What you’ll hear every time when you say you’re an English Lit major is ‘so all you do is read books?’. It’s so much more in-depth than that, there’s a lot of work involved, and the payoff is great. Here’s a list of things only English Lit majors will truly understand:
You’re going to be assigned a lot of books. And I mean, a lot. You’ll never be able to read them all, even if you want to. Sure, you may feel a little lost in tutorials and lectures if they’re talking about a specific book, but Wikipedia is your best friend and will give you the main outline of the plot. Just make sure to take a lot of notes during the lectures!
There are some gorgeous books out there: hardcovered, embossed, 2nd or 3rd editions. You want to buy them because they look so pretty and they’re part of your course but trying to find a way to reference them in your essay is a lot harder when there’s a lack of specification in the front pages.
Penguin Classics are great because of their introductions. They’re incredibly detailed and they are a great inspiration for essay writing. Reading the book is important, obviously, but the introduction to a book makes interpretation of the text a lot easier.
The classic example of this is ‘the curtains are red’. Doesn’t mean anything, right? But as you’re reading different books and trying to find good quotes to use in your essays, things that don’t seem to mean much are suddenly super important.
Being assigned essay questions can lead you to taking two pieces of work and finding a way to compare and contrast them, even if it’s something as obscure as a poem Gothic and Victorian and a whole novel set in the modern day and realistic. There’s always a way to find a connection.
There’s no light way of putting it, trying to find secondary sources to back up your argument is so annoying. You think you have the perfect essay all planned out and then you need to find something to support it. So frustrating!
To try and get through this course, there’s going to be modules where you have to plough through books where you really don’t enjoy them; lecturers will constantly make reference to them and make really interesting points and you’ll regret not having read it.
When you’re churning through over eight books in the span of three months, picking up a book that’s not part of the reading list and getting absorbed in it isn’t really an option. When you do get time to read for pleasure, you start to pick out interesting quotes or sentences, and you itch to highlight them. You get conditioned pretty quickly to always be looking for usable essay material!
You thought you escaped Shakespeare when you left high school but nope, you’re going to have to study his plays in university too, going even more in depth. Hope you liked Romeo and Juliet!
What people who have never studied literature before will not understand is that it isn’t just about reading. There are loads of different subjects thrown in here: understanding history, philosophy, and sociology is incredibly important to understanding texts. You have to research not only the context of the work but also the author themselves. You gain a wide range of knowledge and skills from doing this. This is something any English lit major can relate to.
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