On being an English Major

“What do you do/With a BA in English?/What is my life going to be?”

So begins Avenue Q – an X Rated Sesame Street musical deal which I’m sure if you’re friends with me you’ve heard of.

But I’m not here to talk about musicals or plays or theater. As the title of this post suggests, I’m going to talk about being an English major.

What is it like being an English major? It means that the things you learned in high school with regards to test taking strategies, with regards to memorizing facts, with regards to algebra – all useless. Not necessarily inapplicable, because the facts you learn can be brought into stories you write, but essentially useless with regards to application to your education.

Being an English Major means people look at you and laugh and ask “well what are you going to do with your life then?”, the bitches. Fuck you – don’t judge me for my choice to major in something I love.

So why do I love being an English Major? I came to college planning on being a biology major and going premed and becoming a doctor who cut people open to make them better (still justifiably the best reason to go into medicine – WHO ELSE GETS TO SAY THAT?) What made me switch? The fact that there are no facts. Everything is subjective – everything is open to questioning. No one person is right about anything, and despite all the posturing and the hypothesizing, despite all the technical terms and the scholars who classify things, it all comes down to a matter of opinion.

So why do I hate being an English Major? Because everyone ACTS like there are facts – everyone ACTS like they’re right and you’re wrong. Even in creative writing classes, the professors use “immediate/reflective” instead of “present/past tense” and structuralism and formalism and Russian bluism and Carcinogenic Post-Dadaist Hoy Palloy Suckism. Stop it. Stop classifying shit. Read a book. Accept it as A BOOK. It is fine with me if you find themes and hypothesize what the author intended by this or that. ACCEPT THE FACT THAT IT IS A HYPOTHESIS AND NOT THE BE ALL END ALL OF OPINIONS.

There are no facts in English. The closest you get is grammar and no one very much cares for that anyway unless they’re bored or it’s all they know. There are genres but those can get shady. There are perspectives but those are changing. Brecht discussed the formation of genres as being accomplished by the minor writers doing more daring work, but if no one reads the outermost limit, which will most likely be applicable to another genre as well, then HOW DO WE KNOW THE LIMITS. My point is that I love being an English Major because everything is Unstable and Transformable. Everything can be called into question – nothing is a rock, everything clay.

Except for this guy.