<p>As a recent Princeton grad entering a competitive English Ph.D program in a few months. here’s my take:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>Mythmom is absolutely right to emphasize the importance of canonical works. While canon-breaking may be in vogue at some places, Chaucer, Milton, Shakespeare, Romanticism and the Victorian novel never go out of style, and working knowledge of these authors and periods is essential for both someone who wants to pursue graduate study and someone who simply loves literature and wants to study it in some depth. The fact that the literary canon now (rightly) includes authors like Toni Morrison or the once neglected Zora Neale Hurston is wonderful, but they aren’t being added at the expense of the older giants. It is fine to go to a school that has fairly lax requirements for the major as long as the courses are there for the student to take if he chooses.</p></li>
<li><p>As long as you’ve taken more traditional courses, don’t be afraid to take the fluffier sounding Monster Fiction course either. Part of what you are learning as an English major is how to approach texts, something that can be taught using a variety of types of works. Also, as others have said, don’t assume that the course with the catchy sounding title won’t have just as rigorous a syllabus as any other, just ordered thematically rather than chronologically.</p></li>
<li><p>Don’t put too much emphasis on theory. Nearly all professors make use of it to some degree, so you should be exposed to it no matter where you are. After four years at Princeton, I have a working knowledge of terms like deconstruction, structuralism, post-colonialism and new historicism, but I’m no expert, and know nothing that couldn’t be learned through reading a survey of the different movements. This did not hold me back as an undergraduate and did not hurt me in graduate admissions. Good readers use some of the tools of the various theoretical schools naturally, but there is no need to be overly reliant upon specific movements.</p></li>
<li><p>Having the opportunity to do a senior thesis or other independent work is a huge plus. Lack of specific theoretical knowledge didn’t hurt me, but lack of the kind of scholarly work graduate schools are looking for did - in my unsuccessful first attempt at applying to Ph.D programs. A good close reading will probably get you an “A” in college, but it won’t get you into graduate school. Programs want something that suggests larger engagement with literary and historical problems; while this doesn’t require a deconstructionist reading, it does require evidence of insight beyond careful reading of a work in isolation. This is one of those cases in where those survey courses can come in handy. My first round of applications, I submitted an A + paper as a writing sample and got rejected by all six schools to which I applied. This year, I submitted a chapter of my thesis and got into 5 of the 6 plus a few extras. Quite apart from any advantage in the grad school game, I found writing a senior thesis immensely enjoyable and fulfilling.</p></li>
<li><p>Your peers matter. Even my best “original” insights are frequently inspired by a discussion begun in a class or an idea presented in an article: I read best when I’ve read over the shoulders of giants. I don’t think it is a coincidence that other than my senior thesis, the best papers I wrote in college were probably the two I wrote for graduate seminars (not that I think the ability to take graduate seminars as an undergrad should be a major factor). Obviously, you’ll get brilliant students in many places, and certainly at flagship state schools (when I was at admitted students’ events, the person I spoke to who seemed to have done the best in admissions this year was a recent Rutgers grad), but more selective schools probably do have a higher concentration of great students.</p></li>
</ol>
<p>ICargirl: What a lovely post. I’m sure it’s helpful. And I’m glad you have had a good experience. </p>
<p>Although I agree with you about theory (I like Virginia Woolf’s idea of the common reader, but an education common reader) it’s very hard right now to get any scholarly work published without a strong theory backbone. In a way I think this is a shame because sometimes these theories push literary scholarship of the realm of literature altogether, but there it is.</p>
<p>However, you haven’t needed to worry about that, so you caution is a good one for undergrads.</p>
<p>ICargirl’s post reminds me of a conversation I had years ago (35, actually) with my cousin, who was then a first-year English professor at Princeton. I was babbling away about Harold Bloom’s lectures that turned into A Map of Misreading. He listened politely, and said, “You know, the average Princeton English major has entirely the correct attitude towards Harold Bloom. The average Princeton English major thinks that Harold Bloom is the main character in James Joyce’s Ulysses. Come to think of it, that’s entirely the correct attitude towards James Joyce’s Ulysses as well.”</p>
<p>It’s amazing how persistent some institutional characteristics are. The Princeton English Department didn’t like theory then, and apparently it still doesn’t. Nevertheless, I have no doubt that ICargirl’s advice about graduate school is spot on.</p>
<p>I am not a big fan of Harold Bloom either, although my dear mentor and one of my favorite people on planet earth came from Yale’s Graduate School.</p>
<p>I was accepted into Columbia’s, but the old boy network made me gad (Lionel Trilling et al) and went running back to my much less well regarded (but obviously very rigorous) undergrad department.</p>
<p>To me, theory is Derrida and deconstruction, but that is dating me a good bit since it is largely out of style, and the cultural studies approach IS all the rage; sorry Keil. I don’t you don’t like it.</p>
<p>This things are like fashion trends and go in cycles.</p>
<p>Just a practical thing, but I get some hints about professors from the course evaluation website (which most colleges have in addition to rate my professor). You don’t have to pay attention to the overall rating if you don’t trust that, but many students will comment on how inspiring the professor is and how demanding they are.</p>
<p>This is one of the great threads ever on CC, thanks to mythmom. I have taught English also, and I want to say-- watch out for theory. Of course it’s a part of things-- but in many English departments it has taken over, giving professors the chance to sound very important and knowledgeable while reducing the value of the literature they are supposed to be teaching. English literature is about the meaning of life, about what it means to be human–in all its billion variations. That’s why it was once the most popular major–it’s the most interesting thing there is. Mythmom, Keili, etc. speak with great knowledge and understanding here-- watch out for the jargon that has replaced that understanding and drained so many English departments of their substance (to the point that students think detective literature is more interesting!)</p>
<p>Just to modify/explain my post #5, personally I mentioned literary theory only in that it’s important to be knowledgeable that it is a factor in literary analysis, and one must be aware that there are schools of thought – not that one needs to be obsessed with it, focused on it as a priority. (One should become “literate” about literary theory, broadly speaking.) An undergraduate, particularly an underclassman, needn’t concern himself with the analytical stratosphere. It’s more important to appreciate the art form and become immersed in it, while being able to understand it artistically and even discuss it philosophically. I agree with Gwen that from time to time theory has “taken over,” and in so doing has often drained the lifeblood out of the enjoyment of literature, and the purpose for which the author wrote it. </p>
<p>I will also say that in context of my recent intimate interface with many middle school and high school English departments, it is also important not to force the pendulum in the other direction. Too often now the exclusive emphasis is on (subjective) “response to literature,” with nothing beyond that. Students are not learning even the most classic and traditional literary terms. Many students are coming away with the notion that the author came up with some random fantasy and that the student’s equally random emotional response to that is what constitutes interpretation. I don’t think so. It’s important to understand that the study of literature, like other studies, is a discipline from an academic point of view, which does not eliminate the personal pleasure (and emotional response), but which, when taught well, supports that.</p>
<p>I’m going to come clean and say that I went to UChicago, and I took the same progam that seems to be, I’m glad to hear, in place 25 years later. Except I recall that everyone wrote a senior paper; honors was reserved for selected ones. I’ll never forget that my thesis advisor wrote “This is an excellent - if undergraduate - interpretation of the text.” Ha! She also said that I would need to learn more about the tradition (and presumably the theories used to understand it) in order to make it a graduate level paper.</p>
<p>I don’t recall anything in my program directly about theory, and clearly they weren’t expecting it there. I’m sure it was embedded relevantly in the teaching, though. Throughout the undergrad education in all departments, focus was always on primary material. Maybe if I’d wanted to go on to a PhD and fit in with the crowd, I could have used more of a background in what to expect in the big world of college English teaching and literary journals. Yet I’ve always been able to read those pieces (when they’re good) without feeling inadequate.</p>
<p>I hope this discussion is inspiring the OP’s child and other students to study English, or (perhaps more importantly) giving them an idea of what they’re getting into if they’re not sure.</p>
One of my MA thesis advisors told me that he thought the thesis was good enough, with a little revision, to submit for publication–but then said that on second thought, I might have trouble finding it a home because there was too much Shakespeare and Chaucer and not enough Derrida and Lacan in it, or something to that effect.</p>
<p>But I agree with epiphany about the need for English majors to have at least a rough familiarity with contemporary literary theory as well as a strong grounding in the vocabulary and basic concepts of traditional criticism. I think ICargirl hits the right note with the word “tool.” Theory exists to help us understand literature. Sometimes people seem to get that backwards, and that’s when academic criticism becomes dreary and unhelpful.</p>
<p>I also agree with ICargirl’s point about the “Monsters” types of courses. They are not always fluff; they’re often based around a faculty member’s research, and can be more interesting and illuminating than the survey or author-centered kinds of courses. (But the latter are excellent groundwork for the former.)</p>
<p>Actually, the most classical literary analysis is taught in Classics departments. My S, whose eyes glass over if has to read long novels, sad, yes I know (a function of his ADD) did the best in his Williams’ English class on the study of sonnets. He has total mastery of all terms of literary analysis and scansion. It’s awesome. More than I have, actually.</p>
<p>But he can’t read enough to be an English major. Enough said.</p>
<p>I think all the above are correct about theory, a tool, not an end. One good thing about deconstruction (and other theories) is to acknowledge that all analysis is theory embedded to some degree, even if our theories are unconscious. So identifying our theoretical bent can be helpful.</p>
<p>And I agree that literature should be about humans and how we live our lives, think our thoughts and feel our feelings and discussions of it should recognize that and not be theory heavy and jargon-laded.</p>
<p>And literature should also be about desire – the love of words, of sentences, of images, of people and possibilities. That’s why I studied it.</p>
<p>Last night’s PARENTHOOD (NBC show based on Ron Howard’s movie) analyzed a lovely paragraph from THE SOUND AND THE FURY. Good stuff.</p>
<p>Hmm. I’m in a disillusionment phase with literature right now, but all of the excellent advice in this thread does make me question again whether the English department is the right place for me personally (or people like me).</p>
<p>I’m most interested in how language becomes story, how a sentence or a paragraph mean so much more than itself in the context of a work of literature. I naturally approach the text from a structural perspective, which may be the byproduct of being right-brained yet preferring the ambiguous and creative humanities to math/science.</p>
<p>Which is not to say that I wouldn’t also enjoy “cultural studies” and other approaches to analyzing literature; however, I don’t study literature to learn about humanity but because I’m fascinated by HOW language and story can evoke such a profound visceral impact. Kind of a mix of literature and linguistics, I suppose? Literary linguistics or linguistic literature?</p>
<p>Wow, fascinating thread. (And I say this as a technical type, who (1) doesn’t know anything about the meaning of life, (2) doesn’t understand what something would be to be the meaning of life, (3) can’t imagine how one would sort through and rank various candidate meanings of life and (4) is unsure why figuring out this elusive meaning of life would be important to me.)</p>
<p>Keil: Lots of literary folk are interested in exactly what you are, and it certainly has a very strong place in literary studies right now. I think you would do fine in an English Department if that’s what you want.</p>
<p>And the narrator (who’s telling the story and how s/he is) is central to all prose works, and come to think of it, at issue in poetry, too.</p>
<p>And even a text as old as THE ODYSSEY begins with a flash back and tells us that all that follows is filtered through Odysseus, so this is really nothing new.</p>
<p>You would find a home in English, but I’m sure you’d find a home a lot of places. Not trying to convince you. I have no agenda here, just letting you know.</p>