English Majors and Literary Criticism: Enhancing Skills of Argument, Analysis, and Justifying One's Passion

By the end of their college careers, all English majors should know the evolution of criticism and style that took place between the romantic period and the postmodern period. Style and criticism have changed throughout history as the ideas on what literature, authorship, and readership actually are have changed. Learning about this evolution and current literary thought should spark English students to ask these same questions of authorship and readership. The course will secondarily cause students to ask themselves who they are as writers, and what they want their writing to do to and for others.

Appreciation for Literature and the Study of It

It’s easy for English students to lose hope for both the intelligence required for their major as well as their job marketability when every person they talk to asks them if they are going to teach out of college.

But when students read T.S. Eliot, Foucault, Roland Barthes, Todorov, and Barbara Hernstein Smith all discussing why poetry and narratives work, and how they work – especially in formalist and structuralist thinking – and what they don’t do, it’s hard to accept any accusation that the English major requires little thought or simple work.

Reading and understanding these arguments is difficult, not just because the class is the most analytical and right-brained of all the courses, but because the essays themselves are not always organized. The question “what is the essayist’s thesis and what are the arguments” is not always clear, and students sometimes find that the arguments are counterproductive or do not necessitate what they claim to. The ability to pick out these convincing and unconvincing arguments is a skill that students will use everywhere.

The thoughts discussed in class should also give English students an appreciation for literature in general. The question comes up in structuralist thinking, “Is art a language? Can I make a change here that will have the same artistic effect on everybody because of a scientific nature and biology to art?” More questions arise in postmodern thinking, such as “If everyone experiences art differently, how hard should I really try to communicate myself?”

Marketable Skills from Literary Criticism

Most English classes should be asking their students to analyze what they read and be critical with their responses and comments. But in Literary Criticism, students are not responding to art. They are responding to thought. Besides sharpening their analytical skills, this response also strengthens their ability to interpret. Some day students will be responding to an email from a supervisor that contains tangents, redundancies, and unclear intentions, and those employees will be more equipped to decipher meaning from a jostled message.

Literary Criticism is one of the most formative, inspiring, and helpful classes an English major can take. All such students should seize the opportunity and dive into the foggy world, where they will be surprised, challenged, and trained.

Apr 22, 2009 8:51 PM

Guest :

I just finished talking to a friend of mine about the place of literary criticism as a field. I am a math/history major, however I was raised to have a keen appreciation of Literature. Unfortunately, it seems as though as a discipline, the study of English is losing its way. When the most important skill that your field can boast of is enhanced analytical skills, then you are in a bad way. After all, if a student truly wants to become more analytically capable, why not go straight to the source of such thought and study the mathematical sciences. The problem, at least in my view, is that English professors seem trapped by a rigid dogmatism that prevents them from realizing the full potential of their study in a changing environment. It's not that Literature is worthless, far from it. Literature is the study of narrative, of myth, of meaning as people have expressed it throughout time. It is the best possible chronicle of the development of the human person, it is how our best and most sensitive minds have framed the very character of the human condition. The problem is that the English establishment today seems to be trying to cram the personhood of today into a decades old frame by disregarding the importance of popular culture. Pulp fiction, comic strips, Harry Potter, these things deserve recognition as a form of expression relevant to the person of today, and English majors and their teachers disregard them at their own risk. The ideas of Foucault, Barthes, and Derrida provide interesting and complex ways of looking at Literature, but difficult and abstruse ideas hardly signify a meaningful study. If literary criticism is unable to provide, to the average literate person, some new insight into his condition as a human being, then it serves no purpose outside the realm of a few highly educated elites. I fear that barring some upheaval, the study of English Literature will turn ever inwards until finally it essentially commits suicide, and that if this happens the other humanities will fall into parallel crises.
In summary, I suppose that the thrust of what I'm trying to say is simply; don't let pride, elitism, and dogmatism rob the world of an important and meaningful study. Never forget that Shakespeare wrote for the groundlings.

Apr 23, 2009 12:32 AM

Elisabeth Sharber :

That is a VERY good point, and it is actually discussed in the Norton Anthology of Theory and Criticism, which is the text that our class used. Richard Ohmann's essay called "The Shaping of a Canon: U.S. Fiction 1960-1975" notes that "excellence is a constantly changing, socially chosen value. Who attributed it to only some novels, and how?" This course should address (may not always, but ours did) the issue of different mediums of literature and how the English community should respond to and adapt to them.

I agree. As it is true for all the liberal arts and humanities, the English community cannot afford to be dogmatic about its boundaries--nor should it be, given its exploratory and expressive nature.

Thank you for your thoughts!