can be practiced on. Hence, it is illogical to make any presumptions about the intelligence of anyone in any of these fields.
The format of the argument as one between fields as a whole and the conclusions that can supposedly be gleaned from this are red herrings.
P.S. I blame coffee for my annoying verbosity.
P.P.S. I forgot to mention that another good quality of English majors is that their blogs, such as yours, are, unlike most blogs, free of comma splices and their ungrammatical kin. And remember, as Lisa Dickson says, every time a comma splice is written, a puppy dies.
hee, denielle, did you know that i can't get to your blog just by clicking on your name? i have to go through this amazingly circuitous route, involving hopping hypertext links and back-tracking through internet pathways. it's almost like a mythical journey. magical! & sparkly!
jammy - HAR. english pwns science hardcore, man. (see how i stole your man? 'cause you stole my dude. so not cool, man. now i must find a way to incorporate 'man' into every sentence. man, it could get kinda tricky. or really repetitive. man.
ahhh! dave, speak not to me of comma splices! all those poor puppies... i don't actually think i ever wrote a paper with a comma splice in it; not even as a high-schooler, not even as an elementary kid. it was ingrained within me to avoid the comma splice, inborn knowledge like the instinct to breathe.
but yay! for your logic!!! it organizes what i have to say so much better than how i tend to say it. i honestly rarely ever edit what i write - term papers to test papers, the first draft tends to be the final draft. therefore, i also tend to miss out on logic holes and lose strands of my argument to whatever new ideas randomly pop into my brain.
i'd like to respond to your points, as well:
1. i have always seen english as one of the more philosophically inclined classes for all that it is not actually philosophy - not that i've studied much philosophy, given UNBC's rather pitiful course selection in that area. but the work that english engages in is very much akin to the work philosophy engages in, with perhaps the mitigating factor being that english roots itself in certain time frames and contexts, whereas philosophy seeks to a universal truth, or 'way things are/should be' (please, correct me if i'm wrong, former-philosophy-major person).
in supporting this view, i present the various movements in english study such as post-colonialism - a highly inter-disciplinary field as it draws upon social, political, and historical contexts as well, and is geared to high-specificity. after all, the social situations of different colonies under colonizer regimes are only comparable in that they were oppressed; the distinct manner of the oppression is highly individualized in terms of how cultures dealt with and fought back against said oppression. it may be possible to apply certain broad generalizations to a great number of colonized states, but it is hardly accurate, and to do so in fact undermines the postcolonial project. that is to say, by asserting that all colonies are/were affected in exactly the same way and must be given recompense in the exact same way, is to reinforce the us/them binary that was the framework of the colonial project in the first place as it denies those that were colonized disinct and separable identities from others that were also colonized, despite vast and nuanced differences.
2. i actually did have spivak written down at first; then i realized by putting her, bhabha, and said all together i had the unholy trinity of post-colonial theorists, and to invoke the power of the Three was too much for my blog to handle. i've always been strangely fond of derrida, so i tossed him in there. but now i see i completely neglected the inclusion of a female academic, unconsciously furthering the emphasis and privilege given to male scholars. hm. so, in recompense: kristeva, mulvey, spivak, beauvoir, rich.
P.S. to your P.S. - man, i'd kill for some coffee right now.
p.p.s. - in case you actually believed my claims about comma splices, they were total lies. yeah. i comma splice all the time. poor puppies.
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