The Painful Nowning Process

In the south, it’s “lhude singe mockingbird,” even though we have “cuccu”s, they aren’t nearly as remarkable as the English ones. So, exams and final papers are done, grades are filed, graduation and its celebrations have passed. We said farewell to several of our finest English majors, as we do every year. Some have plans, some–are still planning, but we expect they’ll do well whatever they do.

I’ll be cleaning up my office (or at least organizing the clutter a bit), preparing the courses I’ll be teaching this coming fall, and writing a paper for a conference in June. Not necessarily in that order.

What are you doing this summer?

That is, write stuff people might actually want to read, as opposed to that highfalutin lit’rary stuff and po’try that nobody can understand, not even you. Okay, I’m sort of kidding about that, but you can make a living writing. Unfortunately, the days when Alexander Pope could live very comfortably off the proceeds of his best-selling translations of the Iliad and Odyssey are long gone. Instead, you might have to try writing without inspiration.

Does this mean you’ll never be inspired? No. Inspiration will still come, but the problem with inspiration is … none of us can predict when it will hit. So cherish inspiration, but instead of waiting for it to produce writing, strive to produce without being inspired.

I’m not negating inspiration; I’m simply trying to guide you around it. You’ll still need inspiration to complete good writing. And it can come from a variety of places.

This is good advice for anyone who has to write, whether you hope to earn a living at it or simply produce a paper for a grade.

You can also write popular fiction. English majors galore have taken this road-more-traveled and proven that popular doesn’t have to mean trashy or poorly-written. English majors seem to enjoy reading mystery novels, and some have become very well-known as mystery novelists, including: Dorothy L. Sayers, Thomas Perry. Robert B. Parker. Amanda Cross (Carolyn G. Heilbrun), and James Lee Burke. Charles Ardai writes neo-noir “hardboiled” mysteries under the pen-name Richard Aleas, drawing on his background as a literature major. Then he and a partner launched a publishing enterprise devoted to “pulp fiction,” Hard Case Crime. Oh, and before that, Ardai was the founder and CEO of Juno.

However, if you really want to make money in the pop-fiction world, romance is the game.

One of the courses I’ve been teaching this semester is an upper-level seminar on Postcolonial Literature, mainly books and films from British/Commonwealth and former British colonies.

Nita’s Wide Angle View of India posted this interesting summary of a comparative study of “cultural variables”:

Hofstede laid out certain ‘dimensions’ of culture which he used to compare different nations. These “dimensions” are not individual traits…but simply “averages” or “tendencies” of whole groups. The Hofstede dimensions are as follows:

• Power Distance (PD) The attitude of people towards differences in power and wealth …countries with a great power distance will have strict hierarchies and this will be accepted by those in the lower levels of the hierarchy.
• Individualism Collectivism (IC) This measures the ability to live in groups or choose ones own path, regardless of what the group/community is thinking or doing. Individual achievement is highly valued.
• Masculinity (MF) This measures a culture’s “masculine” traits like competitiveness, aggression and giving importance to material things and “feminine” traits like sensitiveness, empathy, importance given to quality of life. This masculine/feminine terminology has also been dubbed as Quantity of Life vs. Quality of Life. [...]

Uncertainty Avoidance (UA) This dimension (added later by Hofstede) shows how people react to uncertainty in their environment. This dimension also shows the level of tolerance in a society for differences

Where does your culture or the culture where you grew up fall on the these scales? But note the possible exceptions and criticisms of these hypotheses, footnoted at the end of the post.

In case anyone’s interested the Postcolonial Lit seminar, three intrepid explorers*, has read:

• Possession, by A.S. Byatt (England)
• Anthills of the Savannah, by Chinua Achebe (Nigeria)
• The Secret River, by Kate Grenville (Australia)
• The God of Small Things, by Arundhati Roy (India)
• Running in the Family and Anil’s Ghost, by Michael Ondaatje (Sri Lanka and Canada)
• Foreign Bodies, by Hwee Hwee Tan (Singapore/Netherlands/USA)
• Tsotsi (film–South Africa)
• Lagaan (film–India)
• My Brilliant Career (film–Australia)
• The Dish (film–Australia)

In retrospect, I think (and students agreed) I would have chosen Rabbit-Proof Fence or Whale Rider as one of the films representing Australia/New Zealand. Nevertheless, overall it has been a horizon-expanding semester. Also, I chose Achebe’s Anthills of the Savannah, because I figured most of us had already read Things Fall Apart. Anthills is so oblique, however, and depends much more on the reader’s being fairly familiar with modern African culture. We all agreed that re-reading Things might have worked better.

*The small size makes the class, officially, three independent studies meeting simultaneously. Still worthwhile, though.

Pre-registration for fall is just around the corner. Time to think about whether majoring in English is really a good idea. Careerbuilder.com compares English majors future earnings prospects with economics and electrical engineering. Turns out English majors end up having more fun, so they feel fine about making an adequate, if not exorbitant, amount of money.

“The lowest earning English majors continue to have more tolerance for careers that just do not pay well, while an electrical engineering major is a guarantee of at least a good, if not great, salary,” says [Al Lee, Ph.D. and director of quantitative analysis for PayScale.com].

I’m sure electrical engineers really enjoy their jobs, too.

I felt obligated to say “hwaet” instead of “what”—partly because it has so many more potential meanings. But still—February? Also, today is Ash Wednesday. Unintentionally, it is also the due-date for the first set of freshman papers. There’s penance!

I’m not much for giving things up for Lent, although undoubtedly there are things I could forego for forty days in the interest of an improved spiritual life. Instead, I try for more discipline in doing things, so I’ve promised myself to post more regularly (and, let us hope, more meaningfully) to this site.  If there’s anything you’re particularly interested in, let me know.

In addition, I’ll be leading a study on 1st Corinthians for my church as we prayerfully consider the future of our congregation.

An encouraging event last week: a student came in to ask what kinds of jobs she might be able to do if she changed her major to English. Fortunately, I had answers. And more answers. And I hope we have a new English major.

Campbell offers two “pre-law” majors: Government/Pre-law and English/Pre-law. (Some students major in Criminal Justice as a preparation for law school, but it’s more clearly a pre-professional degree.) In the past, almost every time prospective students would visit campus, if they had indicated an interest in “pre-law,” they would be funneled willy-nilly to the History/Government orientation/advisement sessions. Occasionally, an English professor would go over to the History department and ask, “Is anyone here interested in English/Pre-law?” Now and then, one or two hands would go up—they didn’t realize they’d had a choice. Fortunately, things are done differently now.

The Princeton Review notes that law school doesn’t require a “pre-law” major for admission:

If you major in English [emphasis added] or history, you’ll still be on the right track. Crucial to a Pre-Law major are critical reading, writing, and thinking skills. After all, as a lawyer, your job will require drafting cogent arguments and solutions to problems, then communicating those arguments and solutions effectively to persuade and convince a judge or jury.

In fact, you can major in almost anything that includes these kinds of critical reading, writing, and thinking skills, and that will also provide you with a breadth and depth of knowledge you can apply to legal issues.  The American Bar Association also notes the importance of general research skills and the ability to read and analyze lengthy, complex materials—for example, Victorian novels, the plays of William Shakespeare, or Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales in Middle English.

One university  with an entire college devoted to criminal justice recently realized that reviving its English major would give their students good value for money. One reason:

When the time comes to apply to law school, as nearly 30 percent of students there say they plan to do, what’s often missing is a record of analytic study, as honed through a series of literature and writing courses.

In short, one of the many, many things you can do with an English major is to go to law school. Once you do that, all the fun is over, but at least you will have enjoyed your undergraduate days. And perhaps, one day, you’ll write a novel like The Firm, make bazillion dollars, and leave the lawyers to fight it out while you go on to write best-sellers about how awful they are! (But note that John Grisham majored neither in English nor in Government before applying to law school: he was an accounting major!)

They get internships. Seriously.

The deadline for the American Society of Magazine Editors is almost upon us—November 15—but there’s still time if you jump right on it. If you qualify, print out the application and go for it. You’ll need endorsements from your department chair and dean.

And time yet for hundred indecisions,
And for a hundred visions and revisions

says T.S. Eliot, and time to read those neglected classics. Or, perhaps, time to forget about them and give it up as a bad job, like these famous authors who confess their literary blanks to Slate, along with some page-turners they’d rather read instead of, say, Middlemarch or Moby-Dick.

All right, I have read Moby-Dick, thanks to Professor Louis Rubin’s American Literature course at UNC-CH, but I probably would never have gotten through it without his guidance and the combined carrot/stick encouragement of a grade. Middlemarch—sorry, but I have read a boatload of Dickens.

What’s the point of this kind of feature? I’d say—read all you can, at least give the “great books” a try, but few of us will have time or inclination (or, perhaps, ability) to read everything. If you’ve found at least a few authors and books among the “greats” that feed your soul, you’re well on your way.

You could be my former student Michelle Burford. Currently working on her Master’s degree at Harvard’s Graduate School of Education (HGSE), she was a founding editor of O: the Oprah Magazine, and has also been an editor and feature writer for Essence and Latina. Michelle worked her way up from regional publications to the big-time, and while working on her degree she continues to write features and has also completed a summer theology program at Oxford University. Michelle has worked hard to achieve all she has so far, and she isn’t done yet!

The deadline has passed for dropping a course without a grade, so it’s time to get serious with this guide to reading like a scholar. And let’s back that up with some thoughts on how spiritual discipline is part of a complete education.

Some things should be falling into place by now. If not, now is the time to get help—from professors, counselors or pastors, Student Support Services—people who really know what’s what. Your friends and family love you, but for that very reason, sometimes they’ll try to fix things for you instead of helping you learn things yourself. Make the most of college.