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The Decline and Fall of the English Major

nytimes.com

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Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#121

Post by rsingel »

gruseom wrote: post #58
patio11 wrote: post #35

The first paragraph would be improved by the economic reality that dare not speak its name: adjunct . Most people who pursue the PhD in English will fail to join the one profession which actually needs English PhDs (training future English PhDs) and instead, if they want to continue putting to use the last 7+ years of their life dedicated to mastering the reification of privilege and construction of the other as demo…

But your comment already takes for granted that there's no purpose in studying literature other than a career in academia (presumably because education is only about careers to begin with). I'd say the battle for the things worth caring about here was lost long before that assumption became not-even-worth-bothering-to-make-explicit. And sure, the economics are pathetic and the profession is rife with horseshit. The r…

My undergrad degree in literature might not have gotten me a high-paying job out of college, but it helped me live a life that I wanted.

I had the privilege of doing my final two years of college at a school where grades weren't given out for papers in the English department.

You'd write a one-page response paper to a Shakespeare play, where you'd have to make a cogent argument/close reading and in response, you'd get 300 words from the professor engaging with your argument.

My classes wandered across Irish literature, non-fiction writing seminars, 18th century literature, modern and post-modern theory, and hyper-text literature.

I learned to engage with the classics, learned to hear the poetry in James Joyce's initially inscrutable Ulysses, and was forced to confront the problems of loving Pound's words while abhorring his politics.

I learned tech later, as I went. I probably would have made more money studying computer science or cognitive science (which was fascinating mix of technology and theory), but I don't regret at all being a liberal arts major.

The world is big, fascinating and hard to think through -- and that's not getting any easier. I owe to my liberal arts education the limited skills I have for finding beauty in a true sentence or the mismatched typography of a local business's sign.

That education has driven me to understand why I need to live in the world an open heart, to understand things that I naturally want to dismiss and to forge a life built on an ethically-driven approach to politics, literature and art.

I've got lots of arguments about how our education system works - starting way before college.

But if the new reality is that college is only good for pushing out technicians and a liberal arts education is only for suckers, then we've just added one more depressing symptom pointing to a diagnosis that there's something deeply awry in our nation's economic system and social priorities.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#122

Post by foobarbazqux »

abraininavat wrote: post #106
foobarbazqux wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Surely the oldest complaint is that life's too brutal for romance. But why bother living, without meaning, without romance?

meaning == romance ??

That's a good question. If giving meaning to our experience is an act of creation, then perhaps this is romantic originality. But honestly, I didn't really think about it, I just thought "romantic" and that's what came out.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#123

Post by lemmsjid »

mtdewcmu wrote: post #111
lemmsjid wrote: post #34

I'm one of those English majors who pops up in interesting places (in this case, software engineering). After more than a decade in the field, I continue feeling that my degree was excellent preparation for writing code. Allow me some bullet points: * The typical English major is drilled in taking an impenetrable text and constructing an interpretive narrative (an essay). Much of the major involves writing essay afte…

"The progression of the English major is that typically you go from thinking you're a hotshot writer to understanding that you are a bag of presuppositions and ill considered narratives... A well trained English major is the first to point out that their precious interpretation is probably not correct" In other words, humility. You learn it in science and engineering, too. It's hard to get through rigorous training i…

I agree that certain axioms can be verified or disproven, but larger questions remain arguable in both science and the humanities (if those can be truly separated). For example, you can verify that a linked list works, or that an operation is associative... but when you zoom out and look at whether or not a codebase with millions of lines of code is successfully doing what it sets out to do... The act of assessing that is similar to assessing Milton's motivation for his depiction of limbo. The interpretations defy a single right or wrong answer.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#124

Post by pjbrunet »

abraininavat wrote: post #36
foobarbazqux wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If a major is a program of study, then to study a major is to study a program of study. It's possible, of course, but I don't think that's what most majors do. And English ones especially would see the subtle language implications here. (As you can see we're both already abusing the term: majors are also those that enroll in a particular program of study, but I'm quite sure he didn't mean to study them.) It just seem…

Thanks for illuminating the conversation by demonstrating pedantry of the type so often heard from English majors. You've done so to cleverly illustrate part of the reason the major is on its way to irrelevance, no doubt.

I'm just wondering if your username is a reference to Virek from Count Zero.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#125

Post by eshvk »

Crake wrote: post #103
sk5t wrote: post #84

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My intent was not to persuade you on the meaning of "Philistine," but rather to support the idea that a large proportion of STEM students become rather self-satisfied in their fields' relative importance, while more-or-less mocking the humanities as useless fluff. I've not observed the converse to be true--at least not up until the Ph.D. levels. FWIW, I had a highly varied college experience, working and associating…

The classes are useless fluff. The topics themselves are interesting, but at least for me, academic rigor is so lacking that I'm bored to tears. It's been suggested to me by someone who knows me that it's not easy for everyone like it is for me, and that's it's just because I'm smart that I'm bored. While this hadn't occurred to me until she suggested it, I suppose it could be partially the case, but I suspect the pe…

> While this hadn't occurred to me until she suggested it, I suppose it could be partially the case, but I suspect the perceived easiness (as well as the actual relative easiness) of the average liberal arts degree does a lot to influence the type of student who chooses to pursue it.

This is true everywhere; there is nothing insightful about this. I found C.S. courses to be rather mundane, boring (and even sometimes uglier) than pure Math courses. There were people in C.S. who were there because they couldn't cut it in Math. There were also people who did C.S. because they were fascinated by it. People have different motivations why they do something.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#126

Post by tmsh »

The article gets it completely wrong. One studies writing as an English major the way one studies programming as a computer science major. That is, the best way to do it is to inspire via other subjects that will enliven the entire career.

I'm a highly skilled software engineer who was an English and Classics major at at top liberal arts college. The author of the article seems to be an authority, but he is not. Most professors of literature that I respect would look down on his attempt to generalize about the whole field based on a narrow non-fiction / writing practioner-esque approach.

The reason you study English is to study literature which is the most important concentration of knowledge, distilled, evolved and selected as to what is important in the past several centuries. There is figuratively nothing actually more important (if there were, someone would've written a f-ing story). Science, by comparison, is young.

The study of literature is a celebration of what is important in life. And how to live life. And how to find what is important to you in terms of each second that you live on this planet, Steve Jobs / death at your back philosophically-speaking (those are all English majory ideas -- Marvell in that case).

But back to my original point. One studies computer science to understand the philosophy of how computers might be designed and used (see the Abelson SICP lectures or whatever), not to learn how to implement some Java standard interface. Though that is a little part of the practice that one has to do. Same thing with writing.

I took zero writing courses, but wrote over a hundred essays on other writers and it was one of the best preparations for any field -- law, science, software engineering (in my case).

Also the proper way to study literature -- ignoring all the postmodernist and cultural theory baggage -- is to study words closely and this has a long, rigorous history that again rivals any other analytical tradition. Has English studies lost its way? Sure, it always does because it's such a ridiculously large undertaking. Are more targeted philologies and close readings (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Close_reading ) important? Sure.

But just because the typical English major isn't as employable without other skills, doesn't mean the field itself is a bad one. But I think people get upset about it because it is such a tricky field to make a career in and can burn you if you think it is.

But one doesn't set out to become an astronaut by taking astronaut classes. You have to have another broader drive. Among those who value intelligence, however, the study of literature (f- writing -- great writing has no place in the university except as a place to study it, if you ask me -- it's not primarily designed to teach writing in the world because academia does not exist primarily in the world -- it's designed to teach understanding of past writing which is precisely 'what we know', as Eliot would say, etc.).

Anyway, as much as it pains me to give any credence to the idiots there:

http://www.socfell.fas.harvard.edu/senior%20and%20junior%20f...

They know enough to know that English is equal to many other pursuits of knowledge. Will it evolve to a more targeted literary analysis? Maybe. But there is nothing more important than the study of great literature. If this upon me proved I never writ nor no man ever loved, basically.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#127

Post by simias »

Crake wrote: post #113
gammarator wrote: post #70

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I seem to have acquired all three of these gifts, and I majored in computer science. We all think that; it's a cognitive bias. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lake_wobegon_effect One of the benefits of writing classes is the chance to improve in response to third-party feedback. Our arguments are rarely as tight nor our prose as clear as they seem to us.

The difference between compsci and english is that if your prose is not clear in the latter, you'll still get an A (or even get an A because of the lack of clarity), whereas your code will not work in the former if it's muddled to the point of obscurity and non-functionality.

There is a difference between writing code and writing prose though. I've met many, many, many programmers who might have been good at their jobs but suck terribly at expressing their ideas during meeting or even in emails. It makes team work very tedious and time consuming.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#128

Post by Dewie »

sk5t wrote: post #41
krakensden wrote: post #16

> No one has found a way to put a dollar sign on this kind of literacy, and I doubt anyone ever will. But everyone who possesses it — no matter how or when it was acquired — knows that it is a rare and precious inheritance. This is a widespread sentiment. This is even a chic sentiment. This is maybe even a sentiment I once sympathized with. It is also the kind of romantic bullshit that hurts people. It doesn't really…

Are you arguing that there exists a class of people smart enough to gain admission into and pay for college, yet too simpleminded to assess the hazy job prospects based around a degree in English, psychology, art history, and the like? As far as I know, every major world culture produces writers, poets, sculptors, and musicians, and in no case is an education in those fields a guaranteed ticket to economic prosperity…

> Are you arguing that there exists a class of people smart enough to gain admission into and pay for college, yet too simpleminded to assess the hazy job prospects based around a degree in English, psychology, art history, and the like?

Being smart in one facet of life doesn't mean that you're necessarily smart in another one. And smart people can make stupid life-decisions.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#129

Post by bane »

pjbrunet wrote: post #95
bane wrote: post #33

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's sad that the classical education is no more, but it's also true that the humanities rotted from within This really resonated with me. I find the concept of a classical education immensely important. I originally wanted to be a music major before diverting to CS. Even during my CS studies, I took extra liberal coursework to try and "round out" my education: history courses, literature, etc. I found it troubling…

Representational art was valuable in those days, worth spending time on, because they didn't have Internet, TV, movies, photography, magazines, etc. 3D representation of objects on a 2D surface was still a new, challenging concept. Those Renaissance painters aimed to reach Joe Sixpack who was illiterate. Representational art wasn't meant to be that challenging. No surprise Average Joe still nods his head in approval:…

I absolutely agree. I don't think a return to old forms is what's in order. But a return to art that the average Joe can look at and think "no way my 6-year-old could do that".

And that's the problem today, so much of current art is something a 6-year-old could envision. And the unfortunate reality is, if the art looks like it was made with a lack of sophistication, the message it's trying to convey must be unsophisticated as well (despite the insistent yearnings of the art establishment)...at least that's the reasoning most people will have when viewing it.

Re: The Decline and Fall of the English Major

#130

Post by frozenport »

Besides a decline in overall literacy, which from personal impression is not a requirement for a English degree, I wonder if we can say this trend reflects an the accessibility of a college education.

Perhaps, 30 years ago Yale boys could afford to get an English degree because they were guaranteed cushy jobs at Goldman-Sachs where their dad and granddad were partners. Now some kid programming in what once was an Indonesian island took their job.

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