The
following blog is my address at the English major’s honors convocation
at the University of Tennessee on May 10, 2017. If you had seen them, if
you had taught them, if you knew them, I believe you would agree with
me that English majors will save the world. For the record, all the
English majors answered yes to the first poll question, and in response
to the second, all the devoted parents laughed nervously and only one
raised her hand. This only made me love them more. I got a little
verkempt at the end.
In Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey, the narrator imagines defending her own readers against the charge that they are wasting their time reading novels:
“And what are you reading, Miss?” “Oh! It is only a novel!” replies the young lady, while she lays down her book with affected indifference, or momentary shame. “It is only Cecilia, or Camilla, or Belinda”; or, in short, only some work in which the greatest powers of the mind are displayed, in which the most thorough knowledge of human nature, the happiest delineation of its varieties, the liveliest effusions of wit and humour, are conveyed to the world in the best–chosen language.”
I
teach Jane Austen, and I also work on Restoration and 18th-century
literature, but I have recently spent a little more time doing research
in the 21st century as a way to help me understand what to tell my
fantastic students about what we are all doing here. Specifically, how
and what do English majors do in the world? And the news is good. But
first, let me ask, how many people here have been teased about being an
English major, including having to answer the question “so what are you
going to do? Teach?”* And how many parents here were at least a little
concerned when your student “came out” to you as an English major?**
Yes, yes, it is true, we like big books and we just can’t lie. And yes,
it’s true that we know the difference between their, they’re, and there.
(That’s not as good a joke as Derrida’s infamous “différance” address,
in which he told his French audience that meaning in language comes from
both difference and deferral, which sound exactly the same in French,
but still, I know you get it.) And yes, sometimes we have been
silently correcting your grammar. All joking aside, though, I’m here to
tell you that all those people who were teasing you about being an
English major were wrong. Very wrong. Just a few years out from
graduation, English majors do as well in overall employment stats as
math and computer science majors, and better than business
majors, according to a Georgetown survey of recent college graduates. We
also know that English majors get jobs that can’t be outsourced, jobs
based around human interactions, critical thinking, and communication.
CEOs like Bracken Darrell of Logitech are pleading for more English
majors. Law schools love you all. And the journalism firmament
is full of English major stars: Barbara Walters, Grant Tinker, Bob
Woodward, and Andrea Mitchell, to name a few. And we win, because, Emma
Watson.
So
congratulations! Congratulations for seeing beyond the STEM mania of
our age, which has been with most of you from the cradle.
Congratulations on taking the time to read deeply and broadly, to
cultivate yourselves as writers, and to engage with the astonishing
array of human experience available to us through novels, essays, poems,
blogs, and plays. By spending your B.A. this way, you just made one of
the most economically savvy decisions you could have made in an age when
we have to seek “robot-proof” jobs. You all have the soft skills that
employers want. You’ll start companies we haven’t even thought of yet.
You’ll write the scripts, video games, business plans, web sites, and
novels of the future. And yes, hopefully sooner rather than later, you
will get paid for it!
But
wait, there’s more. You may not have thought about it this way, but by
being an English major, you are also participating in one of the most
urgent, life-giving, and promising projects of our age, something that
goes beyond employment or financial success. I’m calling it the project
of deep literacy. It involves listening carefully, thinking clearly, and
writing with grace and honesty. As my students will tell you, I believe
that English majors are going to save the world. I say it often, unapologetically, and without irony. And with the rest of my time today, I’m going to tell you exactly how English majors are going to save the world. Feel free to tweet the instructions at #utkenglish.
English
majors will save the world because they write beautifully. Writerly
elegance—the capacity to take someone’s breath away with a beautiful
phrase, which Alexander Pope described as the ability to say “what oft
was thought but ne’er so well expressed”—is not about being decorative.
It’s about bringing clarity, truth, and grace to the act of
communication. It’s also about being honest. George Orwell argued in his
1946 essay “Politics and the English Language” that “the great enemy of
clear language is insincerity.” Euphemism, phraseology, and inflated
style, he argues, defend the indefensible by distracting us from matters
of great concern. Orwell believed that thought could corrupt language,
and that language could corrupt thought. In an age of “alternative
facts,” it’s hard to disagree. But the creative and honest use of
language creates the conditions for what Benedict Anderson called an
imagined community, a group of people who share common dreams, who talk
about the future, who communicate. In our age of fracture, when talking
heads shout from their virtual boxes, we know we have a crisis
on our hands. Political scientists may be able to tell us what went
wrong, but it’s up to the poets, the essayists, the screenwriters, and
all of us who care about clear, meaningful communication to give us some
stories we can share, to model meaningful conversations, to check our
facts and then speak the truth in love. Who knows? Maybe some linguist
in this room will find a way to communicate with actual aliens and
change the course of human history; or, maybe the movie Arrival
was a parable about the transformational act of reading and listening
well, the everyday miracle of language that can bring parties from the
brink of war to the path of understanding.
Next,
English majors will save the world because they are cultivating their
capacity for empathy. Every time you read a novel, a poem, an essay, or a
play, you engage with the idea of another consciousness, which serves
as a cognitive spur to the radical idea Eve Sedgwick made her first
axiom: that people are different from one another. Blakey Vermule
recently argued in a book called Why We Care About Literary Characters that fictional characters
are the greatest practical-reasoning schemes ever invented. We use them to sort out basic moral problems or to practice new emotional situations. We use them to cut through masses of ambient cultural information. Our eternally premodern brains have simply not caught up to the speed and complexity of the vast moving world—so we use them in place of statistics as tools to muddle through.
The
different reactions, choices, and feelings to which we become privy as
readers don’t lead us to despair about our differences. Instead, we
learn to celebrate them as what makes the story. That Iago is not
Othello, that Gulliver is not Emma, that Sula is not Beowulf, and that
Plath is not Wordsworth are all wonderful things to realize. And once we
do realize it, we would not level their differences. Instead, we extend
ourselves to meet them, not to strip out their complexities but to
revel in them. And I realize I am breaking that first law of the New
Criticism, treating a fictional character like a real person,
identifying with them, imagining myself to be them. But this unwritten
law, like the Prime Directive on Star Trek, was a rule meant to
be broken. That imaginative identification turns out to be better than
an HR course. It trains us to relate to people, to sort inferences,
reactions, motivations, and choices. It is also the gateway to taking
joy in our shared humanity, joy in the wonder of communication.
Finally, English majors will save the world because they are the masters of time. In the musical Hamilton, characters
repeatedly ask Alexander Hamilton “why do you write like you’re running
out of time?” English majors write like they’re running out of time,
but they read like they own mountains of the stuff. You have
rediscovered slow time in an age of instant gratification because
you read. And by reading, you have cultivated your powers of attention,
your patience, your own interiority. You know how to code-switch; you
are digital natives who think fast, who move between tasks, and who are
quite literally wired differently than people 50 years your senior.
Critic Katherine Hayles argues that you can manage both “hyper and deep
attention” in your reading and cognitive styles. You know how to
concentrate, slow down, and read for details, but you also know how to
meme, recombine, and think about networks of relations. These hard-won
skills mean that you have the chance to live a life in the digital age
that is not consumed by digital distraction. And here, I must confess my
own susceptibility to the imbalance that faces us all, which my
students already know, after watching me screech into my classroom,
especially this semester, while I was also working on the CBT’s The Busy Body, a
1709 comedy by Susanna Centlivre that could have been named for me. I
was often fresh from the email avalanche, or from my own online search
for a video clip to show you, or from skimming a new essay from an
online journal, or conferring on skype with my co-editors, or after
getting a little lost in the digital Jane Austen manuscript archive. I
get it; we live in a world that’s not paced for long 18th-century
novels. But on the days when my digital distraction threatened to
overcome my better angels and that precious, kairotic orientation to
slow time, you all saved me. You did it by reading with me, by parsing
lines of Rochester’s scandalous rage at authority, or by admiring the
cool calculation of John Dryden’s couplets (Dryden who, according to
Samuel Johnson, found the English language brick and left it marble).
You did it by opening Pride and Prejudice to marvel at the
precision of Elizabeth Bennet’s comebacks to Lady Catherine, that
“obstinate, headstrong girl’s” refusal to be intimidated. Together, we
got lost in it, and we watched the literary Davids of the world slay
Goliaths with a few well-aimed words.
Inscribed
on the tombstone of John Keats, the great Romantic poet, is the
sentence: “here lies one whose name was writ in water.” Keats captured
the ephemeral nature of our existence. We do not live forever; we will
pass and be forgotten with the rest; we are mortal. But we also have
words, and, with them, we leave our mark on the world in more ways that
we will ever know; in Keats’s case, those words about the liquid
impermanence of life were written in stone. Perhaps it was a twee,
precious joke, but it worked. The sentence is still there. And the world
knows his name, as it does Alexander Hamilton’s, Virginia Woolf’s,
Ta-Nehisi Coat’s, William Shakespeare’s. Maybe soon, it will know your
name, too. Write your way out.
Again,
congratulations. Congratulations on making your life a powerful
counter-argument to the cynical and demoralizing voices of our age, and
congratulations on finding each other along the way. I am so, so glad to
know that you are heading out there. History has its eyes on you.
