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It happened again.  I was talking to one of my distant family members when they asked me what I was going to Suny Geneseo for, and when I replied that I was majoring in English, I received the same response that we all get: “Why? Do you not want a job in the future?”  In my head I muttered the usual recurring thoughts that travel through my mind when I get this response.  I nervously laughed and said “Yeah that’s why”.   Continue reading “Speaking Up”

A line from Moran’s Interdisciplinarity that my mind keeps circling around like water around a drain is, ““unlike many other disciplines, English does not make a strong connection between education and training for future careers” (18). I sort of view the Creative Writing major as the pot-smoking younger brother of the literature major, which is the ugly stepchild of the science majors.

I had gone to an English Professor and confessed my fears about being a creative writing major, “I know it’s what I want to do, but I don’t know if it’s the smartest thing to do. Like, what if I graduate and the only place that hires me for the rest of my life is Starbucks?”

Continue reading “On Being a Creative Writing Major”

As I was flipping back to find a particular page from Interdisciplinarity, one quote from a different page caught my eye, and honestly, made me mad.  As stated by Graham Hough, “I do not believe that anyone should have their higher education in literature alone.  What is disgustingly called “English” in universities should never have grown into a separate and isolated ‘subject’ as it has.  It needs to be closely integrated with the study of other languages, with history and the history of ideas.” (Moran, 42).

Why did this make me so mad?  Because it was a complete slam to my major!  Hough referred to the major as “disgusting” and it irked me.  Why did English get such a bad rap?  What if going pre-med had this bad of a reputation?  Could we go without doctors in our lives?  No! So why is it okay to give a negative connotation to English?  The world may never know, but I would love to find out why.

In chapter three, Moran discusses the notion of ‘theory’ as it relates to interdisciplinarity. He describes ‘theory’ as being “concerned with big questions about the nature of reality, language, power, gender, sexuality, the body and the self” (75). He goes on to explain how theory provides a framework for people to engage within. After reading this I started to think about music theory prior to the 20th century. 18th-century voice leading is a set of rules in which harmonic progressions must take place. Pitches must move up or down by a specific interval depending on the context of the harmony. For example, one rule prohibits the use of parallel fifths. This occurs when two pitches that are seven semitones away from each other move together by the same interval. This is discouraged because of the hollow sound the fifths create. It is more desirable to move to a non-perfect interval such as a third or a sixth. While this definitely provides a framework for musicians to work within, it seems arbitrary. These strict rules are subjective opinions that have been formed over a long period of time. I will make the jump to say that every time a new rule was added to the practice of voice leading someone had to have made a decision based on their individual opinion of what sounds good. These rules aren’t concerned with the big questions that Moran describes. It’s mysterious to me why musicians followed these rules in the first place since they don’t come from anything other than subjective opinions about what “sounds right.”

Some contemporary art music is composed algorithmically, meaning a composer will follow rules that they have devised themselves in order to make artistic decisions. For example, some composers use the overtone series of a given pitch to make decisions about harmony and melody. I’m not really sure how, but some composers even use computer programing languages to provide them with rhythm and pitch material. Since these styles of music composition are more concerned with the nature of sound itself I think that they better fit Moran’s definition of theory. This may be controversial, but I think that newer methods of creating music better fit Moran’s definition of theory.

Moran briefly touches upon the concept of “scientific socialism” in the fifth chapter of his book (Moran, 138). The Marx and Engels  brand of socialism is sometimes referred to as a science because they both took pride in the fact that they developed their thesis by looking at the rise and fall of different socioeconomic trends throughout history, and developed what is commonly called as the “dialectic” of socialism. Not necessarily “empirical” evidence because there was no experiment that had been done, but still not “utopian” because it was based on actual analysis of human history.  Continue reading “Socialist View of the Worker as Presented in Harvest Song”