So what do English BA students study? What do they spend three years doing? Is it as difficult as, say, Chemistry? What can English literature graduates do that other people cannot?
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So what do English BA students study? What do they spend three years doing? Is it as difficult as, say, Chemistry? What can English literature graduates do that other people cannot?
They can write well, I'd hope. They can write things and make them sound interesting.Quote:
Originally Posted by kev67
I gather from YouTube that English Literature undergraduates have to read lots of lots of books in too little time. I wondered what the value of that was, but maybe if you work in the publishing industry you have to read lots of books very quickly.
I read David Lodge's campus books. David Lodge is an English professor himself. I remember in Nice Work, one of his characters, a junior lecturer, was describing the hidden messages in cigarette adverts: metonymy, metaphors, deconstruction and all that sort of thing. It seemed pretty close to psychology. So maybe studying English qualifies you for a career in advertising. In that book, a university lectured was required to partner a managing director of a factory making widgets of various sorts. The MD was rather sceptical of the value of studying subjects like English at universities, while the lecturer thought he was uncouth bully to his workforce. Later the lecturer's boyfriend quit academia, partly because he was having doubts similar to what the factory boss expressed. Presumably David Lodge thought there was value in studying literature, but from a getting a job point-of-view, it is difficult to say exactly what they are, other than you've spent three years successfully stretching your mind.
A couple of years ago I read Stoner by John Edward Williams, which was about an English Literature lecture in America in the first half of the 20th Century. His syllabus was more learning for learning's sake. Barely anything from the last three centuries was on it.