Sometimes I wonder what people think English Literature as a discipline is. Not that I really need to wonder — people are usually very liberal in their communication of what they think it is you do, will go on to do, and the kind of person you are for having chosen to dedicate a handful of years to the meaninglessness of other people’s words, and always with the sagacity of somebody who has sat in all the literature lectures and seminars the world has to offer. A lot of literature graduates will tell you that they loved their degree because more than anything, it taught them how to really think, and I am one of them. I went into my degree thinking I’d get to indulge myself in some of the best literature written (contested term, I know) and pick up a lot of obscure historical knowledge, and that did happen. But my degree was also the means to a new way of thinking about the things that make their way in front of my eyes every single day.
Anybody who’s ever pursued further education for reasons outside of career ambitions and earning potential will be familiar with the exasperation that follows when you tell someone that you chose to study English Literature at university because you love it. The reaction is even worse when you don’t seem to hate yourself for it or regret it after the fact, which would be more amusing if schadenfreude wasn’t such an ugly thing. I’ve seen people get so irritated when I told them I was actually really happy analysing novels, short stories, poems, plays and non-fiction writing for three years, and that it was a choice made fully informed rather than one made out of ignorance, that you’d think I was asking them to read something they had no interest in and write 3,000 words on it. I knew before confirming the details on my UCAS application that English Literature, like many other non-vocational courses, wouldn’t necessarily be my golden ticket to one singular career path upon completion, and I still chose to study it — not under duress (because young people are under so much pressure to stray from capitalist priorities) but because I wanted to read, analyse, explore, and think, and I wanted to go to university for it.
It just so happens that I have loved writing since I was a child and knew by seventeen that I wanted to work with words in some capacity for the rest of my life. As most bookworm children with indulging parents and encouraging headteachers tend to, I have written short stories, poems, and articles since I was around seven. By twelve, prior to the encouragement of the teachers who identified in me an aptitude for literary analysis and written communication, I had decided that I wanted to study literature at university, and when I was shortlisted for a national writing competition that I had entered haphazardly in my first year of sixth form (the competition was run by the musical Wicked, which my mum had taken me to see for my sixteenth birthday and I had entered more because I loved the musical than because of any real confidence in my creative writing ability at the time), any uncertainty that writing was the thing for me was extinguished there and then. It is not hard to see how studying the writing of others for several years was to my advantage as a writer. But had I had no desire to write at all, I would have still chosen to study literature at university for the love of art, and to continue the expansion of my mind that the study of literature had introduced and taken me hostage to.
Before hearing others speak about it as such, I had never conceived of a university education in anything as purely a means of qualifying somebody for a single career (that one thing that everybody knows can only be acquired through an institution attended at the very beginning of a person’s adult life) — I had only ever conceived of it as a continuation of learning. I have never believed that a person’s job or career is the most interesting, let alone the most important thing about them, so I found all the questions about how I’d ‘use’ my degree flummoxing. That I could apply the analytical, communication, and critical thinking skills I developed through an English degree to just about everything (we are, after all, surrounded by messaging of various kinds), would never have been a satisfactory answer because what the questions were of course really asking was ‘What job are you going to get with it?’ Those questions revealed a very narrow, exclusively capitalist conception of education – of utility even – that I didn’t share, despite the presupposition inherent in them that everybody did. Of the things I came to know from having the audacity to choose an arts degree and enjoy it, the one I learnt the earliest is that people don’t like it very much when other people don’t share their values.
Almost annually between the ages of eleven and sixteen, my mum took my sister and me to a different part of Italy. Many an obsession had their origins in Italy, my sister’s fixation on Parma ham and mortadella being one of them and my taste for artichokes and Tuscan-style architecture being another. When I was around fifteen, she decided that we should go and see Giuseppe Verdi’s Aida because it’s only right to see a performance of something in the Arena di Verona if you make your way there all the way from Sheffield. None out of the three of us speaks or understands Italian past ‘Grazie’, ‘Prego’, and ‘Signore e signori’ but we were all transfixed by what we saw happening on stage and understood it well enough, even without the subtitles they offer for non-Italian speakers. More than just comprehending what we were seeing, though, we each really resonated with it in different ways — me in my GCSE year as a boy-crazy teen, my sister nearing the end of her university career but not the end of the questionable fashion choices made to meet the dress codes of themed student nights out, and my mum very much established in her career as a social worker and the resident grown woman among us. If that doesn’t show the universality of art, I don’t know what will. We loved it so much that the following year, we went to see Carmen. By the time my mum took me to see Wicked, I knew that I loved absolutely everything about how people create meaning through words, sounds, faces, shapes, contortions of the body, and all the other things art is made up of, and that I wanted to be involved in that world somehow, professionally or otherwise.
The contempt for the study of the things that colour each of us in as humans, distinguishing us from unlabelled cans of baked beans on a conveyor belt, is staggering. I find it interesting that people who deride those who study the arts are the same people that have a favourite something. Maybe not everybody has a favourite chivalric romance or a favourite revenge tragedy, but they probably have songs that mean something very personal to them, comfort movies or series that they can quote from beginning to end, a book they loved in childhood and that they now read to their children, or a poem they were introduced to in adolescence that never really left them. It’s interesting to think about why it is that the very things that form our cultures, often helping us think more deeply about ourselves, others, and the world around us become frivolous and ‘fluffy’ the moment we endeavour to look deeper into them. Why do we love to enjoy the fruits of another person’s mind—the books, films, plays, poems, music, and fine art we love—but scorn the consideration of the mechanisms through which that enjoyment is effected? The arts are of course not serious enough to study but they are serious enough to constitute our lives outside of working, feeding ourselves and our children, and doing our ablutions and excretions. When all is said and done, we all appreciate, even need, minds that can create. We’re just not all willing to recognise it.
The shows and films we find funny or moving aren’t funny or moving by accident or because they just are. Behind them are people who know how to use language or colour or sound or light or space to elicit a response from you, or who can use their faces or bodies to convey emotions. We like these things because they reflect our own humanity to us. There are people who might read this, or something like it, roll their eyes and wave it off as the rambling of another person who thinks they are too clever for their own good (isn’t that what English students are, anyway?) and then go back to seeing themselves on screen in the storyline of the abused woman who seeks revenge on her abuser or listening to it in a song that narrates the pain of a spouse leaving unexpectedly. The visual, literary, musical and performing arts that we love to hate show us who we are and have done since humans recognised that they could feel. We are not unlabelled cans of baked beans, and we have the arts to thank for that.
For three years I studied classic and contemporary novels, classic and contemporary poetry, plays, short stories, essays, manifestos, philosophical, political, and religious texts, and just about any kind of writing you could think of, exploring how meaning is created through the formal features of each and learning about the various ways of thinking about them and everything else in the world through theoretical texts. Second only to being taken on field trips to see the very desks on which texts I had studied had been written (!) or to look at manuscripts or the earliest editions of those texts, what I found most engrossing about my degree was uncovering how the things that got me to feel so deeply in so many ways were achieving it. What stayed with me most were the discussions and lectures about how the writer, be they playwright, poet, novelist, essayist, theologian, philosopher, or the Thinker of the day, was communicating their ideas in their works in ways that hadn’t necessarily crossed my mind before. Like all art, the literary arts (and creative non-fiction) both communicate ideas to us and make us feel things. Through studying literature, I got to know just how masterful the how of transmitting sentiments actually is.
Writing well, whether it’s the screenwriting that underpins the stories we find so compelling on television and in film or the non-fiction materials that politicise previously unreached demographics, is a craft like any other, more so than I think we realise. Before studying English at university, while I had appreciated to a degree that no cultural production comes about without the care of a person or a group of people, I’d never thought very deeply about the relationship between the appearance of something someone was telling me (all the things that make up a text’s physical presence on a page, or directorial choices on screen or on stage) and the thing they were telling me itself. I hadn’t considered how translating something from one language to another cannot be divorced from interpretation and how consequently laughable it is to suggest that something can be entirely faithful to the original in meaning and untainted by the voice of its translator, as if any person can be more than a person.
Practically speaking, it’s true that with an English student, most things are only an ill-fitting suit and a public platform away from being a dog whistle but I don’t think this is always a bad thing. When you analyse texts over and over, routinely close-reading down to the examination of a single word in a sentence, it becomes easier to hear or see when something is being said even in the absence of the articulation of the words that would typically designate that idea. It becomes easier to identify slipperiness, to identify what might be happening when certain words are used in certain contexts, and for what reason, and to identify when a person or group’s ideas are being egregiously misrepresented. I’m not suggesting that media literacy is exclusive to English Literature students, as though the key to it is found only at the bottom of a pile of Renaissance comedies and satires. But I don’t think you can spend three years examining the uses and manipulation of language in various genres, disciplines, and discursive fields across history without emerging from it with a critical eye towards how words are used in everyday life in particular ways.
Words are everywhere, and because they’re everywhere, the manipulation of language is hidden in plain sight. If a huge part of studying literature is examining how language has been and can be used for purposes other than our everyday conversations, it’s no wonder that people who’ve studied anything that involves analysing the creative uses of words and other modes of communication often thrive in advertising, marketing, filmmaking, content creating, and other forms of storytelling, communicating, and emoting. That studying literature isn’t seen as a worthwhile endeavour because of questions of employability reveals a misunderstanding of what it entails at the fundamental level. That it is denigrated because of the commercialisation of education reveals a society’s caustic hatred of its own humanity.
My degree, like many degrees whether humanities or STEM, did not plop a job in my lap. I never expected or particularly wanted it to. It did give me a mind to create my own opportunities, to analyse and decode the messaging around me, to make the connections that bring clarity to difficult social or interpersonal relationships, to communicate with wit, with empathy, with confidence and with clarity, and most importantly for me, to navigate the world around me — one populated by other humans — with more humanity. These things transcend a singular job role, career, or life stage.
Barrenness of mind is the death of civilisation; I like the side I chose. I thank God for an education that transformed my thinking and increased my wonder at the things I already loved, neither of which is time or context bound. Most importantly, I thank God for the fact that a person’s life does not begin or end with a certificate in one subject, nor is how they use that certificate more meaningful in the formation of their personhood than how they think, what they enjoy, what they believe about the world, and how they live among others.
