Over the past four years, I have alternated between feelings of repulsion and uncertain excitement when thinking about graduate school. After attending the department of English Symposium – an event where English professors present the papers they have been working on – I experienced these feelings side by side and learned that conflicting feelings, if they had a colour, would be the baffling tint of ashy water.
I’ve also learned that thinking about graduate school – in the humanities, no less – makes you want to insert poetic flourishes wherever possible. Maybe that’s evidence that I love studying English, and that I shouldn’t stop. Or maybe it’s evidence that I should stop now.
Like many, I pursued an undergraduate degree in the humanities because the discipline allows students to study existence broadly. Humanities education can’t provide answers to my questions about death, god, or love, but it has equipped me with the skills needed to approach such complex, cloudy issues.
For example, my English degree has exposed me to individuals who struggled with similar existential concerns. As J. D. Salinger wrote, “Many men have been just as troubled morally and spiritually as you are right now. Happily, some of them kept records of their troubles. You’ll learn from them – if you want to. Just as some day, if you have something to offer, someone will learn something from you. It’s a beautiful reciprocal arrangement. It’s history. It’s poetry.”
Salinger’s words suggest an ambition that I believe all of us harbour: a desire to record our troubles and share them. Academia, of course, approaches “our troubles” differently than Salinger’s modus operandi – fiction – but it still provides an opportunity to engage in questions about the meaning of existence, with the hope that some answers may be found.
But I have idealized the humanities too much in my description. Many suspect that the discipline has become obsolete, that the humanities have devolved into a self-involved community of intellectuals who like to pat themselves on the back – and sometimes, in rare moments, deign to pat the backs of others.
Internationally renowned linguist Steven Pinker argues that the decline of university humanities programs is linked to the “denial of human nature” that began in the early 1900s. He describes how modern art shunned an appeal to the human senses because such art was said to be “kitsch” or “gaudy” and instead deliberately focussed attention on the ugly and the unpleasant to shake us out of our apparent intellectual complacency.
Pinker goes on to argue that humanities programs have also forgotten the human need, desire, and love of beauty. He cites literary scholar Judith Butler as an example of an academic who has ignored the importance of aesthetics in her critical writing, and instead writes sentences that disgust, repulse, and give students headaches. In 1998, the scholarly journal Philosophy and Literature even awarded Butler first prize in the “Bad Writing Contest.”
The humanities have betrayed their original purpose. The discipline is supposed to reach out to us so that we can begin to understand who we are, where we have come from, and where we are going. No other discipline focusses solely on reflection and evaluation of our lives and of the beauty around us. For such a discipline to become inaccessible, and to alienate most of the population, appears counterintuitive to its purpose – and tragic for those of us who can no longer benefit from it.
In truth, though, it would be inaccurate to declare all humanities education a failure. Clearly, I am still thankful for the opportunity it gave me to think about the world. And I was surprised when, in the Symposium, I realized that I understood and was interested in the papers that the professors presented. Here was an intellectual world I could engage in.
But still I am not sure about the humanities. And I don’t think I am the only one who worries that graduate school will turn out to be as soulless and detached from reality as I suspect it might be.
