The English Major Is Not Dead

          I was driven to write this because of a New York Times editorial that came out recently. It’s entitled "The Decline and Fall of the English Major," but what it should be called is “The Decline and Fall of the Faith in the English Major”. I admit that the writer makes a valid point: statistics and records do show the diminishing numbers of people graduating with undergraduate degrees in English, from Pomona College, from Yale, from all over. The writer, Veryln Klinkenborg, goes on to mention how even those who do become English majors end up in her nonfiction writing courses she’s taught at various Ivy League schools without the ability to write clearly or even “humanely.” (I assume by that she refers more to the elegance of civilized writing than to any notion of brutality.) I would say that the English major does foster writing skills but does so more idiosyncractically, more as an independent study than an explicit class or focus. I appreciate the article’s insistence that writing skills should be more pronounced for English majors, but I think it goes too far to call the major at its “fall,” or dead.

          Ultimately, I think the opinion is a dramatic one, but it has its merits. The article makes a good point about the move toward “literal-mindedness” in regard to the contemporary student’s approach to the humanities, but I would term it a bit more like obsessive rationalization. There is a self-conscious process of doubting and then searching for how exactly the English major can, and must in this economy, be a practical field of academic study. The answer to this would be the development of better writing skills, and I would agree that it is not the norm for tips about clear writing styles to be discussed by a professor who, for instance, is more concerned with covering a deconstructionist reading of Joyce’s Ulysses than trying to teach a lecture hall the arguable sin of split infinitives. English courses are not writing courses, but that said, the process of writing essays is the field from which better writing sprouts. It isn’t exactly or explicitly taught. The craft of writing is inevitably a personalized skill and any formula to help improve one’s writing has its limits like anything else. It’s much the same about what one hopes to get out of a humanities degree—the ability to read critically and write argumentatively without following just one style or one teacher or one news source. No one can teach you to stand your ground but yourself.

          This doesn’t mean that being an English major means one won’t improve his/her writing. I, for one, can attest to the incredible significance that writing—and writing better—takes when one decides to do an honors thesis (but even a thesis on a smaller scale would make one grow as a writer). My professor at UC Berkeley insisted that clear writing and clear thinking are inextricably linked, but his pedagogical bent was to help out purely with the writing by fixing syntactical or stylistic difficulties. I thought it was horrifying at first. Here I was writing on postmodern metafiction and I had come to his office hours seeking some solace and hope that my argument was an argument. And what happens? He points to the page. The topic sentence here rambles on. He points to the next paragraph. This is unclear. He turns the page. That has a dangling modifier and you can really cut half this sentence out. Those were the questions asked and the comments given, which were galaxies away from the ones I was expecting: So how does this text account for others like it, etc.? Your point relates to Linda Hutcheon’s theory of metafiction, but how does it differ, etc.?

          As much as I disliked this method initially, I actually came to realize that it was the change in my writing style that helped change my analyses and even build my confidence in my thesis. Shorter sentences gave me more momentum and clearer progressions of thought on the page. Once I had adjusted to simpler syntax, I could go back and diversify sentence structures without feeling obliged to fit in everything in stringy mega-sentences or one-page paragraphs. I didn’t realize how much they had weighed down the page until I got rid of them. My enjoyment of writing the thesis also went up exponentially—I was flying over the multiple planes of theories, texts, and postmodern wordplay when before I was running myself into tunnels of complex-compound sentences at every turn.

          So from personal experience, I have to say that I was lucky enough to have my honors thesis professor, as well as a few other professors, who did deviate from lectures and literary theory occasionally to make the class write and write outside the box of formulaic or habitual styles. Even still, talking about writing styles and processes is abstract. Writing is the only way to improve writing. And what you read may inspire you to write in a certain way. What this article addresses is that more and more English majors fall into the form of theoretical discourse as they write, the ability to “assemble strings of jargon and generate clots of ventriloquistic syntax.” They are so equipped with artilleries of jargon that they begin firing off impressive terms without waiting to set up the proper contexts or considering how best to present them and so these terms fall to the ground as meaningless bullets in an obscure mist of language.

          The funny thing is, the article writer talks about how the English major should both be much more idealistic, in offering a romantic vantage point over the sea of human experience, and be more practical, in sharpening writing skills. I feel like that’s too much to hope for. A lot of people grab for movies and music before books nowadays, and that’s part of the reason why the English major isn’t what it once was. Books as forms of entertainment and enlightenment have short-circuited a bit in society and the warm yellow glow of the layman’s and the scholar’s lamps have been somewhat replaced by the fluorescent bulbs of competing theorists, critics, and reviewers’ operating tables. Those tables are not bad or evil or contemptible—they’re just simply more closed off to the public than literary theory and literature once was.

          The contemporary English major has to try his best to bridge the gap between theoretical jargon and clear speech, which isn’t exactly a picnic in the park. At the same time he faces the societal bias against the humanities and the lie that it’s “useless.” Now I have nothing against computer science majors, chemistry majors, econ majors, or business majors—to name a few of the more technical ones that can lead straight to specialized careers—but just because English and other humanities majors help answer the “why” of language and human experience instead of the “how,” they appear less practical and not worth the money when it’s just not true.  

UC Berkeley English Commencement Ceremony ~ May 18, 2013

          I have the greatest urge to get into all the benefits of being an English major and how the decline and its “fall” is not about the value of a degree in literature but about the perception of that value, but I won’t. This reflection-essay was meant as a mere facebook response to a post by a former roommate of mine about this New York Times article and look what happened. I do want to finish by saying that it is true that writing is not an explicit art taught in the humanities so much as it is an independent process of self-discovery, influenced by the readings and the professors one encounters. So it would be nice if more stylistic tips were taught. Theoretical jargon filters in more and more as praiseworthy and useful (which it is, up to a point), yet it does thicken the atmosphere away from clear essay language. Apart from the quest to have better writing, what a major in literature does is increase empathy and comfort about life’s inevitable uncertainties, as can be seen from this recent psychological study on just reading fiction. In conversation with this is a statement from the commencement speech of a fellow English major Prachi Naik, who was in my honors thesis class (the rest can be found here):

Because we chose poetry over pipettes, we might somehow [appear to] be less hire-able, have less to contribute to the market. It’s not enough that we’ve enlarged ourselves through the hugeness of human empathy that reading literature requires, or that we’ve sharpened our words, our vocabulary, our rhetoric so that we can excavate, along with so many who came before us, what it means to be fully human.

    The English major is not dead. It just needs another chance.