Back to high school and college topics for a minute: I wanted to expand on something I mentioned in a previous post. I said that being an English major isn’t the best preparation for a would-be writer, and had a few emails asking me to elaborate.
I was an English major as an undergraduate. I wanted to be a writer, and I thought to myself: well, what better preparation than to study literature? It seems a natural choice for someone who loves to read and loves to write.
The problem? When you’re an English major, you learn how to criticize. I don’t use that in its colloquial sense, which means something like “point out all the flaws and problems.” Literary criticism is a particular way of approaching and analyzing a book.
That sounds vague, but if you do a search on JSTOR or some other repository of academic wisdom, you’ll find that no one agrees on a definition of literary criticism, and when discussions erupt they wind themselves into an unintelligible tangle very quickly and only cut free by announcing that literature and criticism are both social constructs. So, for example, Phillip Smallwood in New Literary History:
Criticism…has whatever meaning users of English acquiesce in when they deploy ‘criticism’ as part of the language. There is no meaning (or definition) separate from the occcasions within the language when the word is used. This removes the imperative to consider what essential attributes criticism might have, or any individual might arbitrarily choose, and instead focuses attention on the relationship between the word and its context of use.
It’s never a good sign when scholars of a particular field can’t define the field itself.
I should qualify that statement. Smallwood’s paragraph encapsulates my biggest objection to formal literary criticism: it has become parasitic and self-focused; it spends more time examining itself than examining literature; it only exists by feeding on the creativity of others.
That’s a writer’s perspective. There are many people who are naturally gifted in literary criticism, but they aren’t creative writers. In my opinion, the impulse to create and the impulse to do formal literary criticism almost never co-exist within the same psyche.
When you study English literature–which I’ve done on both the undergraduate and graduate level–you don’t learn how stories work, how to produce clear effective prose, or how to write book reviews. You submerge yourself in self-referential arguments about what literature is and how it can exist within a certain cultural context.
In my experience, that sort of study is death to the creative impulse. I can do it, but it drives out the urge to write.
This is not an observation that’s unique to me. Just to cite a couple of examples that pop immediately to mind: James Michener (and whatever you think of his work, he was a storyteller) says exactly the same thing in The Novel. Harriet Vane, Dorothy Sayers’s heroine, remarks to a friend, “Have you ever noticed that writers don’t ever study English literature? They all study history or philosophy or something else.” (That’s not a direct quote–I think it’s in Gaudy Night but I can’t put my hands on the book at the moment.)
But probably the most succinct argument against literary criticism for the would-be novelist comes from the front page of North Carolina State’s English department web page. The page is trying to promote the English major, of course, so it provides quotes from satisfied English-major customers. And here’s what it says.
Engage in an education that will excite your senses to many possibilities in the Department of English at North Carolina State University.
“As an English major at NC State, I learned to engage fully the object–to circle it and consider it from all angles, from all levels, with all my senses excited to the possibilities.”
Pam Gabriel (’95 English major and researcher/writer)
Er, yep. That’s what you learn to do, all right.
Would-be creative writers can always major in creative writing, of course, and that major is often located in the English department. I’m not sure I can speak to the wisdom of that. I have never taken a writing course in my entire life; I’m not quite sure how that happened. I teach writing, and I think that my classes help my students, but I have no personal experience with the benefits of a creative writing major.
I wish I’d majored in history, actually: a field that would have given me something to write about. But there are a score of other majors that can serve the same purpose–populating the young writer’s mind with characters, ideas, insights, places, events. American studies, art history, classics, music, theology, theatre, psychology, physics….
That’s not an exhaustive list, of course. But it doesn’t contain “English.”
An interesting pair of writers to consider in this light: Ted Hughes, former poet laureate of England, and his wife Sylvia Plath. Plath had a background in English lit/crit and struggled for years to free herself of its rigidity. Ted Hughes spent most of his early years shooting on the Yorkshire moors and then studied anthropology and myth at Cambridge. They’re both truly great writers; but I find it interesting that Plath broke away most completely and violently from convention because she had been so immersed in criticism to begin with.
Oh, and both hated teaching literature courses because it sapped their creative energies…
This is a really interesting observation. I was an art history major. I have always felt that the main benefit of that major was learning to think and write. (The thinking was definitely the critical analysis that you’re panning, but as I understand it, your point is mainly that critical analysis doesn’t help with creative writing.)
Additionally, I found the upper division papers much easier to write, because, like you said, there was something to write *about.* By then, we were reading primary and secondary sources on our own, then picking and defending a position, regardless of what the teacher thought was the “right answer.” Amazing how having something to say makes it easier to write.
Great observation! I would venture to say that even a degree in journalism is stifling for the creative writer. (Yes, I’m one of those major-hoppers, until I finally landed with a degree in public relations.) Journalism classes taught me to get to the point. Write tight. It took me years to get back into allowing ideas to flow freely onto the page without confining myself to the 5 W’s and the H. If I could do it all again, I’d probably pick psychology or sociology–anything that sheds light on people and behavior.
I completely agree. I have my MA in English and people assume I have a great understanding of grammar and writing as a result. While I do hope I’m good at those things, it’s not because of my MA. I never took a class that even slightly focused on grammar. As you noted, criticism skills were the focal point, not writing or even how to read more effectively. We just learned how to write confusing papers about the Marxist perspectives of ______.
I did take a creative writing course as an undergrad though, and loved it! It was just one course so I can’t speak to majoring in it, but my professor taught us a ton of creative exercises to get story ideas and get started, we studied various poetic forms and how they influence writing, and we wrote short stories. We had small groups to critique each others writing, and the professor taught us how to do that effectively.
That’s the only actual writing class I took, and I ended up with a job that has a heavy emphasis on writing and editing. But, I think my marketing and PR classes helped improve my writing greatly – they helped me know how to think about what my audience wants to hear.
I have a degree in English and I’d add that a glance through the reading lists also points out how little reading of really well crafted writing you get through. While I do pretty well on those lists of 100 great books compared to most people, there are still hundreds of tightly written, engaging books that I didn’t get around to reading. And I shudder at the memory of some of the tripe that I read in my contemporary and modern literature courses.
I would also argue for getting out and living, writing about it as you go. I can’t think of many books written by literary critics that I want to curl up with on a snowy evening or that I reread because the characters are so memorable. But when you look at the histories of some of our great writers, you find men and women who had lived a whole life outside of academics. Just to take a couple current examples, Michael Crighton – doctor, John Grishom – lawyer, even Tom Clancy – insurance salesman (who wrote and wrote and wrote).
Having a wanna-be writer in the house leads me to this: how *did*you learn to write? If English departments aren’t teaching it to their majors, how does a writer learn the craft? Does a [successfully-marketed] writer develop the skill intuitively? Through writing seminars? Through imitation? Or writing coaches? (That actually sounds intriguing.) I’d love to see you follow this blog entry with another on how a budding writer can develop a prose and style that will sell books. :o)
Thanks so much!
Lisa, whose ds15 is at a writing seminar headlined by Joyce Carol Oates as I type.
Read chapter three of http://thetalentcode.com/ . Truly! If I were in care of a young writer-to-be (the younger the better) I would take the story of the Brontës presented here to heart.
Not for nothin’, but: Dorothy Sayers herself studied medieval literature.
I have a MA in comparative literature (University of Southern Denmark), and while there was no training in writing (except for all our essays), we sure did get acquainted with some very good writing. Back when I started, I wanted to be a writer, and I still do (or am, depending on the definition). I don’t think my knowing good from bad writing is any drawback. I earn a living as a literary translator, and I would never have been as good a translator as I am without the knowledge of genre, languagetheory etc. and the analytical tools that are now second nature to me.
By the way: I’ll start teaching my ten year old, dyslexic son at home from mid april. I really look forward to tapping into the collective wisdom and experience on this site. Thank you for running it. I already bought your book, The Well-Trained Mind and hope to use your methods and suggestions.
I’m another English major who never took a creative writing class and would choose a different path if I had it to do over again.
Your comments on the critical focus of the English major are in sync with Ken Robinson’s thoughts in his 2001 book Out of Our Minds: Learning to be Creative. A trend toward academicism in modern education has led to different teaching approaches for different subjects. “Important” subjects like science are taught differently (in method and emphasis) than less important subjects like art. This becomes obvious in the college setting where science students do science, but literature and art students write about literature and art.
Take a moment to consider how and why you teach math, science, English and art. While I enjoy studying the lives of mathematicians and scientists with my children I would never consider that they had adequately studied math if I dropped Saxon and just used Mathematicians are People, Too. This realization has caused me to rethink how I study art with my children. Museum visits and studying specific artists or works is not sufficient for an understanding of art. They need to do art (even if it makes a real mess.)
Maybe we need some more time set aside for writing poetry and a little less time for analyzing poetry. You may get through less material but end up with a happier, more creative child and later a more fulfilled adult. If nothing else, maybe trying to write a poem or paint a picture or compose a song will give them greater appreciation for the work and talent that went into the literature, art and music of others.
Don’t get fooled into believing that hands-on time in the arts is just something extra, nice if you have the time, or okay for younger kids but unnecessary for the serious student. Do you really believe that it takes more intelligence to write about a novel than to write a novel? Which is the greater accomplishment a research paper on Mozart or an original sonatina? Will your child get more out of writing an essay on The Crucible or taking a part in the play? I suggest that we know the answers to those questions, but often forget to let the answers to those questions inform our educational choices.
Very well said, Deb Elieson!! I guess I need to find all of my art smocks
I feel like the entire media industry is full of people who *love* to write and certainly know how to do so.
But they have a glaring deficit of real world knowledge. So their skills are useless and *insights* groundless.
Winston Churchill, one of the most well-spoken and well-written men of the 20th century,….he flunked English, right?
That’s all I need to know about the importance of college majors…
CaptiousNut – Oh yes, Winston Churchill even got a Nobel Prize in literature.
I’d like to add that I was a history major and my name was given to a US senator’s office when they contacted the department for grads. The office asked the history dept for names because they typically can write. Anecdotal, but still it makes me feel good. I could’ve been somebody. :) Sadly, I was 6 months pregnant at the time and the prospect of 80 hour work weeks didn’t appeal to me.
Pam
aka newlifemom
As a homeschooling mom who is also a writer (with an MFA in theatre), I agree that learning to write is not something I was taught in college (I dropped out) or other classes. Master classes in writing don’t even presume to teach writing — they only respond to writing, and each person responds from their own aesthetic. I do remember many workshops where in-class writing was done (inspiration or none), and the value in that was astronomical. Writers write. Once a wanna-be writer gets over the idea that writing is like being struck by lightning a lot can get done. Then a good “teacher” or mentor or coach responds to what works well in that writing and provides feedback, which I believe should be nurturing (think: feed back). Then one can also approach writing the way artists approach art — can it be written with a different pov, larger, smaller, and from many other aesthetics? This will teach the writer how to use the many tools available that shape language and create meaning.
This post puts into words something I’ve felt for over a decade–thank you! I think you’re spot on in saying that future writers should not necessarily major in English. I wanted to be a writer (poet) and opted not to study English in college, and then wound up feeling sort of vaguely guilty about it. I just hated literary criticism. Loved to read, read voraciously–but lit crit? No thank you. So I majored in philosophy, which was marginally better, but at least I wasn’t deconstructing the things I loved the most: novels, poems. In retrospect, I too would have chosen more history or perhaps art history. Not majoring in English didn’t hurt me, either: in my MFA program in creative writing I had a 4.0 and produced a pretty respectable thesis (creative) in spite of the fact that I’d only taken 2 ‘literature’ courses in college (the rest were creative writing courses–some were useful, some were not). I don’t think the lack of English major ever hurt me at all, and I’m still writing and loving it, but it did sort of make me feel guilty, like maybe I should have studied it even though I disliked the critical courses.
But I agree that history is one of the better courses of study for a would-be writer. And lo, I wish I’d taken more theology courses as well, particularly now when I’m working on a collection of poems that could use that foundation! It would have been easier to lay the foundation as a carefree college girl rather than as a mother of a toddler–but I’m plugging along.
Susan et al,
Thanks for the excellent thoughts on the subject. As a homeschooled student now in her mid-thirties, I’ve been trying to “get to college” for several years (long story about why I never went, which is unrelated and I will skip here) and I always thought, I should get a BA in English, right? (I’m a writer/editor/social media strategist to pay the bills.)
But I’m currently in an MFA preparatory writing workshop and well, I’m falling behind in my creativity because of the pressure to critique (I’m so good critiquing, it’s not funny). I’ve had to pull back from the class just a bit to encourage my creativity and that shocked me a bit.
I’m off to research what I could do with a history degree if I decided later to actually enroll in a future MFA program. I’m grateful for all the thoughts presented here.
Thank you!
I have a degree in English and Creative Writing from a VA women’s college, and can say that those are two completely different subjects. Yes, both require vast amounts of reading and writing, and both require an amount of criticism, but they are not the study of the same subject. In the creative writing half of my major I read works by creative writers as well as participated in workshops, both fiction and nonfiction. (Our school also had a poet-in-residence and several classes on the subject, but I’m no poet.) I learned how to write better with the instruction of my professors as well as my peers; I learned what worked and what didn’t. I never would have gotten those skills (however limited they may be) from English literature classes.
I also found that my English professors assumed we already had grammar skills in place; those were never included in any of our lessons, though my roommate did have the opportunity to attend some remedial reading/writing courses because she wasn’t strong in that area. I chose to study Latin to help improve my vocabulary base and understanding, and minored in psychology so as to gain a better understanding of the workings of the human mind. My scientist-cousin always poked fun at my liberal arts education, but I found that the subjects I studied most were not mutually exclusive of each other.
Thanks for this post! I agree that literary criticism is often dry or needlessly obscure. Much of it is parasitic, posturing, soulless. Increasingly, scholars are having to produce criticism because of professional pressures arising from their institutions, rather than intellectual pressures emerging from their reading. That said, there have been — and continue to be — works of literary criticism that are profoundly creative in their own way. For instance, Stanley Fish’s argument about *Paradise Lost* in his book, *Surprised by Sin*, is not only elegant, but also imaginative: whenever we find Satan attractive in Milton’s poem, we are justifying the ways of God to man by revealing the extent of our own fallenness. That controversial off-shoot of literary criticism, literary theory, also contains several examples of bracingly creative works that interweave arguments about life, meaning, and existence with reflections on literature. Furthermore, while it might be true that criticism “only exists by feeding on the creativity of others,” the same could be said of most literature. (I think it was T.S. Eliot who quipped about the difference between borrowing and stealing in poetry.) On the flip side, there is a lot of so-called “creative writing” that is as parasitic and self-serving as the worst piece of criticism — a certain series involving shiny vampires comes to mind. So, I’m not sure that learning criticism is the problem: in a manner similar to those school subjects listed at the end of the post, I believe that good criticism can fire the mind and stoke the heart. (Look at the many great critics who are also great writers: C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien, Charles Williams, David Lodge, A.S. Byatt).
Maybe the problem — and I do agree that this problem is peculiar to English — is that, unlike those other subjects, English majors study the process of creativity itself. Thus there is a tendency (overt in many cases) to seek out an objective vantage point — to become pseudo-”scientific,” even — in our analyses. The English student’s self-conscious refusal to orient herself creatively to the literature she is studying — and this refusal is not only self-conscious, but often tacitly encouraged at the level of the discipline — is unique to the university. In any other discipline, the question of creativity might not even come up, but in English that’s pretty much what we talk about. And since we talk so much *about* it, it sometimes seems that we are unable to talk *with* it.