Three years on...

It's almost a week since I finished my final year at univeristy, and I've taken the past week (sort of) to reflect upon everything that I have learnt from my English Literature degree...

Jokes! It's taken me, like, ten minutes to summarise the "skills" and "lessons" of the last three years. Here is a list of my top 5.

1. As long as you can throw a quote or two at an argument, you can say anything about what you think a text means.

For example: A horse stood alone in a field on a winter's night.

This is how an English Literature student might go about analysing this sentence:

Interpretation: The contrast in the juxtaposition between the single, lonely horse, and the immense scope of the field, draws attention to the way in which these polarising images form a powerful image of loneliness inhabiting a vast space. The namelessness of the horse demonstrates how identity is removed from the control of the horse, and given to the narrative voice. Furthermore, this lack of identity accentuates the solitude and isolation of the horse from a collective or group; instead, the horse exists within a landscape, barren from other forms of life. Such a bleak landscape is further emphasised by the "winter's night", which connotes a seasonal darkness and bleakness. Such relationships between the individual and weather, or landscape, is considered by Dickens.

Or something like that at least! Give me a break, I only had five minutes to think of something! Thanks to an extensive and exhaustive three years, I can now analyse any sentence to the point of death. (Figuratively, of course.) Throw in a couple of critics, and you'll get yourself a solid 2:1.

2. You can blag your way in any seminar as long as you can apply the aforementioned skills. (See point 1.) Also, if you happen to know anything about Feminism, Marxism, or any kind of literary theory, just apply it to your spontaneous reading of the text. It makes you sound clever, and most importantly, it makes you sound like you've read the book.

3. Whilst on the subject of seminars, I've learnt that you can make a totally irrelevant point, and your seminar leader will back you up by deciphering your incredibly convoluted and bizarre suggestion, and then, magically reassemble your verbal diarrhea into a reasoned and useful argument.
Sometimes, a seminar leader will go that extra mile for you and continually refer to "your point", using it to consolidate other discussions and points raised in the seminar, because "your point" was helpful. I feel like we should clap or salute seminar leaders that do this, because I won't have anyone to do this for me in the future.

4. You can write a well-reasoned, thoughtful, and intelligent essay, and you don't have to have read the whole of the book. Like, you could have just read random chapters or relevant paragraphs.

5. And finally, an English Literature degree has taught me that the author doesn't exist. Oh, and neither does a text. And a text has no beginning. And there's no such thing as reality. So it's quite possible that we don't actually exist. It's pretty lucky that I haven't left uni severely damaged or in need of some serious therapy.

So there we have it! Five key lessons that I will take with me as I start the world of work. Overall it might sound like a wasted three years, but I can't complain really. I had all those seminars, and lectures, and loads of contact hours so it was worth being about £20000. Oh, wait....



P.S. I actually did like my degree, and strangely, I already miss it.