<p>Grammar and writing skills are little above personal enrichment? </p>
<p>College is not a technical school. If he wants training for a specific career, find a vocational degree.</p>
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<p>I disagree. There are things you can’t get from sitting in the library that you get from the classroom. Discussion, debate, teamwork, etc. A Ph.D is a research degree for a specific field/time period. A bachelor’s in the liberal arts is the foundation to higher degrees. </p>
<p>That article is one of the worst and poorly written I have read. And your acquaintance is either unintelligent or narrow-minded.</p>
<p>“Shakespeare, Chaucer and Milton have been replaced by living authors who toe the line of multicultural political correctness” says Phyllis Schlafly. Replaced?? What a load of crap. Righteous hyperbole from one of America’s loosest cannons.</p>
<p>While the body of literature, and the ways it is examined and criticized, has certainly expanded in recent decades, classic English literature has certainly not been tossed into the scrapheap. Phyllis chose to seek out only the most inflammatory or “creative” course listings to make her “point” that academia is filled with radical activists intent on perverting the constitution and the personal morals of contemporary college students. This prompted me to grab the 2008/2009 Amherst College Catalog. The English Department offerings are dominated by courses like:</p>
<p>Studies in Nineteenth-Century American Literature
Childhood in African and Caribbean Literature
From Shakespeare to Sheridan: Early Modern Comedy
Chaucer: An Introduction
Shakespeare (Issues of Genre)
Shakespeare (As texts and theatrical events)
Dangerous Reading: The Eighteenth-Century Novel in England and France
Victorian Novel I and II
The Literature of Madness
An Introduction to Post-Colonial Literature</p>
<p>And so on, with plenty of writing and composition courses thrown in. You can go to virtually any college course catalog and find the same thing. </p>
<p>Incidentally, while I believe that the English major can prepare a student for many career paths aside from teaching, I would also say that rather than a surplus there is actually a dearth of GOOD English teachers in many areas. SAT CR and W scores bear this out. In our area the trend seems to be that as older secondary school teachers whose BA was in Education retire, they are being replaced with teachers who majored in English and then earned the MAT. I think this is a good thing.</p>
<p>I am a sophomore in college and an English major, and I do not regret it. I enjoy the subject and I love to write, and I will not change my mind. I do not care about low wages or job demands. If you become a teacher in the first place, you can’t be in it for the money. You have to truly love teaching, because you will never be paid what you are worth. Anyway…</p>
<p>I think that article is ridiculous. It is offensive that the author points out that a murderer was an English major. Their major has nothing to do with anything. A murderer can have any major, not specifically English. I feel like the author is trying to say that English majors will end up murdering the nation or some ridiculous argument of that type.</p>
<p>I also don’t like how they “complain” that classics are being replaced by new books. First of all, you can’t keep living in the past. Yes, it is important to teach classics, but it is also important to learn about books being published in the present. After all, the books being published present-day will end up being classics someday.</p>
<p>I’m not an English major, but I definitely feel like I could have been.</p>
<p>Writing and reading are easy, but doing them well is the hardest thing in the world to do. Not only is it hard, but there’s little in life that gives me as much satisfaction as taking the time to write something thoughtful in a way that conveys deep ideas and subtle points, and to have others understand and appreciate it. Writing well is very powerful, and if I were better at it, I would be in that rather than CS and Physics.</p>
<p>I get so tired of people pretending that STEM fields are somehow better than the Humanities. I think it’s just the opposite, and the tragedy is that Humanities majors do have a harder time than STEM people after graduation. Math is the real barrier, and for people who are good at math, it’s the easiest thing in the world. That’s the irony.</p>
<p>English (including composition, literature, and everything that goes with it) is probably the subject I respect most. I’ve enjoyed (and done well) in the introductory-level English courses I’ve had, and the teachers have liked my work. I love English, and have nothing but respect for those majoring in English (well, the ones who actually work at it, naturally… there are slackers and do-nothings in every discipline).</p>
<p>In conclusion: if I were smarter, I would be in English right now, no question about it.</p>
<p>My Associate’s degree is in English Lit. Whenever I mention it to employers (I’m one of those masochists who’s working and going to school at the same time), they invariably remark that it’s such a rare asset to have employees who are skilled with both critical thought and articulation. So, yet again, Phyllis Schafley is wrong. ;)</p>
<p>What’s wrong with studying post-colonial literature and deconstruction?
I sense this conservative tendency, or rather, this intense jealousy towards the current progress in literature criticism. We live in a globalized world and market demands us to have a horizontal knowledge about the current condition rather than a vertical understanding, which has been deemed by some as valuable and deep. I don’t think studying books written in non-western countries will necessarily damage the scholarly research on shakespeare; rather, I think it expands our horizon and enable us to analyze traditional authors in a different light.
People who think humanities majors can be acquired by reading in a library and therefore meaningless are contradicting themselves. I can pretty much be a certified CCNA or a computer scientists by reading books in the library too! If you want to get a job, the best way to get it and do it well is to do it.</p>
<p>Nothing wrong with it at all. Nor is there anything wrong with studying non-western literature as a counterpoint to “English.” Nor is there anything wrong about studying Shakespeare or Chaucer. The academy is supposed to be about the free and open exchange of ideas, which Mrs. Schlafly would apparently like to censor.</p>
<p>"I can pretty much be a certified CCNA or a computer scientists by reading books in the library too! If you want to get a job, the best way to get it and do it well is to do it. "</p>
<p>Well, I think you can learn anything on your own, if that’s what you mean. That includes any engineering, scientific, business, or humanities discipline. With enough books, practice, and time, anybody could learn anything they wanted to.</p>
<p>This doesn’t mean college is pointless. You learn more, better, in less time and with less effort in college. You make friends and business contacts that are in many cases more valuable than what you actually learn about your major.</p>
<p>I would like to point out that becoming a computer scientist, however, is not as easy as reading a few books, even though many would have you believe this. I don’t really like to perpetuate this stereotype; I know you were just using it as an example, but CS actually gets ragged on pretty hard too by the same people who rag on the humanities. CS is not something you can pick up in a weekend, or a month, or a year, or even in 15 years. CS is lifelong pursuit, and you’ll never know nearly everything there is to know about the field. Just thought I’d step in and defend my major’s honor…</p>
<p>I honestly believe that a degree in English was the best preparation when I entered the job market. Once you have the opportunity to have a solid foundation in English, the STEM majors, law school, and business are much easier to tackle. The transition to a professional life is easier with a major or minor in English.
It is very obvious that Schafly still is pursuing her hidden agenda.</p>
<p>Of course a handle on the English language makes things a lot easier, but how exactly does an English degree make math and engineering much easier to tackle? Or professional life for that matter? Because plenty of majors develop your writing skills to a great extent.</p>
<p>I guess my problem with the English major originated in my English literature classes. When we read Hamlet, everything was analyzed, even stuff that didn’t seem to make sense. Everything HAD to have an interpertation, and I just couldn’t understand why something couldn’t have just been a plot hole and we’re just overanalyzing everything. In my mind, Shakespeare wasn’t a perfect god who could never have written anything other than absolute perfection. And the fact that we used Freudian psychology to explain the characters in Hamlet made things a heck of a lot worse… how did Shakespeare incorporate ideas originating in the 1800’s into his works, again? It always seemed to me that people were pulling interpretations out thin air.</p>
<p>And then I tried to tackle Finnegan’s Wake… is this what literary authors want to emulate? I got through 3 pages before I concluded that it was an evil puzzle designed to mock literary criticism and fool people into wasting their lives trying to understand the damn thing. It’s incomprehensible, nobody knows what it means, so why is it admired again? I thought studying English and literature is supposed to make you more understandable and better able to wordify your ideas? Finnegan’s Wake destroyed any affinity I had to studying literature.</p>
<p>Well, this is my rant about why I don’t like the English major. Feel free to correct any misconceptions I had.</p>
<p>Finnegans Wake is not a conventional novel so please stop treating it like it is one. It’s an entire langauge on its own that you simply have to work to get used to. Go to “night school” like Joyce did- study your dreams and patterns and such like Freud and Jung who influenced him. Read Vico’s New Science and Freud’s Interpretation of Dreams and give it another try, not being so compulsive like you just mentioned how school stresses compulsion- to interpret everything. It acts like an inkblot test. But there is a lot there. For example, 'sent an unquiring one into the well." When one sleeps, he cannot inqure (unquire is the negated form). It is an immensely complex book, perhaps as a testament to your argument, an example of Joyce’s superiority complex (if you read his semi-autobiographical novel you would understand). But it is truly a dream language- and consider Freud and Nietzsche of the time who influenced Joyce- the mind acts irrationally. And it’s a book of the night, the man is deprived of his senses and dead to the world- the world of construct and civilization. So the language can’t make sense and there can’t be a linear plot for Joyce’s masterpiece to make sense.
And even you would have to admit that, considering the stresses of Ulysses reached resolution, the Wake is often a lighthearted book which is hilarious often times for its absurdity and rebelliousness/uniquness of language and form if nothing else.</p>
<p>I’m not saying Finnegans Wake is a conventional book, but rather I question its high status in literary studies. I appreciate that it is irrational, strange and utterly absurd, but I don’t understand the need to analyze and understand something that was probably never meant to be understood. I don’t think its language should be studied that much because nobody understands it and we probably don’t want to encourage people to write like that. It is absurd in how strange it is, but I’m fairly sure that I were to give some paper to mental patients and then collect those writings after a few years I’d probably get something equally amusing and nonsensical. Yet it is studied, it is respected, and I am rather disturbed how the number of people who spend years analyzing it. I mean, cool if you read it as a hobby, but when I see publications about and people who spent years academically studying it, I just think it’s absurd. I personally believe that English majors should be able to improve the language and write in a way that would be enjoyed and understood by as many people as possible without sacrificing the poetry of words, so when a book that is the exact opposite of those things is held in high regard, I’m troubled. I suppose I am worried about English majors being inspired to write works that only English professors could ever hope to decipher. </p>
<p>I am further reminded of the painting sold in Paris that was in fact painted by a donkey… if I created a computer program that randomly stringed words together, and created a book out of that, would any literary critics hail it as a masterpiece of confusion and absurdity? Or more concisely, can book be so bad and so awful that it will be considered a literary masterpiece? That’s the thing that turns me off the most.</p>
<p>But it is meant to be understood; it’s not just jibber-jabber. I won’t explain again the necessity of the various languages (metalinquistic is an aesthetic quality defined by Umberto Eco) which comports with the chaotic nature of dreams and the light. But, it can be interpreted which makes the book easy to generalize about and essentially fun for anybody- casual reader or literary scholar. But I’ll give you another example, “…brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation.” vicus- reference to Vico. Cyclical nature of history. the first page- the man’s head is in search of his toes: when asleep and unconscious. people lose a sense of space- objects in relation to each other, which means they lose a sense of time as well because time moves with space. This. again, means darkness. There is a whole ton to be understood in this book as you would agree with because you implied that English professors could only hope to decipher this book- this seems to refute other elements in your argument which try to discredit Joyce. Joyce wasn’t some scizophrenic putting neologisms together for the heck of it…</p>
<p>Then I am further confused. If it is meant to be understood, then why is it so hard to understand? As far as I know, I know of no one who has claimed to have solved the riddle, almost a century after its release. Is it a puzzle meant to torment people? I suppose I should word it better: there’s no single point to the book, the author made it such that it would appear differently to different people. Which is why I question the need for people to find its one true meaning.</p>
<p>I am not saying that one cannot possibly interpret the book, I’m saying that it might as well be a futile exercise. I’m sure if I gave some text written by an insane inmate and told you to tell me what it means, you’ll be able to give me sort of literary analysis of the book. Or, given another example, if I gave you some randomly-generated text, how long would it take you to conclude that it is, in fact, gibberish and not some genius manipulation of language? Perhaps literature could use some sort of standard. Perhaps it might restrict the full range of human imagination, but words are inherently limiting.</p>
<p>I also just can’t get past the futility of it. Is Finnegans Wake an example of how one should try to get one’s point across? Is its language to be copied an emulated? Should more books be equally incomprehensible and rebellious? Why, exactly, is it studied? The ambiguity of it all turns me off from literature studies a lot. I’m not really the type of person that wants to solve a puzzle just because it’s unsolvable.</p>
<p>One true meaning? Ulysses sure didn’t have just one true meaning why should the Wake? The book is a huge accomplishment, for one reason, because Joyce creates a language of puns and parodies. It is incredibly unique. It’s also very easy to just generalize about which can make interpretation amazingly subjective. Like, the third page or so Finn Mccool (Irish legend) is mentioned. So I had this interpretation based on Irish history going because I’ve read about Irish history and Irish mythology.</p>
<p>Look up Joyce’s quotes on the book. The man is unconscious to the world. Had you ever read a book before about a man unconscious to the world and the only actual primary character in the book is that man (there are a ton of secondary characters it seems).</p>