Why can you get a degree in fiction appreciation?

[Student of Trinity]

Did I already start a thread about this? I can't find it, so I think I didn't, but maybe I did. If so, sorry.

 

I recently started following a blog by this guy D.G. Myers, who's spent over twenty-five years teaching college English without tenure, and is losing his job because extending his contract would give him a claim on tenure. He's a passionate scholar who's also very articulate, so I think he's probably great at what he does; it's a shame he never got tenure. He's made a few posts about the sad state of academic English studies today, and how doomed his field surely is, because it's far too self-indulgent to be economically sustainable. Allowing for understandable bitterness, I think he probably still has a point. I wanted to be sympathetic, to argue that English departments were legitimate pillars of a university, at least in principle, and so some kind of sane reform could surely salvage the discipline. That's what I'd always felt, as someone who fell just short of minoring in English.

 

But thinking more seriously about the academic study of English, with a few more decades of academic experience, I'm not sure I can buy my own argument. I still want to believe the conclusion. But I'm stuck on one point.

 

Why should there be a university degree in fiction appreciation? Isn't that like getting a degree in gourmet dining? I mean, sure there's a lot to learn. I'm sure it takes a highly educated palate to savor all those truffles fully. But it's not a useful trade, to anyone. It's an indulgence. If rich people with time on their hands want to pay an expert instructor, to learn how to get more out of novels and recognize the really good ones, then fine: they can pay for private courses, just as they pay for courses in wine appreciation. But why should fiction appreciation be an academic discipline alongside medicine and engineering and natural science?

 

I don't just mean that students need an education that will get them a paying job. I mean that education, that's worth supporting with public funds and recognizing with credentials, ought to enable people to make some positive contribution to the world, in the course of their lives. I'm not assuming that every student has to be driven by the lust for flat screen TVs and enormous vehicles. I'm talking about the moral obligation to try to do some good in the world, in the time that you have here. How is studying fiction appreciation going to help with that?

 

I'm aware of the standard argument, that studying English trains one in reading comprehension, critical thinking, and articulate writing. Absolutely, it does — and those are awesome tools to train. I learned a lot about those things when I studied English, and I've valued that learning ever since. But here's the thing that someone else posted, on D.G. Myers's blog, and that struck me immediately as a knock-down point.

 

Other disciplines train those same things, too. Comprehension, thinking, and writing are wonderful things, because they're critically useful everywhere. So every discipline has to train those things. And they do train them. They train them the same way studying English trains them: incidentally, in passing, while conveying something else as core content. But where other disciplines have core content that might someday make you useful to other people, the core content of English is fiction appreciation. So you can get more out of novels. What's up with that?

 

What if English departments all switched over to studying non-fiction books and creative writing? Creative writing is a fine subject. As I said, my point here isn't just Philistinism. Fiction is valuable, because people value it. They pay for it. So training in creative writing would absolutely be a worthy peer to training in engineering. And a little bit of literary criticism might be appropriate to teach and research at university — as an adjunct to creative writing.

 

But all this academic study devoted to fiction appreciation. Really. What's up with that?

[Alorael at Large]

Longer thoughts to follow, but here's a start: why is English any worse than other humanities? If you're studying in the Classics department you're going to emerge equipped for even more highly specialized and irrelevant training.

 

Or physics. Sure, it's a fundamental science, but the utility of understanding solid state or high energy physics is basically nil unless you're a physicist. Physicists are probably more useful to moving society ahead, sure, but colleges aren't intended to produce societally benefical training either. If English really prepares you for an academic or commercial career appreciating fiction how is it worse than being trained to be an academic or consulting physicist?

 

—Alorael, who also notes that few majors in either stay in the field. Is English worse as a career-irrelevant major than physics?

[Student of Trinity]

I don't really mean to argue over whether people actually end up using what they specifically learned in school. Very little of what anyone learns in school or college turns out to be directly useful, even in very applied fields. One reason people still value degrees is that sometimes something you learned turns out to be extremely useful, but you can't tell in advance which particular thing that will be, for you. Another is that the implicit knowledge of the field's general background is very valuable, but the only way to acquire that is to spend some years studying details.

 

In Germany, physics is a highly valued degree, for work in all kinds of industries. It seems to open doors here to all kinds of technical careers, the way an engineering degree does in North America. Physics isn't that way in North America, I'll grant that. North American physics departments do most of their teaching to engineers, though. Whatever the Honors Physics graduates end up doing, the departments have a paying trade.

 

At any rate, physics is at least training you about something objectively real. What you learn could in principle enable you to do something useful or valuable for other people. My worry about English is that all it does, directly, is to help me enjoy or appreciate things better, myself. Every discipline has a struggle to demonstrate direct utility, and I think we should be generous. I'm worried that this 'training in gourmet dining' aspect is something qualitatively different about English, however, that renders it ineligible for much benefit of doubt.

 

Some of these concerns likely do apply to other humanities departments than English; but since I'm willing to accept utility-in-principle, even with a fair amount of stretching, I think some other humanities departments might be off the hook. Philosophy, for instance, trains you to analyze arguments, about anything whatever. You could reform philosophy departments into departments of critical thinking, and it wouldn't be that big a shake-up. Or, history: it's no guide to the future, except that it's the best guide we have. So I'd rather represent History or Philosophy in court, than fiction appreciation.

 

I'm playing Devil's Advocate here, in a stricter sense than people usually mean. Like the Curial official charged with digging up dirt on candidates for canonization, I'm a prosecutor whose heart is with the defense. I'd like to see English exonerated. But it looks like a tough case.

[Slawbug]

You just hand-waved away Alorael's point by saying "I don't mean to argue about that," but I think it's a pretty relevant point, so I'm bringing it back up.

 

Given how few people apply the specific content area knowledge that they learn in college, to the majority of their future employment... I'm not sure why it makes sense to target English specifically. You let history off the hook because my cuneiform tablets are some kind of nebulous guide to the future, but not a single Modernist or Post-Modernist novel goes in that category? You let physics off the hook because there are far more future careers that its content is relevant to, even though most people who take physics classes never get anywhere near those careers?

 

I'm sympathetic to your thrust, but your assessment of subject areas is incredibly inconsistent. These comparisons don't hold water. If your focus is on the usefulness to the student, and you're not willing to include everyone whose major doesn't line up with their career as part of the problem, I think you're out of gas. I could just as well ask, "why can you get a degree in physics appreciation?"

 

I think a more convincing argument would be to suggest that neither writing nor reading nor hermeneutics (etc.) would be particularly injured if every English department suddenly disappeared, whereas the disappearance of archaeology or physics departments would immediately stop the flow of new knowledge. I'm not sure that's 100% true, but literature is certainly less dependent on academic structures than science is. Of course, in the days when there were few to no universities, we did have poets and we also had scientists. I think what today's disparity speaks to is that English has been much more successful at democraticizing itself, at introducing itself to the masses, than physics or even history. The means and the techniques to read, write, and interpret literature are available to many. That is much less true for science; there are more obstacles on more levels, whether we are talking about understanding current scientific theory, applying it to life and industry, or conducting experiments of any nature.

 

So, let me reverse both parts of your question now. Why can't most people do science without a degree, when "doing fiction" has no such barrier?

[Randomizer]

So, let me reverse both parts of your question now. Why can't most people do science without a degree, when "doing fiction" has no such barrier?

Universities have become the apprenticeship programs for science.

 

Long ago a person would get trained by someone that knew the field as an apprentice until he could prove enough skill to become a journeyman to leave to travel and eventually reach master status.

 

Universities provide a place where the masters can train the next group of apprentices. A degree is "proof" that the apprentice has reached a level much like they used to require making objects to show mastery. You can do science without a degree like Thomas Edison, but the individuals that can do it that way are limited.

[Triumph]

Disclaimer: I'm sick and literally feverish, so this might make no sense.

 

I wonder if the "problem" with the "usefulness" of degrees has more to do with student intention or purpose than with something inherent in certain fields of study. I have a B.A. in Liberal Studies and I'm working my dissertation for a Ph.D. in history, so I am evidently in favor the liberal arts. But I never earned the B.A. in liberal studies expecting to get a "liberal studies job" upon graduation. I also didn't study things just because I thought they were cool. I valued it for the "incidental" benefits it would confer, and saw it as a steppingstone toward future goals. If a student takes a bunch of literature courses (or "fiction appreciation?"), I ask "Why?" For me, the degrees I've pursued all had purpose, were all part of broader hopes and goals.

 

I've seen enough of colleges and universities (this is my ninth year of college, in effect) to say that a good many students (undergrad but also graduate) are painfully aimless in college. Sure, lots of people show up to college not sure what they hope to do with their lives. That's totally all right if that is the case. But if they stay that way all the way through, and stay that way even AFTER, then they could have trouble. At the grad school level, I can think of a number of instances where I know / knew someone whose purpose for grad school was, I'm pretty sure, something like "I have no idea what to do with my life, hey, studying this sounds cool, I'll go to grad school and that'll occupy my life for a while." The same thing can happen at an undergrad level. The "problem," then, is not with B.A.'s in literature or with M.A.'s in archival administration. The issue is with individual people who pursue those things without an vision for WHY they are doing it, other than "I had no idea what else to do and thought studying X sounded cool." You find the proverbial unemployed, floundering lit. major not because of the lit. degree, but the degree's holder has broader issues to struggle with.

[Alorael at Large]

Universities have become the apprenticeship programs for science.

That's true but misleading. We're talking undergrad. Graduate programs are the apprenticeships of the science world. And not by loose analogy, either: the student-apprentice learns from the principle investigator-master by performing assigned tasks, eventually with increasing independence, but a harsh master can indefinitely delay graduation, require endless menial tasks that provide little training, and generally make life miserable.

 

Physics teaches you about something real, but it teaches you how to do very little. Except math; that's handy, but applications for the kind of higher math you'll break out in the course of quantum and statistical mechanics are few and far between. In an English degree the subject is pretty useless but the tasks are more broadly applicable. You'll make arguments and back them up with evidence; you'll engage with others' opinions and support or refute them. That's handy stuff.

 

If all English departments became departmentsof language analysis and departments of essayism they'd still be fairly worthwhile. Arcane, perhaps, but not unusually so for majors. And honestly not much more arcane than physics.

 

—Alorael, who notes that there's an important difference between physics and English. You need an understanding of a fair amount of physics to pursue a career as a physicist. Not all of the field, but depth in your subfield is mandatory. To produce literature does not require anything more than literacy, drive, and the luck or talent to produce something others want to read. That talent isn't what Englsih programs train at all, so literature is irrelevant. There's also an argument to be made about the fundamental wide-but-shallowness of English and other humanities compared to depth of knowledge in natural sciences. You can know a lot about literature, but all of it will probably be basically accessible to a layperson. In serious physics, math, chemistry, or even biology you can talk about things that make absolutely no sense to the uninitiated even if you try to explain the jargon.

[Edgwyn]

My perspective is from someone with a BS in Electrical Engineering and an MS in Management, so a "hard" degree and a "fuzzy" degree if you will. While the EE degree taught me a lot of fundamental concepts, it did nothing to prepare me to actually work in design/construction, that all came from on the job training, using the fundamentals that I learned while getting the degree. The MS, being more focused (MS vs BS) did have some classes with more direct application to my career as a manager, such as labor law.

 

I believe that training in one's primary language (english to a fair number of us on this board) is necessary to make that complete, competent individual. That of course does not require an actual english Department to accomplish and in fact, an English Department may well be worse at it than a History Department or a Liberal Studies Department or especially a Communications Department. I believe that most college graduates need to be able to articulate their thoughts properly in oral and written form. Having successfully avoided humanities classes in college (AP classes + Engineering Major), the best communication training that I received in High School was from History Class. The drill of doing five paragraph essay after five paragraph essay taught me far more about how to frame and support an argument than trying to find the symbolism in a Faulkner novel ever did. Ultimately, I am not interested in being trained for creative writing, I want to be trained for effective writing (I never expect to publish a short story, much less a novel), but there does need to be a place for those who wish to study and pursue creative writing (as a profession or advocation).

 

I believe that the "fuzzy" classes have a very important place in college as part of the quest to produce culturally literate students. Unfortunately, too often, the minimum humanities requirement does not aim for cultural literacy, it serves as either a stepping stone into a humanities major, or aims for indoctrination in a politically correct school of thought. My college had what we (tech majors) referred to Physics for Poets, Rocks for Jocks and Stars for Studs where "fuzzy" majors could get the concepts of science without having to learn calculus. Unfortunately, there was not an English for Engineers or Political Science for Physicists geared to develop cultural literacy in technical majors without all of the extraneous garbage.

 

That said, when I did my Masters, I found it depressing as to what level of mathematical competency was sufficient to graduate from college. The three classes that my "fuzzy" friends found daunting (and took a GPA hit in) required math no higher than pre-calculus.

 

So, what does it require to be that literate or truly educated adult? English? Math? Physics? Poli Sci? History? Economics? Communications? Physical Education? Psychology? Ultimately I believe that they are all important and while our undergraduate degrees are broad in our field of concentration or major, they are not necessarily broad enough to truly educate us.

 

Finally (I promise), what is a "useful" degree? If useful means leading to meaningful employment of your skills, then a two year degree in dental hygeine or fire science is more useful than an under grad (four year) degree in English, Psychology, pre-Med, pre-Law or Physics. On the other hand, a four year degree in teaching, engineering or nursing is very useful. Some career paths are open without a degree, some with a two year degree, some with a four year degree, some with a masters and some with a doctorate. With enough specialization, any degree can be "useful".

[Kelandon]

At any rate, physics is at least training you about something objectively real. What you learn could in principle enable you to do something useful or valuable for other people. My worry about English is that all it does, directly, is to help me enjoy or appreciate things better, myself.

This seems to be the crux of your argument, but as far as I can tell, it's just nonsense; you're trying to make a distinction that doesn't exist. Having studied physics, I have no idea how it enabled me to do something useful or valuable for other people. I guess if they really, really needed to know the landing spot of a projectile through airless space, given a launch angle and a speed, I could tell them that. But if I had a nickel for every time I'd come across a person who needed me to tell them that, I'd still be flat broke.

 

I also don't know how the equations of projectile motion are in any sense more "objectively real" than the fact that Shakespeare wrote some stuff back in the 1590s or so. One is a fact about history and the other is a general principle, I suppose, but that isn't a difference in how "real" they are.

 

Even if you assume that all disciplines teach some kind of critical thinking and, at least in passing, teach some kind of writing, you have to admit that English teaches writing (and close reading) a lot more than the sciences do. A person who struggles somewhat with writing will have advanced rather differently after an English major than after a Physics major. (I should hasten to add that writing about literature is not always the right vehicle for learning to write; some people would do better trying to learn to write about something else. But we shouldn't begrudge the ones who would rather learn to write by writing about literature.)

 

But perhaps most importantly, I think you are mistaking the purpose of an English class, too. After a good class on Shakespeare, you probably enjoy reading Shakespeare more, but the point isn't your enjoyment; the point is your understanding. You know a lot more about what he was doing, and how his plays were put together, in terms of language and scene structure and character and so on. This probably makes you like them more, but that's basically an unintended (but fortunate) side effect. I liked looking at the sky more after taking a stellar astrophysics classes, but those classes weren't "star appreciation" classes. They were about understanding stars, not about liking stars. A class in Shakespeare is the same.

[Dikiyoba]

That said, when I did my Masters, I found it depressing as to what level of mathematical competency was sufficient to graduate from college. The three classes that my "fuzzy" friends found daunting (and took a GPA hit in) required math no higher than pre-calculus.

Most people don't go into careers that require advanced math, though. Most people will never need calculus or advanced algebra or whatever. Most people would be better served with more emphasis on the basics. (And statistics, if you are planning to go into any kind of science or research.)

 

Dikiyoba.

[Student of Trinity]

At least in my mind, I'm not just waving away the general issue of usefulness of education. I'm trying to focus instead on the specific issue of being educated in consumption rather than in production. Even if you're being equipped for some form of production, it's certainly hard and arguable undesirable to train in very specific applications; the goal is cross-application. Fine; humanities departments have defended themselves with cross-application for centuries, and science departments can't really claim much higher ground, either. I don't want to rehash all that. The point that's new to me is a wrinkle I never used to notice. The core content of English studies is training in consumption. Cross-application from consumption skills to production skills is a much bigger stretch, it seems to me.

 

Slarty and Alo and others may have had the same points in mind, but Kelandon seems to me to have hit my narrower target most squarely. One of his points is substantial even though it's beside the mark, strictly; the other is directly on the topic I want.

 

The beside-the-mark point is that English does teach quite a lot more close reading and argumentative writing than most other disciplines. That's true. I say this point is beside the mark, because what it says is that English is a product in excellent packaging. I'm trying to focus on products themselves. Other disciplines could adopt English packaging, or English departments could stuff their containers with other things. What if English studies concentrated mainly on non-fiction — on textbooks, for example — but put students through the same traditional exercises of heavy reading loads and lots of essays? What if biology courses demanded a lot more writing? I'm not questioning close reading and persuasive writing as universal skills that can be wrapped around any content. I'm looking narrow-eyed at fiction appreciation as an academic product.

 

The point that hits home is the comparison of stars and Shakespeare. Touché: what I say next is not rebuttal but concession, restating Kelandon's point in my own terms.

 

Everything may be probably useless but astrophysics is astronomically more useless; there's a slight chance that some undergraduate might possibly change the world with any one bit of knowledge, but no-one is ever going to leave college and build us a star. Stars are very interesting phenomena, however, and they illustrate some basic principles that apply to lots of other things. The same can be said of Shakespeare's corpus. It's a very interesting phenomenon. There isn't much around that's fully like it, but a lot of things use common elements.

 

Someone who really knew how Shakespeare worked might indeed use that knowledge to make something really valuable, even if it wasn't specifically Henry IV Part Four: The Final Reckoning, or Wives of Windsor Gone Wild. In fact such a something might be so valuable, that it might be well worth training millions of people in Shakespeare, just to keep buying a ticket in the lottery. Learning how Shakespeare works counts as understanding of something real and important, just as much as understanding how stars work; if understanding Shakespeare is only training in consumption, then so is understanding stars.

 

I think that might be a leg that English can stand on. Shakespeare's a star.

 

There might be a lot of further argument about whether any given current department of English is really standing firmly on that leg, or even whether English as a discipline currently needs more shaking up than most, to shake off self-indulgent satisfaction with consumption and refocus on products that are really valuable. Maybe non-fiction studies should become a thing, and creative writing get a lot more love. But although I may have suspicions about those things, I don't really have the expertise to discuss them. If English does after all have a leg to stand on, then it's for those firmly standing English faculty, however few or many they may be, to get their house in order if it needs it.

[Slawbug]

I'm having a hard time understanding the distinction you're trying to make between "consumption" and "production" as they relate to undergraduate courses. What, exactly, do any undergraduates produce? Small minorities might do creative writing or meaningful original research. But I fail to grasp how my reading Hamlet would be "consumption" while my learning about particle physics would be "production." It seems to me that in both cases, what I'm learning follows an identical pattern:

 

Learn skills and background knowledge that allow me to "consume" what someone else has produced (literature / current theory).

 

In turn, the new understanding I gain from having consumed that thing could be "cross-applied" to my own "production skills" in scholarly analysis of either field, a related creative or experimental endeavor, or even something that applies an insight to a situation that is far afield.

 

You keep insisting that there is something inherently different between an English BA and a Physics BS. But "consumption" vs "production" does not describe that difference unless you want to construct new meanings for those words that have it built in.

 

It's clear, despite the disclaimers in your posts, that you think there is an important difference here, that science departments are simply more valuable than English departments. The aspersions you're casting on English — reducing a field of scholarly analysis to "appreciation" at the outset, then giving it the rather nasty backhanded compliment of being "in excellent packaging" — are sloppy and do not serve this exploration well. The approach seems to be "let's come up with more labels for what the difference is" — "objectively real", "production", etc. Well, all you're doing by relabelling it is trying to come up with "excellent packaging" for the same assertion the thread began with.

 

Can you give a specific example of how college English is "consumption" (or whatever) while college physics is not?

[Kelandon]

I'm trying to focus instead on the specific issue of being educated in consumption rather than in production.

This is the very distinction that I just called nonsense. Even if I were to concede that this distinction is real and not just a matter of framing — which I'm not sure that I'm ready to do — there's a second problem here. All academic study is in consumption, not in production. Lab courses and applied engineering courses, as well as some creative writing courses and other such things, attempt to be in production, but your basic intro physics classes? In no sense is anyone going to go out and produce more Newtonian mechanics after taking Newtonian mechanics. That discipline is finished. At best, we can say that that person can go out and determine situations in which Newtonian mechanics is applicable and analyze them, but how is that different from someone who deeply understands the structure of (say) certain works of modernist and postmodernist literature, and recognizes such rhetorical techniques when they are used, and analyzes them?

 

Put another way, what students are graded on in an English class is not how much they like Chaucer but how well they can write analyses of Chaucer. How is that not production, if solving physics or chemistry problems for homework and exams is "production" in some sense? (Especially given that what they're writing is not, "OMG that passage was so neat!" but rather some analysis of literary techniques, structure, etc., which may be reused either by the student or by some other author at some later point. Frankly, I think an English major is more prepared to produce works of literature than a physics major is prepared to do any kind of applied physics at the end of an undergrad major.)

 

Other disciplines could adopt English packaging

I'm fairly certain that's not so. A biology class could teach a great deal of writing, I'm sure, but it would no longer be a biology class. It would be a technical writing class. (This would be an "English" class, albeit perhaps taught in a biology department.)

 

Perhaps I'm describing the idea uncharitably and therefore am wrong. Maybe it would be possible to teach a biology class that actually taught biology but also taught some writing skills at the same time. This is not something that I have a lot of experience with. But my sense is that in physics, at least, it's hard to design anything more than paragraph-answer for the kinds of topics covered at the undergraduate level, and that simply doesn't engage the same writing skills as a full-blown essay.

 

I do think that there are serious problems with the way that academic coursework in these disciplines is structured, but I don't think you've identified one here.

 

EDIT: What I've said is not terribly different from what Slarty said, I suppose, but it may help to have it in different words.

[Triumph]

My impression of SoT's posts is that he has been led astray by the admittedly curious label "fiction appreciation" and probably invested that term with more significance than it warrants. Note the distinction he made between negative "fiction appreciation" and positive "creative writing" in the OP.

 

Now, IF a degree exist whose purpose was solely to help students enjoy fiction, that might contribute more to his argument. However, I suspect "fiction appreciation" was just some misguided department chair's attempt to make "literature" sound more hip and trendy, not in fact a degree about maximizing personal enjoyment of fiction to the exclusion of any other skill.

[nikki.]

I actually have a BA in English, and achieving it was a lot harder than simply sitting around discussing 'good' literature for three years. I actually feel mildly insulted that all of the time and effort I poured into my degree is being waved aside because 'consuming tasty morsels of prose and having a natter about them' is all anybody thinks students of English do. I'm also insulted that courses like History and Philosophy seem to get a pass, whilst English does not, but that's by-the-by. SoT, I recall that you once asked me the point of studying English by suggesting that I could get the same amount of knowledge, and the same academic experience, from joining a book club. As such, I don't imagine you'll be particularly receptive to my post. For everybody else though, here's why English is an important subject - equally as important as any other academic field in which one can attain a Bachelor's degree.

 

First, I don't think anybody has accurately described what precisely is required in order to get an English BA - a fact which is bewildering considering the only reason we're here is to discuss how valuable a field/subject it is. The consensus seems to be that English students read a lot of 'useless' stories and plays, and then talk about them, and write about them in order to understand them better. The skills we learn and use in order to do this talking, writing, and understanding are the only valuable parts of an English degree, and the sad fact is that these skills can be learned from any course, including the ever-popular Physics. Nothing tangible is ever really learned, and the knowledge that is gained from literature exists purely to benefit the individual. In short, the impression I'm getting from a large majority of this thread's responses seems to be that an English undergrad learns to argue, and to defend against counter-arguments, and to read texts that are essential fine cuisine - consume them and move on to the next course, boys!

 

In reality, English, I'd argue, is actually an amalgamation of several disciplines. It is a study of people, and places, and events. It is a study of deeply complicated and important philosophical questions. It is a study of myths and beliefs, of cultures and contexts. And, of course, it is a study of language, and form. Taking a class on Shakespeare will, as Kel says, help you to understand Shakespeare's writing all the better, but it'll also give you an insight into what life was like in the 16th Century in the same way that a piece of non-fiction will help a History student do the same. Reading Dickens (if you can stomach it!) will offer an insight into Victorian Britain, whilst other texts, including science fiction and SOME post-modern fiction will offer glimpses of the future (as an aside, Modernist and Post-Modern fiction can, of course, offer 'nebulous guides' to the future, but so could a Realist text, or even a limerick. Modern and Post-modern literature are defined by their formal features, rather than simply being 'about' modern or post-modern issues, as I'm sure Slarty knows). Furthermore, we don't just learn about solid events, or fictional characters, by studying literature - we also learn about the human condition more widely. Issues including depression, insanity, gender, sexuality, parenthood, fear, love, and religion are all woven into the fabric of the novel - sometimes explicitly, and sometimes tucked away, hidden upstairs in the attic (Jane Eyre and Wuthering Heights, for example, both deal with colonialism and the treatment of black characters in 19th Century Britain, even though neither texts are really 'about' this issue).

 

English, then, is a study of people rather than a study of literature - it just so happens that our source materials are novels and plays, poems and essays. English, at a degree level (though I'd argue it begins even earlier) is an exploration of our world and our lives through the eyes of characters that may have existed centuries in the past, or future. Literature attempts to answer questions including 'who we are', and 'why we're here', questions that are very much relevant today. In addition to the vast amounts of reading I managed to cram into my three years, I also analysed a wide range of texts, applied critical and literary theory to them, extracted minute passages and applied them to contemporary culture, researched science, history, politics, and religion, and learnt about language, methods of communication, and ideology. Yes, studying English is enjoyable. Yes, a lot of the skills I've learnt from my course could've been acquired form other undergrad courses (though I'd like to think I can write, and construct an argument better than a graduate of a Maths or science course), but English offers a unique view of humanity and our past that other subjects might touch upon, but never quite capture.

[Kelandon]

I tend to focus on the more formal aspects of literary analysis as the things that make English classes not the same as, say, history or political science classes, but Nik's post reminds me of the fact that I recently read the first half of Uncle Tom's Cabin — a book of fiction — partly in order to get an account of American slavery from someone contemporary with the practice. An analysis of a book like that need not be formal; it might be historical or political (among other things), even in an English class.

 

Come to think of it, as far as I can tell from reading it, the reason that it's standard in middle school and high school reading lists in American schools is not its literary merit, because the writing is competent but not spectacular. It's in the canon virtually entirely because of its historical/social/political importance.

 

In that sense, I'm not sure that you can say that the humanities are completely distinct from each other, so if you understand the importance of, say, history, you can't just draw a sharp line and say that English classes are different in some deep way.

[Alorael at Large]

I think the last few points have been really helpful. Especially Nikki's, and I'm somewhat ashamed of not doing better at defending English classes despite having learned a great deal of what I know of history from it.

 

 

There's one further note, though, that I think is worth emphasizing: physics, and other physical sciences, are creative disciplines. They aim to expand the boundaries of human knowledge, which is an admirable goal, and on a practical level that knowledge has applications and makes new things for us. But that's all very distant from undergrads; in fact, anything that's even a meaningful advancement in science is distant from most practicing scientists. Most science is of interest only to other scientists; we say that we do the basic research now for the applications decades down the line, but I think much of science never really goes anywhere. It's just that with the vast circumference of ignorance we poke into there's no way to to know where the important knowledge lies. (And this is all compounded by the publish or perish grant culture. Big leaps in knowledge are often slow and difficult and hard to fund. A slightly more accurate structure of proteins or characterization of distant stars is descriptive and often not terribly meaningful beyond academic kudos.)

 

English majors, on the other hand, produce work. Specifically, a lot of written work, though there are other kind. Regardless of the value of essays, that's more directly productive than most science majors. Science is, at best, reproductions of lab experiments and working through problems. Even the most callow and ignorant student in intro-level English—heck, in grade school English—has to produce novel work. The thinking often isn't anything new, particularly in early classes that are just close reading, but the essay is new words put together to explain whatever thoughts the writer has.

 

—Alorael, who will touch on benefits again. Humanities majors are sadly often woefully ignorant of basic math and science. But scientists are often direly lacking in basic writing ability, as witnessed by the execrable caliber of most scientific writing. (To be fair, some is discipline preference, but a lot of journals are stuffed with unnecessarily unreadable prose). There are two sides of worthwhile. And only one of them will make you a better Spiderweb poster.

[Slawbug]

Is the actual distinction that underlies all of this just the fact that science tends to expand boundaries that are external to the human experience, whereas the humanities tend to expand boundaries that are internal to it?

[Dikiyoba]

There are two sides of worthwhile. And only one of them will make you a better Spiderweb poster.

Get a double major or major/minor in science and humanities?

 

Dikiyoba.

[Cairo Jim]

There has been instances when simple science has changed peoples ideology, and thus changed their course through history. For example, early observational astronomy not only proved that the known universe didn't orbit Earth, but that the Earth was round. That combined with it being able to be used as a form of navigation, from what I've noticed, helped spark an age of exploration.

 

But what about the English language? Does someone that studies English and/or its literature help change or shape it? Or is that burden mostly on those who compose literature? Is it a combination of both?

[VCH]

I guess it's more so an issue of what the consumers want to study and pay for. Universities just provide stuff that sells to students...

[A less presumptuous name.]

There has been instances when simple science has changed peoples ideology, and thus changed their course through history. For example, early observational astronomy not only proved that the known universe didn't orbit Earth, but that the Earth was round. That combined with it being able to be used as a form of navigation, from what I've noticed, helped spark an age of exploration.

 

Just a pet peeve here, but people have known that the Earth was round since the times of ancient Greece and Egypt. In fact, they knew the diameter of the Earth with pretty good accuracy. This information didn't disappear after the fall of those cultures, either. Also, the transition from geocentricity to heliocentricity wasn't nearly as smooth and painless as people think.

 

Sorry if I'm pedantic, but I'm in the middle of a class on the history of "science" during the scientific revolution.

[Dikiyoba]

Sorry if I'm pedantic, but I'm in the middle of a class on the history of "science" during the scientific revolution.

Out of curiosity, why did you put the word science in quotes?

 

And don't worry; being pedantic has a long and venerable tradition on SW. There's no need to apologize for it.

 

---

 

Dikiyoba has found that the quality of English classes is determined by the teacher, which is not the case in science classes. You learn about the same in science classes whether you have a good teacher or a bad one. In English, you learn a lot from classes with good teachers or practically nothing at all (or worse, incorrect information) from classes with bad teachers. Other people might have different experiences, though.

[Cairo Jim]

ALthough there were a few ancient cultures that knew the Earth was round, there were some cultures that thought the Earth was flat until the Rennaissance.

[Triumph]

Dikiyoba has found that the quality of English classes is determined by the teacher, which is not the case in science classes. You learn about the same in science classes whether you have a good teacher or a bad one. In English, you learn a lot from classes with good teachers or practically nothing at all (or worse, incorrect information) from classes with bad teachers. Other people might have different experiences, though.

 

I have found the quality of the teacher relevant in pretty much every kind of course - be it American history, calculus, or Spanish, the quality of the instructor profoundly affects what you learn and how much you learn.

[Randomizer]

ALthough there were a few ancient cultures that knew the Earth was round, there were some cultures that thought the Earth was flat until the Rennaissance.

The town that voted the Earth is flat.

[Alorael at Large]

With a great textbook you can get the same results out of a mediocre or bad teacher if you're willing to put in a lot of effort. With less effort the mediocre teacher will still teach more, and he or she's more likely to inspire that effort, too. In my experience a great teacher will always be better than non-great teachers no matter the subject. Science is science is science, no matter the way it's conveyed, but there's plenty of ancillary material to learn with it.

 

—Alorael, who thinks that "some cultures" aren't a good marker. European culture, at least among the educated, held that the world was round from the time that Classical knowledge disseminated widely enough to count as European culture. Other cultures were unaffected by the Renaissance, which was a European cultural phenomenon, so it's a meaningless distinction. There are almost certainly cultures today that think the Earth is flat. We don't live in them or in cultures descended from them.

[A less presumptuous name.]

Out of curiosity, why did you put the word science in quotes?

Well, the class is History of Science, Culture, and Society in Western Civilization, so it's a lot more than just the science. It's just that we're coving the scientific revolution this quarter, so that's the focus. Also, the concept of science during that time was so different from what we think of as science now that I hesitate to use the word without some demarkation of difference.

 

You learn about the same in science classes whether you have a good teacher or a bad one.

While I suppose it's true that you're learning the same science in a given class, how well you learn it, and indeed whether you learn it at all, has a lot to do with the teacher.

[Student of Trinity]

I may have been led astray by the label 'fiction appreciation', but I invented the label for myself. For most of my life I've been a big fan of English as an academic discipline. I was good at it. I got bizarrely high grades in high school English, and won the freshman English prize in college. I reluctantly abandoned my plan to do a double major in English and physics, but I did poorly in thermodynamics because I skipped half my lectures to go to an English seminar instead. Since my undergraduate days I've had less and less contact with academic English, but I always wanted to believe well of English as an academic subject. Recently, I had a crisis of faith.

 

Crises of faith are often triggered by injustice. English in North American colleges suffers more than many departments from a class struggle. There are a lot of doctoral candidates teaching and grading for years and years, for very low pay, while slowly writing the dissertations that are seldom worth much as a career credential outside of academia. Within academia, a PhD in English might let you join the thin ranks of tenure-track faculty, but it is all too likely instead to leave you teaching and grading, for very modest pay, as an adjunct lecturer who can find yourself out of a job at any moment. Science and engineering departments aren't nearly so harsh. They bring in large research grants, from which universities skim off a substantial cut as 'overhead', on the grounds that all that research is supported in lots of ways by the university's infrastructure. Universities like science departments the way governments like rich corporations: because they pay taxes. Grant money also pays graduate students better, and science PhDs are granted sooner; much of the grunt work that is done by Nth-year doctoral students in English is done in science by substantially better paid post-doctoral fellows. Economically, science departments are normally fairly healthy. English departments, in comparison, are like those poor countries with many poor, few rich, and no middle class. It's an ugly fact of life. Some English departments are among the last bastions of Marxism; this is less mysterious than one might think.

 

I happened to be reminded of all that by reading a blog by a suddenly unemployed English lecturer. My instinct was to see this individual tragedy as an inefficiency in an operation that was basically sound, in that it was aimed at achieving a sensible goal at a sustainable cost. A meaningful response to this guy's misfortune, I figured, would be to identify the inefficiency and see what could be done to fix it. That might even suggest a useful next step for the guy himself. Trying to get a clear bead on the problem by taking a fundamental perspective, I found that perspective much less useful than I had expected. What exactly was the purpose of a university English department, anyway? The arguments that came to hand quickest were boilerplate about writing and critical thinking, but then I read a blog comment that shot those down, by pointing out that those great skills can in principle be learned in subjects other than English. So what was English really trying to teach, as core content? Wasn't it something alarmingly similar to gourmet dining — fiction appreciation?

 

Kelandon's analogy between great works of fiction and stars has helped me shore up my faith in English. Perhaps it's an obvious point that I just missed because I never studied English far enough to be challenged by it; I'd thought well of English all those years, as it were, on principle, without really ever having had the personal experience of English as more than self-indulgence. I've dropped my case against English.

 

This is not because I am now convinced that everything about academic English studies is good and healthy, however. I simply no longer believe there is a big and basic enough problem that even I, as an outsider, can judge the case. The issue now seems to me to be one of finer detail than my expertise can reach. Details can still kill, however.

 

Lots of entities are actually supported by a small subset of their activities. A brain surgeon's existence may be justified by a few cuts each day. As long as the small subset of value is valuable enough, it can support a lot of other activities that aren't so valuable. Let the surgeon enjoy some golf. The golf might not even be as worthless as it seems; maybe it's the hours on the links that keep those hands so steady. In the same way, a physics department may do a lot of things that aren't really so valuable, and justify its existence with a few things that aren't even so obvious. And maybe an English department can say the same.

 

On the other hand, though, a marquis of the ancien régime might have insisted that all his indulgence was justified by the exquisite taste with which he led his society to finer things by way of example. At some point, that kind of argument can be specious. In principle there can be hidden value, or partial but adequate value; but sometimes the value delivered just isn't enough, for the cost that is claimed. À la lanterne.

 

The economic injustice of academic English departments still makes me suspicious that there is something rotten going on.

[Kelandon]

There's probably a difference between a Ph.D. in English and a B.A. in English. A really big difference. Enough of a difference to make it a completely different discussion.

[Randomizer]

In US universities the main purpose of English major graduate students seems to be to teach freshman the basics of writing papers and critical thinking that they were supposed to have learned in high school. There seems seems to be similar functions in the Mathematics department with regards to getting freshman ready for calculus.

[Slawbug]

And there's *definitely* a difference between a Ph.D. in English, and high school English classes -- which in many cases have little in common with "English as an academic discipline."

 

SoT, you say you're dropping your case against English, but don't even acknowledge most of the other arguments that were made — and then you compare the discipline to a surgeon playing golf and to a self-righteous aristocrat. I give up, man.

 

Randomizer, I think you're confusing "main purpose" with "most visible function."

[Randomizer]

The main purpose of a graduate student is do research leading to a thesis and/or dissertation to graduate. But from the professor's viewpoint a graduate student is low paid slave labor to teach undergraduate classes or in the science and engineering departments doing experimental work for him while he applies for grants.

 

We referred to one professor's research assistants as the lowest paid plumbers in the state. Another professor had his RAs sign up for classes and then mid-semester send them up the mountain during the day when they had classes for a few weeks to collect data for his research.

[Kelandon]

Just to fill out the point that I was suggesting above...

 

One of the big problems with Ph.D.'s in anything, but in the humanities in particular, is that they're basically professional degrees, like a JD or an MD, in that they're supposed to feed into a particular type of job (being a professor), but there's a huge supply/demand mismatch. There are a ton more Ph.D.'s graduating each year than there are jobs in academia for Ph.D.'s each year. I'm not sure what job a Ph.D. in English prepares you for other than to be an English professor (or maybe a high school English teacher), whereas a Ph.D. in Physics probably can land you a job in industry somewhere if academia doesn't work out. The glut of people with heavy-duty literary training — and few options — drives down bargaining power for English Ph.D.'s, so you end up with the awful labor market that SoT describes.

 

This creates an existential crisis for English departments. As I said, I don't think it's obvious what a Ph.D. in English prepares you to do other than become a professor, but because there are so many people who can't become professors, it's pretty urgent for many English departments to come up with the answer to that, or to close their doors.

 

This problem is not very applicable to a bachelor's degree in English, because pretty much no bachelor's degree outside of maybe engineering is a professional degree. You get a bachelor's degree to become more educated; you're not buying a diploma to get a job, at least not in your field, most of the time. Ph.D.'s are professional degrees in a way that bachelor's degrees just aren't, so it's a problem if Ph.D. graduates are unemployed.

 

This problem isn't unique to English departments, though. It's true through most of the humanities and some of the social sciences, too. It's true in my own field (law), for that matter. There has been a lot of hand-wringing — and some class size reductions — in American law schools, because the legal market just doesn't have any use for as many JDs as we're producing, and JDs tend to incur far too much debt to justify getting a JD for any other purpose than to get a high-paying job, generally as a lawyer. (There's kind of a lot more to it than that, but it's too much to go into in this post.)

 

So yes, there is an existential crisis for English departments, but it's not unique to English, and it has little or nothing to do with characterizing the academic study of English as "consumption" or "production" or "fiction appreciation" or whatever. It has to do with the skills demanded in the workforce right now, which is in some sense external to the discipline: it's not that the discipline itself is flawed.

 

Looking at it another way, getting a B.A. in English to train your reading, writing, and thinking skills (among other things, amply described above) is clearly sensible. An undergrad degree in Physics just isn't going to do that in the same way, nor most other subjects outside of the humanities. Getting a Ph.D. in English for the same reason is much more of a stretch; there's a ton of reading, writing, and critical thinking in any Ph.D. (that's the point of a Ph.D.). So there must be something about the subject matter of graduate-level English itself that's valuable. Probably there is, though I'm not very well qualified to say what it is, but whether it's economically valuable in the labor market is another matter, and that's the crisis.

[Student of Trinity]

I want to pick up on just one phrase, "skills demanded in the workforce right now," because I think this might be an indication that Kelandon doesn't disagree with me as much as it seems, but simply uses different words for what I mean.

 

I'm not sure it makes sense to say that "skills demanded in the workforce" are "external to the discipline", as if every discipline were a sovereign judge of value, and the workforce were merely capricious in its demands. In bestowing great wealth the economy may well be capricious, but in providing subsistence, I think it tends to have a fair point. If your academic discipline has given you tools that let you make something that other people want, then you have to be quite unlucky indeed to suffer much want for long. If your discipline doesn't provide you with that kind of tool, then this is what I've been talking about as training in consumption rather than production.

 

I think "valuable" is an unhelpful concept here because it ignores that distinction. Some things I've learned are valuable to me because they've made me happier, but other things are valuable because they've enabled me to make others happier. The distinction between consumptive and productive value is a refinement that I think this discussion needs.

 

The qualifier that I omitted, the "right now" in Kelandon's "demanded in the workforce right now", can indeed make a difference to all that. You might have a skillset that used to be useful but no longer is, or that will be useful soon but isn't yet. I'd like to see that as a separate issue, though. It's certainly practically important if you're stuck with bad timing, but if your skillset has never been demanded in the workforce and is never going to be, then that's even worse.

 

When I talk about production and consumption, I mean to talk precisely about skills being demanded in the workforce, or not. But I don't only mean that 'production' equals 'in demand', by definition. I have the premise that the economy is at least somewhat rational, and that there is a reason why some skills are demanded while others are not. I assume that what the workforce wants is something real, and I call that something "production".

[Student of Trinity]

SoT, you say you're dropping your case against English, but don't even acknowledge most of the other arguments that were made.

My premise was a distinction between training in consumption or appreciation, and training in production. Analysis of just what might be wrong with my premise does interest me, but I really only saw one substantial point being raised. I recognized it most clearly in Kelandon's first post. Other points seemed to me to be either the same point as Kelandon's, stated differently, or else to be simply saying, "No. But here's a different issue." On those different issues, I haven't thought of anything good to say.

 

Kelandon's comparison of Shakespeare to stars made me see that the distinction I'm trying to draw can't really just be exactly the distinction between production and appreciation, because (depending on how you refine your definitions) either those two things are just overlapping shades of understanding, or else all disciplines are going to come out as having elements of both production and appreciation in them.

 

That was enough to make me drop my hard accusations against English, because the only reason I felt competent to weigh English in the balance, with my limited expertise, was that I thought I was seeing a really basic and simple case. Okay, it's not that simple. The glove doesn't fit.

 

I still think there's probably some important distinction that can be drawn, somehow along lines of production and consumption, between two different senses in which education might be valuable. And although I'm no longer sure that this distinction will end up killing English, I still think it's probably a problem for English academia in its current form. If I was initially accusing English of felony, what I'm worried about now is maybe more like bankruptcy: not that it's all bad, but that it's just not paying its way.

[Alorael at Large]

But you're missing the point of what Kel's saying. Getting a B.A. in English is perfectly reasonable. It's a perfectly serviceable way to get a job. Sure, there are jokes about unemployed English majors, but I don't think they're actually terribly worse off than most graduates in a lousy economy.

 

PhDs are a different problem. Graduate schools are explicitly designed to train people in the path to becoming their teachers. The problem comes in with supply and demand of teachers and students and exit strategies. There are too many English professors training too many English PhDs who cannot go on to become professors because all the spots are taken (by existing tenured faculty and those other numerous graduate students who graduate). The same is actually true in the sciences. The difference is that there is much more taxpayer support for being an academic in the sciences. There are plenty of government organizations giving scientists grants to be scientists; there are very few for humanities experts to pursue the humanities outside of, not in addition to, a university professorship.

 

 

And there's the problem. The market has spoken: we want scientists. But the universities aren't driven by providing what the market wants. They don't actually get any benefit from matching market needs except when student demands are a reflection of that. As long as students want English degrees, English departments will happily provide them. Because English departments are the supply here, and students have the demand.

 

The simple answer to the original question, then, is this: you can get a degree in fiction appreciation because there are departments of fiction appreciation who will take your money to give you that degree. (And there are fellowships that will pay you, too, if you can get one!) If you are good at it and lucky you can join one of those departments; your livelihood then depends to a degree on convincing more people to get those degrees.

 

—Alorael, who suspects that there's also a degree of ignorance floating around. It's obvious what you do with a graduate degree in physics. It's less obvious what you do with the same in English, yet (despite stereotypes) there are few people with "Hungry, please help!" scrawled on the back of a doctoral diploma. Perhaps among teaching jobs, research positions, nonprofits, publishing, and so on and so forth there really is enough demand for those degrees in less obvious ways.

[Slawbug]

When I talk about production and consumption, I mean to talk precisely about skills being demanded in the workforce, or not. But I don't only mean that 'production' equals 'in demand', by definition. I have the premise that the economy is at least somewhat rational, and that there is a reason why some skills are demanded while others are not. I assume that what the workforce wants is something real, and I call that something "production".

This argument, like all of your arguments in this thread, is just positing that there is some kind of mystical distinction between the humanities and the sciences which you can't quite describe but which, you have this unshakable feeling, makes the sciences valuable and the humanities not.

 

In this case, though, I have a specific answer for your argument. I agree that the economy is at least somewhat rational. But you're also assuming that the inputs to the economy's decision-making apparati are meaningful and admirable, rather than nasty, brutish, and short. For the economy also values weapons manufacturers more than aid workers, advertisers more than poets, speculating investors more than kindergarten teachers.

 

You are in dangerous territory when you make such a grandiose distinction based on market value. You may worry that English is bankrupt. If I accepted your logic, I'd be more worried that the disciplines on the profitable side of the fence are morally bankrupt.

[Kelandon]

I want to pick up on just one phrase, "skills demanded in the workforce right now," because I think this might be an indication that Kelandon doesn't disagree with me as much as it seems, but simply uses different words for what I mean.

Maybe, but your words are both pejorative and fuzzy, so you're both insulting people on the other side of the discussion and confusing people at the same time. That seems like a pretty strong argument for using different words than the ones you're using.

 

It seems to me that you're brushing up against understanding the purpose of education solely in economic terms. That is, if it doesn't get you paid, it's not worth learning. That's an awful way to understand education. I can go with you in part on that point for a professional degree (an MD, a JD, to some extent a Ph.D.), but not for a general degree (a B.A., a high school diploma).

 

And, again, I have no idea why you'd single out English as a discipline for this particular discussion.

[Alorael at Large]

If you get an MD, a JD, or a PhD in pursuit of money right now, you're probably barking up the wrong tree.

 

A JD can maybe make you rich, but it's very expensive and you can easily come out the other side unemployed.

 

An MD can make you rich, but it will take a long, long time to get there, and the hours will be grueling even then.

 

A PhD has an outside chance of making you rich if you have a great idea, form a startup, and get lucrative patents. That's a slim chance. Mostly it will give you a shot at a comfortable but probably not ostentatious upper middle class life. You also might end up as a destitute adjunct professor.

 

—Alorael, who doesn't have any idea what the reliable paths to wealth are now. MBA, maybe? It seems to be attracting scorn now. Skip the degrees and just be good with computers? Plenty of those coders go hungry too.

[Lilith]

—Alorael, who doesn't have any idea what the reliable paths to wealth are now.

 

pick rich parents

[Kelandon]

If you get an MD, a JD, or a PhD in pursuit of money right now, you're probably barking up the wrong tree.

I feel obliged to point out that, for the JD or the MBA, it depends a lot on the school you go to and what you do while you're there. At my school, if you want to get rich from the JD or MBA (or the JD/MBA!), you can do that, if you make an effort from the beginning to make the right connections and apply to the right things. At most law schools, though, that is not true; you have to get really good first-year grades, and even then it's kind of a crapshoot at a lot of them.

 

It's unfortunate for a lot of reasons that law schools are so expensive and isolated from the other disciplines, but one reason is that, in some senses, a legal education could be like an undergrad degree in English or Political Science or something that's personally enriching, even if it doesn't directly lead to a job in that field. (That being said, I suspect that the overwhelming majority of law students don't feel that way about it.)

[Student of Trinity]

In some sort of crude sense which no vulgarity, no humor, no overstatement can quite extinguish, the physicists have known sin; and this is a knowledge which they cannot lose.

 

Slarty has made another point that strikes me as solid: whatever it is that I mean by 'production', it might be a bad thing; and that might be worse than even the most uselessly self-indulgent training in consumption. I accept this as a solid argument, without accepting it as decisive.

 

I worked at Los Alamos for four years, though I didn't work on weapons (and would not have been allowed to work on them). I felt okay there, however. If I had been a trained physicist during the Manhattan project, I'm pretty sure I would have been part of it. Temperamentally, when the hard bottom line comes, I believe in action. I'm not sure I'd really act, in a crisis, but that's just it: my fear is that I wouldn't act, not that I'd act wrongly. I'd find it easier to forgive myself for acting wrongly, than for not acting.

 

Abusus non tollit usus: just because there's a bad way of doing something, doesn't mean the thing itself is bad. Maybe the market sometimes demands bad things; okay, it's better to deliver nothing to the market, than to deliver bad things to it. Imagine, however, a better market. It would still want something. It wouldn't want everything. Education should supply training in delivering the things an ideal market would want.

[Student of Trinity]

Maybe, but your words are both pejorative and fuzzy, so you're both insulting people on the other side of the discussion and confusing people at the same time. That seems like a pretty strong argument for using different words than the ones you're using.

That's like complaining that your sparring partner hit you. I'm not wielding any authority on this issue; I'm just a guy on a board. I think it's seriously important to be able to cope with fuzzy terms, and with pejorative ones. Words aren't things, and I don't think there's anything so good that it couldn't fit some unflattering descriptions, at least to a fuzzy degree. You've got to be able to stand up for what you believe in, even in an unflattering light; admit that, yeah, it is kind of like that bad thing, in some ways; and then go on to say, But it redeems itself as follows. In return, I'll be happy to concede that some more flattering descriptions of English studies can also be stretched over reality. The point is to try on both descriptions, and try to judge which fits better.

 

It seems to me that you're brushing up against understanding the purpose of education solely in economic terms. That is, if it doesn't get you paid, it's not worth learning. That's an awful way to understand education. I can go with you in part on that point for a professional degree (an MD, a JD, to some extent a Ph.D.), but not for a general degree (a B.A., a high school diploma).

Brushing up, yes. In my previous life I've always been quick to deny that the essential purpose of education is economic, but now I'm trying to say, Hang on — there's a grain of truth in there. I'm happy to let rich people pay for courses in wine appreciation, and I acknowledge that it's a rich subject; but I refuse to respect that kind of training in the same way I respect training in medicine. I don't insist that English finds itself in exactly the same place as wine appreciation, in comparison with medicine; but I do insist that it's a meaningful and important question, just where along the spectrum English falls. Defenses of English that take the form of rejections of the question only serve to sharpen my suspicions that English falls too close to the unworthy end.

 

I single out English for personal reasons: it's the subject I know best, after physics (though it's a big step down in expertise from first place to second for me), and it's the subject of the blog that started this train of thought for me. It seems to serve okay as a test case.

[Student of Trinity]

Skip the degrees and just be good with computers? Plenty of those coders go hungry too.

Not all good coders have yachts, but I doubt that very many go hungry.

[nikki.]

I don't insist that English finds itself in exactly the same place as wine appreciation, in comparison with medicine; but I do insist that it's a meaningful and important question, just where along the spectrum English falls.

 

Actually, I believe you began this thread by stating that yeah, getting a degree in English is exactly 'like getting a degree in gourmet dining', which 'takes a highly educated palate to savor', but is 'not a useful trade, to anyone'. Maybe you didn't say it was like wine appreciation, but I'm struggling to see any meaningful difference between fancy wines and fancy foods here.

 

Defenses of English that take the form of rejections of the question only serve to sharpen my suspicions that English falls too close to the unworthy end.

So I can defend my field, but in doing so I have to phrase it in such a way that I don't reject the notion that it is useless, or mere 'fiction appreciation'?

 

And finally, since I have all but given up with this thread:

 

Education should supply training in delivering the things an ideal market would want.

An 'ideal' market would hopefully have room for criticism of literature, and studies of historical fiction, and, goddamit, appreciation of beautiful prose, rather than just churning out $$$ and weapons and machinery.

[Edgwyn]

I do believe that an ideal market would definitely have room for criticism of literature and studies of historical fiction. I also believe that the ideal market would have room for beautiful prose, but I find it having room for the appreciation of prose less likely. I am not sure that training someone to like something (wine, prose, art, n-dimensional physics, etc) will ever be anything other than an enjoyable exercise for those with excess disposable funds. I believe that a good writer is either innately capable or can be trained to write prose that I do not need to be trained to enjoy. After all, without any training (much of my english classes would count negatively to enjoying prose and I had zero art appreciation classes), I am capable of enjoying Shakespeare, Monet and Rembrandt.

[nikki.]

I am capable of enjoying Shakespeare, Monet and Rembrandt.

 

And yet I (and Kelandon) would argue that you'd enjoy them more for studying them.

 

Your post addresses a point that I've seen raised elsewhere though. Why is appreciation of art/literature considered accessible only to people with excess disposable funds? Reading essays and lectures when I was younger (Tolkien's 'On Fairy Tales' is a great example!) was something I not only enjoyed, but, after a while, something I craved to do; I began to actively hunt out this kind of material in order to really get a good grip on the world I was inhabiting, and the kinds of worlds the people of my world could create. The very best way to escape material poverty is to read, in my opinion - literature is a great leveller (assuming one is literate, which is unfortunately not always the case), and yes, sometimes survival comes first, but after that, I'd imagine stories and literature comes next, not a science.

 

Anecdotally, I've read voraciously for as long as I can remember, and I'd say that throughout my life my economic background has progressed only slightly from lower working-class to working-class. Of course, yeah, comparatively I'm well off, but if I could find these books, and grow as a result (and hopefully I'll end up contributing something that benefits others), then so could other people. Libraries and book-schemes exist everywhere (heck, I posted on reddit just yesterday about an old telephone box I found in a poorer neighbouring town that somebody had converted into a book-exchange). Literature, and the appreciation of it, is something EVERYBODY can enjoy.

 

Now, whether or not studying English contributes to society is another question, but I guess I inadvertently gave a half answer in the above post. In addition to the points I raised in a post way, way above, criticism of literature, and essays, and articles in the back of books (and heck, even the cheapest editions of books seem to have introductory notes by some professor or another) can absolutely reach the poorest of people in ways that certain sciences can't. Not that no science can, but as has been pointed out elsewhere, there exists certain jargon in some science fields that makes physics et. al unapproachable. I'm not so sure English, or a lot of it, has that problem.

 

(edit: Disclaimer. It is late, and I am tired. I fully expect somebody to roll their eyes, or poke right through this.)

Edited March 2, 2014 by infinite crisis

[Alorael at Large]

Not all writers have backgrounds in English, but a lot of writers seem to come form the humanities, and English in particular.

 

All physicists are trained as physicists, nowadays, but most don't produce anything of interest or use to anyone. And haven't for quite some time. The bench to industry to household good pipeline is still happily in place for scientific fields, but I get the impression that a lot of basic physics research has become stuck in basic research mode without applications. (I could well be wrong. Correct me if I am!)

 

So from the perspective of actual production, maybe English has the edge.

 

Sure, you can argue that physics papers produce knowledge, but I'm not sure that knowledge is really more meaningful than the knowledge of literature produced by English papers. And someone, somewhere, might get more enjoyment out of reading something from the benefit of critics. From a utilitarian standpoint that could well be more valuable than an even lower upper bound on the possible dipole moment of the electron.

 

—Alorael, who knows programmers who go hungry. Some are the ones who create startups that fold. Some are the ones who can't get beyond the code monkey grunt positions. No degree is a guarantee.

[Dikiyoba]

Your post addresses a point that I've seen raised elsewhere though. Why is appreciation of art/literature considered accessible only to people with excess disposable funds?

Probably because the works considered typically fine art and classic literature tend to be most relevant to the wealthy. Most people tend to read popular literature like The Hunger Games, or watch TV, or play video games, which is considered inferior (sometimes a deserved reputation, but just as often an undeserved one). Which makes studying English all the more important, because the skills you learn in English is transferable to popular literature and TV shows and video games, and that is far more meaningful than having read the classics.

 

Dikiyoba is tired too. Sleepy logic, go!