My First (and Last) Undergraduate English Class

This past semester I took my first real English class in almost four years, and my first at BYU. (I’m not counting Technical Writing because it was technical by its very name, and not at all about literature.) After bouncing back and forth between the math and engineering buildings for my entire college career, I thought it was time to sneak in a proper English class for my Letters GE requirement. I was intrigued by what my EE 485 (Digital Communication) teacher told our class last winter — that we would “melt” in humanities classes. They were that hard.

Oh, really, I thought. I’d have to try it out.

Turns out, I didn’t “melt.” Engineering and math classes still are harder for me. But it wasn’t a waste of time. I still learned things which were applicable to life in general, which is kind of the point of general education classes.

Here are some of the lessons I learned:

1. Good authors choose their words carefully. I was skeptical the first day when my professor insisted that every alliteration, every stress on each syllable was chosen carefully if the author knew what he or she was doing. But as I’ve read more poems, plays, and novels throughout the semester, I’ve come to see what he was talking about. There is a great deal more planning that goes into good literature than I had anticipated. Coincidences just aren’t this consistent.

Of course, there were times where it seemed like my teacher went overboard, like when a passage described trees which were “blocking breezes.” “‘Blocking breezes.’ Isn’t that just beautiful?” he raved. Personally, I like alliteration just as much as anyone else, but I don’t judge a book based on it. Yet my teacher did. In fact, he said, “That’s why I couldn’t get through Harry Potter. It just didn’t sound pretty.” He said similar things about Twilight, namely, “I read it. I had to finish it. But it was like chewing on this wall here.” And I think he has a point — there’s more to a book, play, or poem than just the story. If story were the only issue, most of us would probably be content watching it than reading it. It’s the words themselves and how they connect together that make something worth reading.

2. There’s more to literature than theme. Ever since seventh grade, I’ve been hardwired to find theme in literature. “This story is about love.” “This story is about family.” “This story is about the futility of wickedness.” “This book is about inasmuch as ye keep the commandments ye shall prosper in the land.” So like many of my classmates, I was ready to find the theme in all the literature we discussed. But on the first day, my teacher basically said that he didn’t care for theme. What? No themes? What was literature without theme?

But now, having read literature without looking for themes, I think I know why my teacher had an issue with them. It’s the same issue I have with picking favorites. Questionnaires with too many “favorite” questions have always been a bit painful, to be honest. What’s your favorite color? What’s your favorite animal? What’s your favorite ice cream flavor? What’s your most embarrassing moment? (Okay, that’s not a favorite, but I still hate that question.) How do any of these really help you know me any better? It’s great that you want to know my favorite candy bar, and I’ll probably be really touched if you give it to me for my birthday, but I think there’s a lot more to me than just my made-up-on-the-spot favorites.

And the same goes with literature. There is a lot more to a good story than its moral. There’s dialogue! Action! Plot development! Character development! The way the words flow together on the page! Must we force every piece of literature to have grand meaning? Can’t we just enjoy it for what it is?

3. Literature is like a mirror.  Over here in the electrical engineering department, we believe in doing research for a reason. We like building new things: bigger telescopes, faster chips, algorithms with lower complexity . . . you get the idea.

And so I think many students and professors in the Clyde Building look at the research done in the “Great and Spacious Building” (the JFSB) with a bit of disdain. Who really cares what Hemingway was thinking? What difference does it make if someone was an existentialist or not? Why write about Shakespeare again????

Having sat through an English class, I can now see why they want to write essays about old stuff. You see, I now think good literature is carefully fashioned as a sort of mirror. There are definitely things the author puts in for everyone to recognize, but somehow there are also elements of a good story or poem that are flexible enough to mean something different to anyone who reads it. For example, I read the short play Sure Thing by David Ives. It was set up sort of like the movie Groundhog Day where the two characters Bill and Betty get chance after chance after chance to go back in time and fix their words so the relationship could progress. Since I had more than my fair share of boy drama before I met Kevin, I really appreciated the play, especially with the way awkward encounters were handled. David Ives had no idea that I would be reading the play and bring my specific experiences along, but he did word things in a way I could relate to them. Thus, I was able to write a paper that pointed out things that my teacher had never noticed before because he hadn’t experienced them the same way. And I think that’s why they keep publishing papers on old literature. There’s still more to say, even if the authors didn’t originally intend for people to read everything they do into the literature that they do.

4. Aristotle is lousy when it comes to science, but he did know what he was talking about when it came to literature. Since about, oh, eighth grade, all I’ve heard about Aristotle was that it was his stupid ideas that kept Europe in the Dark Ages, since he didn’t believe in experimentation, so none of the Europeans believed in experimentation either til the 1600s or so. I saw the video about Galileo dropping the orange and the grape and them hitting the ground at the same time, and how everyone thought he was cheating or something because Aristotle said that running tests introduces bias (which we’re actually finding to be true at the quantum level).

But yeah. I had this notion that Socrates and Plato were smart guys, but Aristotle was just completely crazy. Now I haven’t actually read any of these philosophers (and I call myself an educated person . . . *gasp*), but my professor has read us some Aristotle in class, and I have to admit that Aristotle wasn’t completely crazy. I think he understood the elements of a good story, be it tragedy or comedy, and he had good things to say about “causes” in literature. I don’t think I’ll actually seriously study any of his work, but at least I can forgive him now for thinking that men have more teeth than women (seriously, man, just count them!) or thinking that the earth was at the center of the universe, since he did have good ideas in other areas.

5. English is not entirely subjective, and engineering is not entirely objective. It was kind of funny learning about poetry terms and the technical side of literature because at the same time in my control theory class we were learning about design and tweaking things. Thus, it seemed like my English class had the equations and my engineering class had the delicate, artsy side of things. The point is, for both the humanities and for engineering, there are lots of bad answers, and there’s a wide spectrum of good answers. The trick is knowing what makes things good and implementing it into both your writing and your engineering.

6. This stuff is hard. Not everyone can do Fourier Transforms, prove calculus, or design controllers. But nor can everyone write well and read carefully. Like every other art (music, dance, animation, visual art, etc), there are subtleties and nuances that make it more than just a fill-in-the-blank exercise.

And that’s very hard for me to accept. When I play piano, I like to just throw chords down and assume that they sound good on the first shot. I’m decent at improvisation because of this . . . I can’t afford to fix my mistakes while I’m performing, so I have to know a couple of basics and just go from there. But good music and good writing are carefully planned out and revised. This doesn’t really appeal to me.

In fact, that’s probably one of the reasons I never considered doing an English major. If you had known me when I was younger, you might have never guessed I would end up doing math since I wrote plays, poems, and stories long before I cared about Pythagorean Triples or differences of squares. Yet I have done very little non-academic writing other than journals, letters, blog posts, and Facebook statuses since I came to college. Why is that? It’s not because I was bad at it . . . though to be honest, a lot of stories I wrote were pretty terrible (but no worse than anything else people my age wrote). But I didn’t want to take the time to perfect them. And I didn’t want to spend four years in college trying to perfect something that could never be quite perfect. So I went for math and electrical engineering instead, where answers came more easily, and where “good enough” was preferable to perfect. (Of course, it also helps that those have much better job placement, and I slept better at night feeling like I was developing things which could help starving children in Africa.)

So this class reiterated what I already feared about literature — it’s hard to write. And even when it’s written well, only well-educated people will appreciate its true value. Yet for those who do pursue this route, just know that there’s plenty of respect coming from the Clyde Building.