English not a "real" degree.

[JuniperWoolf]

I can see this conversation teetering on the edge of the dreaded faculty war.

What profit if this scientific age
Burst through our gates with all its retinue
Of modern miracles! Can it assuage
One lover's breaking heart? what can it do
To make one life more beautiful, one day
More godlike in its period?

I can think of more than a couple of drugs that scientists have cooked up which can do all of these things and more.

[stlukesguild]

Yet, I would venture, the poetry of Wilde has never cured any child of leprosy.

Nor vaporized 100,000 through the practical application of nuclear physics.

[OrphanPip]

Yet, I would venture, the poetry of Wilde has never cured any child of leprosy.

Nor vaporized 100,000 through the practical application of nuclear physics.

Hmm, but I don't think any nuclear physics text book ever put the notion into anyone's head that there was a need for large scale global conflict. Science is the greatest tool for giving humanity the opportunities to do great good, and a good deal of harm as well. Yet, the persistent attempt by critics of science to place blame for negative uses of technology at the feet of scientist is rather weak. Where did the will to drop the bomb come from? When we as a society value humanity, science is the greatest tool we have to improve the lives of people, and it has benefited far more people than it has harmed. Even with the massive casualties of WWII, it is a mere fraction, per capita, of the death toll the plague caused regularly. Merely a fraction of a fraction of neonatal deaths that used to occur before modern medicine.

What good has poetry really done on a tangible level? I love poetry, but I hardly accept the claims of Blaze that it is a great shaker and mover, or really all that great a tool of progress. It was forever a pass time of that small handful of people who made up the leisurely classes, now it's a pass time for a handful of the bourgeoisie.

[The Comedian]

If English is not a "real" degree I hate to think what my degree in Art is.

Yep. . . your degree is just painted on. Couldn't help it. . . .

And for the record. English is very much a real degree. I have a degree in it. Two degrees in it actually. And I have a job. And I still read literature. And write about it. And chat about it with other geekily inclined people on the internet.

It's psychology that's not a real degree, by the way. . .

[stlukesguild]

Hmm, but I don't think any nuclear physics text book ever put the notion into anyone's head that there was a need for large scale global conflict. Science is the greatest tool for giving humanity the opportunities to do great good, and a good deal of harm as well. Yet, the persistent attempt by critics of science to place blame for negative uses of technology at the feet of scientist is rather weak. Where did the will to drop the bomb come from? When we as a society value humanity, science is the greatest tool we have to improve the lives of people, and it has benefited far more people than it has harmed. Even with the massive casualties of WWII, it is a mere fraction, per capita, of the death toll the plague caused regularly. Merely a fraction of a fraction of neonatal deaths that used to occur before modern medicine.

Sounds like an apologist for the NRA: "Guns don't kill people, People kill people."

[LitNetIsGreat]

I can see this conversation teetering on the edge of the dreaded faculty war.

No, I'm not going there. I stated my full philosophical and intellectual position yesterday with a cheeky bum smiley. That's about as far as I am going to go. I am not going to get drawn into this one...

[Taliesin]

What profit if this scientific age
Burst through our gates with all its retinue
Of modern miracles! Can it assuage
One lover's breaking heart? what can it do
To make one life more beautiful, one day
More godlike in its period?

This. For example.

In 1925 Werner Heisenberg was working in Göttingen on the problem of calculating the spectral lines of hydrogen. By May 1925 he began trying to describe atomic systems by observables only. On June 7, to escape the effects of a bad attack of hay fever, Heisenberg left for the pollen free North Sea island of Heligoland. While there, in between climbing and learning by heart poems from Goethe's West-östlicher Diwan, he continued to ponder the spectral issue and eventually realised that adopting non-commuting observables might solve the problem, and he later wrote[1]
"It was about three o' clock at night when the final result of the calculation lay before me. At first I was deeply shaken. I was so excited that I could not think of sleep. So I left the house and awaited the sunrise on the top of a rock."

from here.
I have always found this little story amazingly beautiful.

[Hurricane]

Sounds like an apologist for the NRA: "Guns don't kill people, People kill people."

Well...yeah....

[OrphanPip]

Sounds like an apologist for the NRA: "Guns don't kill people, People kill people."

Pssh, that's rather trite. A good way to hand wave away not actually acknowledging the fact that science does good, and tangible good at that. As if humans have no responsibility for the way they use things.

My initial goal in starting this was to attack the myth of the humanities as some special privileged root towards achieving contentedness or doing good in the world. It's nonsense, it's a self-aggrandizing motto people in the humanities repeat to themselves without any real critical assessment. Just as their attacks on science stand on a weak foundation of presumptions about, and misunderstandings of, science.

Science is a tool, and it is the greatest tool humanity has at its disposal to really understand the world around us. To achieve real improvements of quality of life.

It is not cold and impassionate, a la Star Trek Vulcans, as can be seen in Tal's example, or even in the words of biologist J.B.S. Haldane: "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." Scientist are filled with a passion for understanding, for the work they do.

It is not inherently inhumane, as the foundations of humanitarian science has been around as far back as the writings of Francis Bacon.

It is not the root of all evil, as for every bad use of technology we can come up with twice as many positive uses.

Anyway, I'll extend the olive branch, art and science need not be in contention. Here are Robert Hooke's illustrations of some of the earliest observations made by human beings with microscopes.

[Gladys]

I say 'English', I am then greeted with a grunt or a sneer or a sarcastic "Oh, so not a REAL degree then!

The discipline would benefit from a strict application of scientific method. The reputation of English Literature qualifications has suffered from decades of self-absorbed nonsense about Freud and an ongoing fetish with Marxist and feminist readings.

How about a more empirical, evidence-based approach to English Literature?

[blazeofglory]

I like all disciplines of literature and everything in it intrigues me. Literature helps me understand life better and it make me complete in life and no other disciplines can surrogates it

[LitNetIsGreat]

The discipline would benefit from a strict application of scientific method. The reputation of English Literature qualifications has suffered from decades of self-absorbed nonsense about Freud and an ongoing fetish with Marxist and feminist readings.

How about a more empirical, evidence-based approach to English Literature?

There has been a leaning towards the likes of Marx, Freud and feminist reading in recentish years and despite some readings perhaps going too far, you can't say the whole approach is free from textual evidence. I have only ever seen theory as opening up new possibilities and not closing them down. What is annoying is the amount of hatred which seems to exist towards biographical detail. At times it can be very difficult to bring biographical detail into an argument without getting your fingers a little slapped.

In terms of science Vs art, personally I think that you need to be studying something that interests you, something that you feel passionate about. If that is art, science, IT or whatever then you should follow that through. I started life as a teen "studying" science, but came away from it with little more than a lot of extended hangovers. I certainly lost interest in science pretty quickly. Perhaps that was the age as much as the subject, but I think it was more the case that learning facts and labels given to plant structure etc, did little for me. Thank goodness I found a few books laying around.

[Petrarch's Love]

The discipline would benefit from a strict application of scientific method. The reputation of English Literature qualifications has suffered from decades of self-absorbed nonsense about Freud and an ongoing fetish with Marxist and feminist readings.

How about a more empirical, evidence-based approach to English Literature?

I'll start here. To begin with, Gladys, I do agree with you that literary studies across the past several decades has become so scattered and theoretical that it has lost a sense of center and a clear and cohesive sense of how we as literary scholars and enthusiasts contribute to the world. That said, I emphatically disagree with those that suggest that therefore what we need is to make literary study more "empirical and evidence-based" in the sense that it should emulate the scientific approach.

Now, I have absolutely nothing against the scientific approach (see my response to OrphanPip below). Indeed, I think that it is vital and important for people to develop the sort of skills and thinking that courses in the sciences provide for them. This is, in fact, part of the reason that I disagree that the humanities should move explicitly in an empirical direction. The sciences already provide students with rich empirically based studies. Our society already values, praises and (when they fund education at all) funds empirical and evidence based study. This is not something our educational system lacks. What it would lack, what it is in danger of lacking, without the study of the humanities, is an approach that takes the human factor into serious consideration. The humanities serves an important purpose in giving students a space in which to wrestle with the messy, non-empirical side of life. It provides a space in which people are encouraged, even demanded to reflect upon and question themselves, others, the culture they come from and the cultures they interact with.

As Orphan Pip rightly pointed out, scientific education will teach someone how to develop a new technology or make a discovery that can change the way we see the world. A scientific education on its own will not address the human minds and hearts that are producing and using that new discovery or technology. It will never make people, including the scientists themselves, stop to reflect on what science has done in the past and how this has affected human lives, or make them think through different possible scenarios as to how this discovery will be received by people, how they will react to it, what they will do with it, what it will mean on an emotional or irrational level in the world of human beings. That process of reflecting, imagining, questioning how people act is not something that science as a study does for us. It is something that the humanities do for us. This is not to say, as a few rather desperate defenders of the humanities may claim, that the study of literature and art is the great answer to peace on earth and a perfectly functioning society, any more than science is. What it does mean is that it serves a valuable purpose in that it makes people think about people and the way they think and feel and act in a very serious and intensive way, something that is incredibly important to any society. When people stop even attempting to recognize and contemplate the non-empirical component of our lives, this leaves them just as vulnerably ignorant as they would be without some understanding of logic and hard evidence.

This does not, of course, mean that scientists are not people who think about moral or human issues. It does mean that these issues are not the main focus and center of their work. Scientific pursuit may produce things that touch the human spirit, and the impetus to begin and continue such pursuit may be (almost certainly is) driven by the passions and emotions of a very human scientist, but the understanding of these passions (at least in a non biological or neurological sense) is not the goal of that scientist. Nor should it be. There are many situations and applications for which it is absolutely essential that the method and focus for inquiry should be as empirical and objective as possible. That is why we need a space for that kind of inquiry, and we also need a space in which those parts of us and of our experience that are not well served or well explained by an approach that strives to be purely quantitative and objective can benefit from a different approach.

I am also not suggesting that students should just sit around and contemplate what they feel, that any willy nilly theory about what a text means should be held up as gospel etc. Certainly literary study (or the study of art or history or any other humanities related field) needs to have some sort of structure in place, some logical boundaries, some critical thinking skills for looking at textual evidence, rhetoric and so on. The ability, not just to understand or feel something from what we read, but to process and analyze it is another important part of what the humanities have to offer. But this is a very different sort of analysis, a different sort of evidence, a different set of conclusions than the empiricism of the sciences, which is the very reason that it is important to keep it in place.

I agree that the humanities has dropped the ball in the last few decades. We have been guilty to a large extent of being distracted by internal debates and of not promoting and articulating what the valuable things humanities fields have to offer. This will change if I have anything to say about it.

Pssh, that's rather trite. A good way to hand wave away not actually acknowledging the fact that science does good, and tangible good at that. As if humans have no responsibility for the way they use things.

My initial goal in starting this was to attack the myth of the humanities as some special privileged root towards achieving contentedness or doing good in the world. It's nonsense, it's a self-aggrandizing motto people in the humanities repeat to themselves without any real critical assessment. Just as their attacks on science stand on a weak foundation of presumptions about, and misunderstandings of, science.

Science is a tool, and it is the greatest tool humanity has at its disposal to really understand the world around us. To achieve real improvements of quality of life.

It is not cold and impassionate, a la Star Trek Vulcans, as can be seen in Tal's example, or even in the words of biologist J.B.S. Haldane: "I have no doubt that in reality the future will be vastly more surprising than anything I can imagine. Now my own suspicion is that the Universe is not only queerer than we suppose, but queerer than we can suppose." Scientist are filled with a passion for understanding, for the work they do.

It is not inherently inhumane, as the foundations of humanitarian science has been around as far back as the writings of Francis Bacon.

It is not the root of all evil, as for every bad use of technology we can come up with twice as many positive uses.

Anyway, I'll extend the olive branch, art and science need not be in contention. Here are Robert Hooke's illustrations of some of the earliest observations made by human beings with microscopes.

OrphanPip--I think I've responded to part of your post in my response to Gladys above. Thanks for the Hooke illustrations. I think that they are where we need to begin (I don't reproduce them in my quote only for reasons of space). In the period I study and that Hooke emerged from the term "science" was the term for knowledge of all kinds--study of people, of politics, of the natural world--and I think that people in the modern academy would do well to remember that and to remember that both what we now term the sciences and the humanities have a lot more in common than people often suggest. There is a lot of creativity and imagination at work in the best mathematics and scientific work, just as really good humanistic study, as I briefly suggested in my response above, does require a certain degree of logical analysis and dispassionate distance to succeed. Frankly, I think both sides are being amazingly stupid when they attack one another. It keeps us so busy picking at one another that we are less apt to notice when the results of such infighting are that education in general takes a hit and less likely to band together to fight for our common goals in promoting well rounded education that will help our society continue to innovate and prosper. In the process of trying to sort out who is better we may eventually find this to be a case of "divided we fall."

Additionally, we are missing out on a lot when we don't talk to one another across the sciences and the humanities. The modern day undergraduate who either does nothing but bury herself in bio-chem classes or does nothing but take courses with titles like "Art in Abstraction" or "Deconstructing Paintings with Foucoult" will never become a Robert Hooke by remaining exclusively in either of those worlds. Many of the brightest people, the best inventions, tend to come from some sort of middle ground between strictly quantitative and strictly artistic grounds. To deprive our students, our people of either of these essential components is to deprive them of the potential to invent and create the things that we most need and desire.

[Petrarch's Love]

I am at Unversity, and sometimes when I meet new people and they ask what degree I am studying, and I say 'English', I am then greeted with a grunt or a sneer or a sarcastic "Oh, so not a REAL degree then!".

Does anybody else experience this? Or am I just surrounded by idiots. Perhaps they don't understand the concept and think that studying English means reading the dictionary and practising all the words.

There are some ridiculous degrees available to study these days, I could be doing a lot worse!

I do understand that with a lot of degrees, there is a promising career path that follows, yet with literature, there isn't anything quite as obvious and easy to walk in to, and I may have a struggle to find employment.

But at the end of the day, I love English literature, and I wouldn't have studied anything else.

Rant over

To return to the OP. Next time you get told your major isn't real, try one of these:

1) "Doesn't get much more real than sex and death in this life. That's what my major covers. How about yours?" (Say this with both conviction and passionate intensity. Extra points for looking and sounding slightly mad while putting a gleeful emphasis on the terms "sex and death." One way or another they'll leave you alone.)

2) "Yes, I've enrolled in the imaginary faculty of the university and it's the best decision I ever made. Now that I'm not a real person, I worry much less about being hit by motor vehicles."

3) (When the person is unusually egregious and/or has the gall to suggest that the pursuit of economic study is in some way more down to earth and connected to reality than the study of fiction.) "Want to come down to the basement? I hear there's a big keg of this great wine, a nice Amontillado, down there." (If you haven't read Bradbury's "Usher II", it will give you some comfort...and some ideas.)

4) Immediately commence reciting Keats' "Ode on a Grecian Urn" (This will do nothing to make your tormentors stop, but might make you feel better. You can do the intro. to Paradise Lost or any excerpt from Hamlet you have memorized to equal effect).

5) "Yes, you're so right. My major is so cool, it's unreal." (Extra points for saying this with such naive seeming misinterpretation that the person is ashamed to correct you.)

6) (When you really want everyone, including your fellow lit. majors, to clear the room). "What is real? Isn't reality just a product of our own perception? What would Nietzsche say?" Then begin spewing quotes from increasingly dense philosophers, preferably, when applicable, in the original French, German or Russian.

7) Smile indulgently at your interlocutor and make a small note of his or her name and some essential features about his or her person and personality for later use when you write your best selling novel, a modern interpretation of Dante's Inferno.

[drago]

Where would any other degree be if not for English?