English Majors Practising Criticism
Along with the Buzzfeed article that Kristen Owens posted, here’s an interesting article about a stereotype I’m sure we have all heard as English majors that you might enjoy!
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/akane-otani/i-will-not-be-making-coff_b_5128196.html
http://www.navy.mil/navydata/questions/zulutime.html
Both novels, Meridian and Zulus, work outside of the realm of time. I think Everett did this on purpose. But I’m not quite sure why just yet.
I am torn on my ideas on the portrayal of white women in Meridian, mainly because I feel that many of the accusations are earned. Obviously, my interactions with white women have occurred on strictly a 21st century basis, so I am biased.
Meridian’s grandmother “held strong opinions which she expressed in this way: 1. She had never known a white woman she liked after the age of twelve. 2. White women were useless except as baby machines which would continue to produce little white people who would grow up to oppress her. 3. Without servants all of them would live in pigsties” (110). Upon reading this section I had agreed with this depiction of white women, remembering a similar sentiment in Solomon Northup’s Twelve Years a Slave.
Anything I know about the bible I probably picked up from the Arabic songs on cassette tapes my grandma used to listen to. So I knew enough to knew the first chapter header in Zulus was something biblical, but it was still indecipherable to me. So after looking at “B” and shaking my head, I just ignored that bit of paratextuality.
When one of our classmates who was smart enough to look up Absalom and Achitophel had told the class that it was an allusion to a satirical political allegory, written by John Dryden, that uses the story of the rebellion of Absalom against King David, a story I am not familiar with, something stuck out to me:
“…the wit was Solomon’s…So A is for Solomon for there are better for S and because Solomon was small and a little queer.”
Solomon, whose name means “his peace” in Hebrew, was King David’s son. Of course anyone rebelling against King David’s kingdom could not have known what King Solomon’s reign would be like. But David’s subjects in his war torn kingdom did want what Solomon brought – peace.
This short, slightly biblical, and slightly political, thus interdisciplinary, bit of paratextuality thus opens up a post-apocalyptic, post-war novel quite well: with hope for the future.
Once upon a time classical studies were what a basic education comprised of, and as a result anyone with any sort of education knew a lot more about antiquity (Greek and Roman philosophy, art, languages, etc) than I even want to know. People were a lot more “interdisciplinary.”
The education shift we experienced is because of how much more we have to teach due to new theories and discoveries, as well how much harder it would be to teach “the classics” alongside everything else. I’m not saying that’s a bad thing, but that shift definitely resulted in a weaker emphasis on the humanities.
This shift in education is easily observable through the change in the way things are named in the science. For example, Magnesium, element 12, discovered in 1618 was named after Magnes in Greek mythology who was killed by Odysseus. On the other hand the naming of elements 104 through 109, discovered during the Cold War, were a lot less sophisticated and a lot more silly. Silly because naming them was a 30 year long controversy over whether or not they should be named after an American or Russian scientist followed by the suffix “ium” (ex. “Lawrencium”). Maybe, had these scientists been better versed in the Classics, naming the elements would have been much easier and more artful.
Biology follows the same trend. Zoologist Carl Linnaeus, often called poetic, created the taxonomic system for classifying life. An example would be”ecdyzoa,” coming from the Greek for “to take off” which is used for animals that shed or molt. The thought put into naming “ecdyzoa” is very different from the thought put into “TaqMan” probe, named after PacMan because it kinda looks like PacMan following an enzyme called “Taq Polymerase.”
While I don’t think there’s anything wrong with the way scientific nomenclature has changed over the centuries. I do think it is interesting how the way education has changed over the centuries worked to further polarize the disciplines.
As the semester as gone on, I have realized the legitimacy of criticism for being an english major. As I read Cane, Interdisciplinary, and They Say, I Say, I realize that we as english majors do something that others cannot. We enjoy the lost art of reading. We take pride in our studies, and throughly enjoy doing so. Although the material we are given by professors can be a touch dry sometimes, we are able to peel it back and find things others cannot. In particular, some of the things you guys said in class about Meridian were things I never would’ve thought of. For this, I applaud all of us; for being english majors and studying what we want to study, not what we think we should study.
The other element to being english majors is taking the next step. Whether you want to teach, write, report, anything; english majors need to take the extra step in doing so. For example, I want to be a journalist. Being a double major in English and Communication, I will develop the skills to build my argument, and at how to properly argue it. Whatever you choose to pursue with English, do it with pride.
Moran’s investigations into feminist theory offer an interesting probe into queer theory. He notes society’s need to categorize and diagnose sexuality: “from the late nineteenth century onward, the homosexual became a named category or species, whereas previously same-sex love had just been an activity undertaken by a wide variety of people” (97). Sexuality not only needs to be defined and categorized, but also it becomes tied to personality, becomes “entangled in much wider issues… of masculinity, capitalism, and national identity” (99).
At the Trans? Fine By Me talk I went to recently, one of the speakers mentioned a man who was gay who was assaulted. However, she noted, this man was not assaulted for his sexuality. He was not with his partner, and therefore the assailant would have no way of knowing his sexuality. Rather, he was assaulted because the assailant believed he failed at his gender. He was believed to not be actively expressing his masculinity enough, and because of this, the assailant believed he was homosexual. Thus, his masculinity tied directly to his sexuality, as Moran suggests is a common fault.
Chatting with some friends today at Letch over some amazing cold stone ice-cream wasn’t so amazing.
There was three of us, me being an education major with an English minor. The other being a business major minoring in education. And lastly but not least (..but I placed her last because she was the most rude) has a bio major and I can’t quite remember what she had said she was minoring in. But anyway. We chatted and chatted, and then we started to talk about school. How the midterms went, how our grades were, and what it was we were doing in our individual classes.
The bio major had A LOT to say regarding her major, and unfortunately mine. She non stop talked about how hard and challenging it was now, but would always end the sentence with “but at least I’ll have a job out of here, and i’ll be making bank”. “Bank”. I mean really? This is when I silently laughed to myself. Who would say they were making bank? Not an english minor! Although I do make plenty and plenty of other mistakes, I don’t think that would be one of them.
As I discussed this english class, and talked about how we recently gave comments on each others papers, she also had a lot to say. First, she said it was unnecessary, and also embarrassing. And two, she made it very clear that us students shouldn’t be correcting the paper, the teacher should be. Basically saying we don’t know what we are talking about but the teacher does, but in a much nicer way. And I thought to myself, “NOOOOOO!”. Sharing my essay with my fellow classmates was, yes, a scary thought at first. But knowing that I did it anyway, and gained so much from it was such a proud moment for me to talk about with her. I explained to her that with my group that I had worked with, not only helped me see what I did wrong, but the teacher gained a lot from it too(at least I thought). It was such a good experience for all of us, that I would recommend it to any major out there, regardless if it’s a paper or not. It could be reaching for help in any subject! I talked and explained, and she basically shut up.
Now I do not mean to bad mouth her, and I actually let her proof read this because I wouldn’t want her to think that I was. And she laughed and agreed it was ok to post. Although I love this girl to death, I am going to sit back and enjoy my ice-cream next time while she does all the talking.
Thinking of things to blog about, I was sidetracked thinking about how literature is never really complete. All of literature is just drafts, being revised over and over again and the work will never fully be complete because English is not a subject which always has concrete answers. Reading chapter 4 in Interdisciplinarity, I stumbled on a quote by Rene Wellek and Austin Warren that stated exactly what I was thinking, “…literature must be conceived as a whole system of works which is, with the accretion of new ones, constantly changing its relationships, growing as a changing whole” (page 105). Continue reading “Never-Ending Literature”
Lately, I’ve been thinking long and hard about my concentration in English. This class was pretty challenging in the beginning regarding the three books all at once. I was a bit worried that I wasn’t cut out for all this reading. I thought to myself many times in the past week if this was the right minor for me..