Embracing Uncertainty and More
Seven Things, Mostly Soft Skills, I Learned as an English Major
Since I graduated from university three years ago, I’ve tried to persuade some people that there are lots of things you can learn from majoring in English. Beyond basic reading, writing, and researching skills, there aren’t a whole lot of hard, job-specific skills like UX design that you learn as an English major. Which makes many people wonder, Well then what of anything, of any practical value did you learn? It’s a fair question, but one I won’t address here.
Imagine the following scenario. You just graduated as an English major and are now trying to navigate a bleak job market, but all the work in applying for jobs, writing cover letters, and learning new job-specific skills makes you feel like Sisyphus pushing a boulder up a hill. The work never seems to end. You want to cry and eat a doughnut. (It’s okay. Go ahead.) As you eat your doughnut, you doubt if you learned anything, absolutely anything in college if you can’t get a job with your spanking new degree.
Fret not, my good friend. We English majors have all felt like losers with no discernible skills at some point. As challenging as life after college can be, I can definitively say there are many great things I learned as an English major. Perhaps you will find some of these things to be true of your college experience, too. Here are just a few of the soft skills I learned:
- Talkin’ ‘Bout Abstract Stuff
I learned how to talk about complex matters affecting the human condition. I learned how to do this in a bunch of classes and World Literature in particular. For that class, I read Wole Soyinka’s play Death and the King’s Horseman. The play’s main source of conflict is a clash of cultural differences. According to Yoruba culture, Elesin, the king’s horseman, must commit ritual suicide after the king’s death in order to help the king’s spirit make it to the afterlife. If Elesin doesn’t do this, the king’s spirit will stay on Earth and harm people. British authorities in Nigeria view this ritual suicide as barbaric. My classmates and I discussed some controversial ideas like “How can ritual suicide be morally justified?” and “What moral obligation do you have to prevent ritual suicide when it’s become morally justified in a cultural setting?” (To be clear: suicide is never okay under any circumstances and should always be prevented.) There are no easy answers to either of these questions. In answering them, my classmates and I had to explain our views very clearly, carefully, and tactfully. There are conversational moves you can make in order to do this such as making concessions, clarifying someone’s point, asking her to provide evidence that proves why a character is, for instance, selfish, adding onto his point, and moving onto other topics of possible interest. I learned these conversational moves in English 101, and they helped me immensely in my literature courses.
2. Judge of Character
I learned how to develop a better judge of character by seeking out the subtext in every sentence. Let me make this analogy: Sometimes body language can say much more than the words a person uses. The same can be said about sentence structure and a character’s explicitly expressed desires or fears or beliefs. If a character wants to deflect responsibility, he or she may use the passive voice. What’s the difference in tone between these two sentences?
I accidentally injured myself sawing that frame.
I accidentally got injured when I was sawing that frame.
In the first sentence, you could infer that the speaker feels responsible in some way for the accident. Perhaps the speaker feels that he was being reckless. In the second sentence, you could infer that the speaker doesn’t view recklessness as the cause of the accident but rather was the victim of an unfortunate accident that could happen to anyone. Or maybe the second speaker is too proud to admit that his recklessness caused his grip to slip and the blades of the saw to dig into his flesh. My point is that English majors are trained to spot every little detail and provide subtext that reveals what a character may be thinking. Some non-English majors might view this as a lot of meaningless guesswork, but when done well, this subtext can get to the heart of a character’s rationalizations and also his or her motivations.
In American Literature II, I read Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying, a novel, my literature professor claimed, every person working in Human Resources should read. Why? Every character in the Bundren family wants something, but they don’t directly reveal why they really want those things nor why they travel to Jefferson to bury Addie Bundren, the matriarch in the family. Why does Anse Bundren want to get a set of new teeth? The answer lies beyond just chewing food. It is here that English majors are called to imagine themselves as Anse Bundren and to imagine multiple reasons as to why he wants them teeth. Reading between the lines and sussing out characters’ motivations is something that you are expected to do for pretty much every literary text. This leads me to my next point.
3. Empathy
I learned how to empathize with other people, even people I considered evil. If you are really engaged with a literary text, chances are you’ll come across a character’s decision that really surprises you. Such a surprise offers an excellent opportunity for reflection. Did you really know that character as much as you thought? Is that character more sinister or kindhearted or courageous or loyal than you imagined? You might wonder, Do you really have to take a college course to learn how to take another person’s perspective? Can’t you do that in your day-to-day life? My answer is yes, of course. However, in a college course, the opportunity to empathize with other people is laid out much more clearly with thoughtful discussion questions a professor may ask and any analysis of characterization you may be called upon to write. Taking a Holocaust literature course, for example, certainly taught me how to empathize with people who were evil or amoral. Evil people do not see themselves as evil; they see themselves as responding justly to the circumstances they’ve been given. Amoral people, like the narrator Vorarbeiter Tadek, a prisoner in Auschwitz in Tadeusz Borowski’s short stories, may have once been moral but had to forgo living honorably in order to just survive. In other classes, I learned how to empathize with Eleanor Vance, a friendless woman who finds herself haunted in The Haunting of Hill House. I had to imagine my life as Eleanor’s and consider what guilt from her past may be creeping up on her and haunting her. I learned how to empathize with Edna Pontellier who suffered from ennui and felt trapped in her marriage in The Awakening. By developing your ability to empathize with fictional characters you will find it easier to imagine the lives of other people and relate to people in real life. Boy, does this help with making friends.
4. Literary Periods
I learned the characteristics of different literary periods like Modernism and Romanticism. This can be genuinely interesting as you get to see how one literary period, like Modernism, acted in response to another literary period, like Realism. You also get to see what readers’ expectations were in reading a story and how authors in general approached the art of storytelling at the time. You also learn how events in world history helped shape some of these literary periods. For example, WWI made several people hopeless about the future of humanity and this feeling was reflected in Modernist literature. Learning about how different events in world history affected literary periods helps dispel the myth that literature exists in a vacuum, independent of what’s going on in the real world.
5. Appreciating Literature
I learned how to enjoy reading literature on a deeper level. Some of the fun in reading comes from being surprised by plot twists, but more of the fun can come from becoming familiar with genre conventions and watching an author take creative risks to subvert them.
Take the genre of gothic fiction as an example. One characteristic of gothic fiction is the return of repressed emotions, such as guilt or sexual desire. In The Haunting of Hill House, a novel I read for American Gothic, Eleanor Vance deals with both of these feelings. You could make the case that she deals with repressed sexual desire for Theodora. If you’re familiar with characteristics of gothic fiction, reading passages involving Eleanor and Theodora might make you more on edge and question the nature of their affection for one another, all the while seeing how the author Shirley Jackson may play around with this trope and tease readers. You can also be on the lookout for any moments when Eleanor expresses any guilt for her past. As we learn, Eleanor Vance blames herself for the death of her mother and, according to one commonly accepted interpretation, continues to be haunted by her guilt in interesting ways. The spooky moments in this novel made falling asleep hard, but when you examine Eleanor Vance’s character and her troubled past, these spooky moments become more horrifying when you learn of their possible origins.
6. Literary Analysis
I learned how to conduct a close reading of a literary text. Learning this changed the way I look at the world, and I’m not just saying that. Let me explain. I had a literature professor who spent weeks teaching me and other Literary Studies students how to go about creating meaningful, relevant interpretations of a text while also making connections between a text and our own way of understanding the world. Before I took this class, I assumed that writing a literary analysis meant you had to explain the more ambiguous parts of a story and why they fit in with the rest of the story in establishing a theme. I thought that meant you had to, you know, say something profound about humanity as it relates to the text. I was worried more about coming across as highly perceptive in my writing than admitting to myself what I didn’t know, what confused or surprised me about a text. Oddly enough, I didn’t ask curious questions; I stuck with what I did understand and used those passages to construct an argument. As I discovered, this is the wrong way to go about doing literary analysis. If you already have the idea that a poem says something about the repression of sexual desire, for example, you may look for textual evidence that supports only that idea — in essence, I was guilty of confirmation bias.
The six steps of close reading changed all that. Very briefly, they are: ask questions about the author’s motivations for any moments in the text that seem important or confused you, provide hypotheses for these questions, see if you can find any patterns in these hypotheses, describe the overall pattern you find, synthesize your findings in a tightly worded thesis statement, and reflect on how you relate personally to your reading of the literary text. These six steps did wonders to help organize the messy process that is literary analysis. It encouraged me to look at a good chunk of textual evidence first before making quick assumptions about a text in order to come to some sort of working thesis statement that will put your mind at ease (because, hey, at least you have a rough draft now and can submit something in case you completely freeze — that’s honestly how my brain in preservation mode thinks because often times writing papers was a battle filled with self-doubt and the fear of criticism.) Having to look at a wealth of textual evidence first was, counterintuitively, easier to do than constructing an argument out of two scenes I found interesting because, uh, can I really make such a bold statement that Jim acted as a surrogate father to Huckleberry Finn with the scant evidence I have? Not really.
The six steps of close reading also encouraged me to take educated guesses as to why the author chose to write a certain way. I learned that early on when doing a literary analysis, it’s okay to make educated guesses and even speculate because at that point you are imagining possible reasons for an author’s motivations. With sound reasoning and the accumulation of evidence, you will begin to feel much more certain about the argument you are making. I didn’t realize how true this was in my first two years of college. I felt so scatterbrained and tense because I wasn’t sure what I was supposed to write 99% of the time, which really prevented me from expanding my thoughts.
7. Embracing Uncertainty
I learned how to become more comfortable with and even embrace uncertainty, something that has greatly helped in 2020. Reflecting on the more ambiguous parts of a text has, of course, prompted me to come up with possible interpretations. Do we know for certain if the governess in The Turn of the Screw is seeing ghosts or hallucinating? Or is it some mazed combination of the two? Do we know for certain who was holding Eleanor Vance’s hand in The Haunting of Hill House that one night? You can gather textual evidence and make a case as to what really happened, but do you know for certain? No, but that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try to make sense of it, of course. Just like there’s plenty of ambiguity in literature, there’s plenty of ambiguity in real life. Sometimes life does not provide you the closure you would prefer and so sometimes you are called upon to fill in the gaps with a charitable interpretation. For example, you may not know why a date or a friend ghosted you. You may have some guesses, but you don’t know for certain. My point is that there are times as a reader and in life where it is better to let something remain a mystery than to venture a guess when there is barely a hint of an answer. Savor that mystery and appreciate what beauty there is surrounding it. In absence of an answer, why not stare in wonder at something so unique? We don’t need to immediately categorize every flying object we see in the night sky. This kind of attitude also extends to a willing suspension of disbelief.
Reading fiction is an experience that’s meant to be enjoyable. Let it’s magic work on you. You’ll actually have more of a meaningful reading experience if you can suspend your disbelief and just accept the fact that there is a talking cat who shoots at people and flying witches in The Master and Margarita. Despite being prompted to explain away every little passage in a text, I also did learn that too much analyzing can get in the way of an enjoyable reading experience just like how completely trying to understand a person can get in the way of you enjoying her company. A friendship without surprises sounds pretty bleah to me.
