Why I'm a Terrible English Major

Recently, there was a big controversy about the Oxford serial comma. The rule used to be that when making a list, your list should look like this: x, y, and z (notice the comma after the letter y). But now, the Oxford elite have changed the rule. Your list should now look like this: x, y and z (notice the absence of the comma after the letter y). This ticked me off because I envisioned the best and brightest men and women in the English discipline gathered as a committee (because you just know it was a committee) discussing the fate of one, stupid little comma instead of worrying about real problems. Right now, we’re in the midst of a war, there are people starving all over the world, our economy is in shambles, but we’re worrying about a comma. Things like this make it hard for me at times to justify my discipline to people. I am a terrible English major because I believe that much of what we do is silly.

As an undergraduate, I both loved and hated my literature classes. On the one hand, my teachers exposed me to many great, classic writers like Flannery O’Connor and Nathaniel Hawthorne. But on the other hand, literature classes seemed like glorified book clubs. All we did was sit around talking about the stuff we’ve read for the week. People in other academic disciplines, in business for example, were learning how to change the world. Meanwhile, we were stuck in the classroom talking about dead white guys who wrote interesting things, but were ultimately irrelevant to the present and future of humanity. It was silly to sit around being passive observers to history rather than makers of it.

When I was a student in Jason Saphara’s American Lit class I wrote a paper on the poem “After Apple-Picking” by Robert Frost, and I got a B on it. Jason told me the analysis was sound, but because I didn’t use enough outside resources, he had docked my grade. This leads me to my next point of why I’m a bad English major. Every class demanded at least three major essays in place of exams, and I resisted using outside research for my papers. This was not because I was lazy or didn’t know how, but because I firmly believed a writer should be inventing new ideas about a work, and not regurgitating what someone else had already said on the subject. It’s silly not to use our honed critical thinking skills to rely almost solely on our own ideas.

The English department is full of biases, and two of those biases are that if you’re a serious student of literature, you must hate Stephen King no matter what, and you must also worship at the altar of Shakespeare. It’s silly that we, as English majors, can’t simply like what we want, that we must conform to the “canon.” But Stephen King, I would argue, is so culturally entrenched that even if a person doesn’t like his writing, it can’t be denied that he is a significant writer worth studying. On the flip side, Shakespeare is like the Steven Spielberg of his time. Yes, he is culturally significant, but I’m not sure he’s worth all the forced adoration. It is ridiculous that our own personal interests are sources of such heated disagreements in our community.

English is the silliest subject to study in college, yet it is the most important to me. For all the things I find fault with – the armchair scholarship, the outside sources, the biases that rule us – there are ten more positive things that sprout in their place such as the joy of writing and being exposed to writers and ideas I never would have otherwise. I just have to square myself with the fact that I’m not cut out to be an armchair scholar like most in my field. My destiny as an English major is to be a literary bad-girl for having beliefs that live outside the box. In that spirit, you can take your Oxford serial comma, and stick it where the sun doesn’t shine!