According to Interdisciplinarity by Joe Moran, “It was not until the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that English was fully accepted as a reputable area of study” (Moran 18). Moran’s claim that English is well-respected rests upon the questionable assumption that English is fully accepted, an adverb I associate with completely. I disagree with Moran’s claim, as reputable isn’t the first adjective I’d use to describe English; at least, not when even my father questions my dedication to English studies.
At first glance, a reader might say that my father does not support me. This simply isn’t true. My father has always been my back support, there to keep me from falling. Perhaps this is why he can think of many different majors I could study over English: because he doesn’t want me to fall. According to a study of the college graduate labor market by the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce, during 2010 and 2011, 9.8 percent of English majors experienced unemployment; the pre-professional fields such as health and business had noticeably lower unemployment rates when compared. Not only does the idea of me working hard simply to not get a job scare my father, but also I come from a small family where all six of my uncles have professions related to medicine, business, or therapy- those very studies that did better than English in the Georgetown unemployment study.
Naturally, those uncles have no problem whatsoever with me pursuing English. William Sanday explains this concept best, as when he was supporting the introduction of a School of English at Oxford at the end of the nineteenth century, his support was because ‘there were the women to be considered’ (Bergonzi 1990: 41). Of all six of my uncles, only one is married to a woman who has a job. Perhaps if my younger brother were to say he wanted to be an English major, those uncles would stop him. But for me, a girl, this is an option.
Of course, I’m not just “a girl” to my father. Moran explains that English must “stake out its own territory, define its activities and justify its autonomy from other areas of study” (Moran 17). Just like English in Moran’s description, I doubt there will ever come a time when I don’t have to explain to my father what exactly I’m learning in my English classes. To him, a man who went to a high school where one could graduate high school with only taking one English class, which he very well did, he thinks that I am simply learning how to read and write more extensively than he ever did. I have to tell him that I don’t just read the text; I analyze it. Not only that, but what I analyze I bring with me to real life. Literature “is about life in all its diversity” (Moran 19), which includes love, friendship, and more. By seeing what a character does wrong, I make sure not to make the same mistakes in my life. In fact, I know for a fact that many of the themes involving family relationships in Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman I used for my relationship with my family. I lived by that book my senior year of high school. I bought it and gave it to my father, hoping that he could learn from it as I did. That was five months ago, and he still has not managed to finish it. But I don’t blame him for this. We all have our talents, and I’ve come to accept that reading isn’t his. But he tries, sitting down with the book every so often simply because I find it important. Soon enough, he will do the same with my English major.