English Major Feels

Thinking about a History/English Double major, will I have time?

>>9723801
How should I know? Every university has different programs and requirements.

Major in Classics. It's the one department in humanities that has staved off critical theory for the most part. Plus you'll get a nice foundation in the Greeks and the Romans. Thereafter, reading Shakespeare, Milton, and Pope will be easier and more gratifying as you'll understand more of the language and allusions.

>>9723834
>tfw classics minor
>your university cut ancient greek classes
>you take four years of Latin and bond with your old teacher-grandma
>she teaches you ancient greek in her office for two years
good times.

>>9723834
Classics and English majors are supreme beings

>>9723840
When do I get my special privileges?

>>9723840
What about Great Books majors?

>>9723794
Honesty, beauty, and truth.

But people in the know will hate you for it.

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>mfw critical theory and being made to relate every novel every written to discrimination of minorities is killing my love of literature

>>9723872
The only reason you made this post is because you're hoping for a specific type of response.

>>9723872

I have to imagine that's because of the general hegemony of leftist writers students are made to study. You know what I mean? It's a cultural kind of thing. You'd be a rightist if your curriculum consisted of Evola Stirner and whoever the rightwing equivalent of Marx is.

And that's only for humanities students anyway, all the autistics and spastics in math/engineering are more right leaning anyway

>>9723882
>autistics and spastics in math/engineering are more right leaning anyway
I'm an autistic engineer and literally do not give a fuck about politics. All of my professors and classmates are the same. We are too busy actually caring about our subject matters to worry about banal shit like that.

>>9723872
>English majors
>well-read
It's like the distorted, politically-charged way they read literature makes makes them less intelligent.

>>9723886

That's true; I should've said the ones who are interested in politics

>>9723893

That's a much easier way of saying what I meant.

I graduated as any English major just a year ago and experienced none of this.

>>9723872
Except that the majority of philosophers through the ages hasnt been "progressives"

>>9723794

There's no way this is actually true. This just sounds like a dumb right-wing stereotype, that colleges are nothing but Marxist indoctrination centers. There's just no way it stands up to reality.

>99% of class mates are female

>>9723919
Have you not gone to college/university? I wouldn't believe it either if I wasn't seeing it firsthand.

>every american novel ever written that features 2 male protagonists are definitely gay and represent the author being a closeted faggot

>>9723919
I'm not OP but at my university the philosophy, history, and classics departments were fine but the english department was pretty much exactly as he described.

>>9723996
I'm an English major and I haven't experienced any of this. It obviously varies by university.

>>9723977

I went to college a few years ago, was an English major but also took some Psych and gen ed courses.

I honestly didn't see this. Most of the classes were just very "here's what we're learning, this is what it's about". So if we were reading a poem from the mid 1800s it was just about the guy and what the poem was about. And in the psych courses it wasn't "here's why people are oppressed", we were just learning about things like conditioning, mental health, etc.

There were virtually no politics at all in my courses.

>>9724000
>>9724001
You don't know how good you have it. Being a conservative English major was suffering at my university. Literally could not give an opinion since I would get talked over by other classmates since I am a straight white guy. Kept getting B's and C's on essays and critical interpretations until I stayed on the Left's political line and fed the teacher utter bullshit, then got straight A's since they saw me as reformed. It was basically a joke degree.

>>9723886
Politics is banal?

>>9724032
Hey! That's just like my BFA!

You can always tell when someone isn't an English major when they make these complaints, this shit doesn't happen except for very particular courses devoted specifically to different critical approaches to literature, and even then they are ideologically varied. Just because we aren't all fucking Cleanth Brooks anymore doesn't mean English departments are some fucking leftist propaganda machine. Theory doesn't become a major component of your course work until graduate school anyway.

>>9724170
yeah, it's so obvious these guys have never spent a day in a university classroom, why do they waste their time posting this crap

>>9724170

Stop undermining my "lived experiences", man.

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>>9724170

>doesn't mean English departments are some fucking leftist propaganda machine.

Kek. Yeah, okay. Try to put forward a paper with any readings that would oppose Left-wing/Marxist interpretations and I bet your professor will treat it fairly and impartially.

I'm not even that Right-wing really but you are a legitimately delusional person if you think this shit.

>tfw classmates didn't even read outside of class
Well, at least I don't have to deal with having friends anymore.

>one of the only straight males in your program
>classmates unironically like Rupi Kaur
>classmates hate modernist works because they're too difficult
>classmates start discussion with if they liked the book or not
>being the only person in class who read for the day
>those concerned stares when you argue against feminist readings
>surrounded by not only English majors but sub-human English Ed majors
>"I chose to be an English major because I enjoy reading"

>>9724210

I submitted a paper to a 70 year old feminist professor over The Waiter's Wife by Zadie Smith about how a Hindu-British character had a conservative philosophy (and hated his Muslim co-workers because he thought they were lazy) and was being fetishized by wealthy liberal play directors who kept sexually harassing him and patting themselves on their backs for being progressives.

I'm a liberal, but my paper wasn't exactly liberal, and I got an A.

So, yeah, it's not a good idea to submit "I want to rape and kill all niggers just like my boyfriend President Trump" as your paper but you are really exaggerating things.

>>9724253
Not the other poster, but I still feel like I have to blunt my papers to make them acceptable whenever I take conservative positions. There's only one professor in the department I feel I comfortable not doing that and he's on death's door.

Just go to the library and educate yourself. I don't mean quit university; by all means, follow through and get your degree, just don't buy into their reading lists. Sometimes it feels like the study of literature is a joke and you're on your own against the world, but if you actually dig through the history of literary theory and criticism, you'll find this has only been the case for a very short time. The people they hail as gods (Butler, Spivak) are nothing in the major scheme of things. There's a treasure-trove of useful and sane tools for the analysis of literature out there, they're just gathering dust in the library because today's """professors""" haven't even read them, let alone teach them. Sit your ass down and read some narratology, New Criticism, T. S. Eliot and Edmund Wilson. You'll be fine.

>>9723868
Sick wojuan

>turn up to my first English class (on Milton)
>tutor begins the class by having us sing The Internationale
>asks us what we thought about Paradise Loft
>everyone hated it because it "justifies and perpetuates the patriarchy"
>I object saying that such a reading is reductive of Milton's intent of justifying the ways of god to man, at best
>several girls and one guy run out of the room, crying and calling me a rapist
>the students whose interpretation i disagreed with react angrily at me for mansplaining and hate speech
>the tutor looks me straight in the eye and asks me if i am a cismale
>i tell her i don't know what that is
>she calls security and they hold me down while the tutor dyes my hair green
>i protest but am powerless
>i see the tutor brandishing a large pair of scissors
>please don't cut my hair too, i say
>that's not what i'm going to cut, she says, and i hear a loud crack and feel a horrendous pain in my genitals
>before i black out from the shock and pain i see her hold up my penis to my face and tell me that perhaps now i will accept the reality of the determinate relationship that the base has with the superstructure

well that was some weeks ago and i can happily say that i am no longer an oppressive cismale but a tolerant and progressive gender-fluid transnigger (i can say that because black is my state of mind) who is fully committed to destroying the system of violence that constitutes the western world. i love being an english major.

>>9724329
But where I itty now, O my brothers, is all on my oddy knocky, where you cannot go. Tomorrow is all like sweet flowers and the turning vonny earth and the stars and the old Luna up there and your old droog Anon all on his oddy knocky seeking like a mate. And all that cal. A terrible grahzny vonny world, really, O my brothers. And so farewell from your little droog. And to all others in this story profound shooms of lip-music brrrrr. And they can kiss my sharries. But you, O my brothers, remember sometimes thy little Anon that was. Amen. And all that cal.

>>9723868
I mean, you know there are other schools of lit crit. If you really want to stay apolitical, you can do narrative theory shit. That's pretty popular right now. If you get good at it you can probably get a scholarship for an MA or PhD program at Ohio State, which is one of the better Narrative Theory programs in the nation.

>>9723904
Most undergraduate programs don't really expose their students to critical theory. Some will give their students a small taste of it and usually start with the basics, which were usually structuralists or Marxists, because that's what a lot of later critical schools were responding to. It sounds like he got a basic overview of some lit crit in his undergrad program and took it the wrong way.

>>9724329
So they put you in your place and then you were so infuriated that you came to 4chan and phrased the story in a way that shows them oppressing you?

I get the feeling that not only are you an idiot but you are a pussy as well

>>9724426
Which is deplorable. There should be one literary criticism course in all English departments. The problem is no one wants to teach it and the departments don't think it's important. I'd kill for that class.

>>9724428
>Triggered this hard

English major detected

>>9724428
t. cuck english teacher detected

>>9724491
thinking an english teacher and a literature professor are the same thing, kill youre self fag

>>9724428

>gets so emotional that they end up doing the very same thing that they are trying to criticize
>totally blind to the hypocrisy because hypocrisy ends where my feelings begin

possible womeme posting

>>9723837
>tfw chemical engineering major
>trying to into philosophy and literature
>How do I relate Wittgenstein to Mccabe Thiele Diagrams?
confusing times

>>9724329

anyone who doesn't think this is funny watches sissy porn while shitting into a diaper

>>9724386

this nerd really took the time to write this

>>9723977
I just graduated in May and saw none of this outside the women's center and the multicultural center.

>>9724032
I feel like you're just experiencing extreme confirmation bias of some kind.

>>9724210
My dissertation was literally titled Pinko Scum: Why People Who Follow Marx's Doctrines are Gullible Idiots and I got a 60/50

>>9724240
>those concerned stares when you argue against feminist readings
>Arguing as to why the lense being used is wrong instead of the quality of the photo it took
You should probably not be an English major. Maybe switch to trade school.

>>9724260
Probably because your conservative opinions don't belong in an analytical paper, they're poorly reasoned, or there is no real state for politics in what you're discussing. Stop blaming the system.

i was a real marxist dickhead in school during my history degree and did some materialist interpretation of every situation ever covered in every class, i did ok, but believe it or not most professors, while obviously familiar with marx and marxism, are not really eating it up, when i was in school in the 2000s the whole "human agency" was the real fad, i got told all the time how "economic determinism removed human agency" blah blah blah. although the couple professors i knew who were straight up out of the closet leninists were both in the english department, i chilled with them but never took their class cuz i was a lazy student and it would be awkward to force them to give me a B- or something hanging out

>>9724580
this is the real reason "conservative papers" end up getting shitty grades, putting a bunch of angry foxnews talking points in a paper you whipped up at the last minute is not going to get a good grade

To those providing conservative readings, what works did you base your readings on? Who are the contemporary conservative literary theorists?

>>9723794
>use RateMyProfessor to avoid any nonwhite, nonmale, or jewish professors, where possible
>only about half of them are open marxists, and they at least lean toward intellectual honesty

comfy-mode desu

female english teachers are pure cancer 90% of the time tho.

>>9723794
Man, I'm glad I graduated from university years before idiots like you showed up.

>>9724601
same

>>9724210
>Try to put forward a paper

Oh you mean you don't actually attend higher education? Funny.

>>9723794
There is no single way to 'appreciate literature'. Deconstruction is one of many.

Anyone have the image of the reddit stemfag who complained about his leftist professor giving him a C on a paper due to it's politics, but then he posts the paper and it ends up being complete shit?

I really have to wonder if this is the case for 90% of people who bitch about leftist professors giving them shit grades.

>>9723985
A Seperate Peace was pretty gay though

>>9724645
What is he complaining about anyway when he passed?

>>9724649
A Separate Peace is fantastically faggy and I fucking hated having to read it. It's the one novel from my high school curriculum that I have no desire to revisit. I'd rather reread To Kill A Mockingbird before that shit.

>>9724598
tbqh jewish professors are sometimes brilliant

>>9723886
>politics
>banal shit
m8it's ok to be apolitical but it literally shapes every aspect of your life... but I guess some autistic engineer math is more important

>>9723794
why I left english and joined cog sci desu senpai

>>9723868
if something isn't true, it shouldn't hurt you. especially in the realm of pure thought, ffs

>>9724240
>>"I chose to be an English major because I enjoy reading"
Hate to bite your ankles, m8, but this is the only reason anyone should study English. It's not fuckin scripture.

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>>9724240
>>classmates unironically like Rupi Kaur
i want off this ride.

>>9724032
You're probably just an idiot/lying

It's pretty fun to just take the leftist professor's idea xe tried to shove down your throat in class to an obviously insane extreme and write a paper with that as a thesis.

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My lecturer cut the sides of this poster and talked for 40 minutes about patriarchy in the great Gatsby and Hollywood because the men are in a position of power by being above the helpless female in the poster despite the full poster showing two other females besides them:)))))))

>>9725354
>yfw the professor takes your insane extreme paper seriously and tries to implement it

/pol/ needs to leave

I was close to applying for an MA in Cultural Studies because I'm interested in how technology affects culture. I didn't because I was worried it'd end up in too much discussion about minority issues and gender politics. My interests are more aligned with questions concerning how perception of reality differs when you use the internet every day. In the end I chose Communication Studies.

Reckon I made a good decision?

>>9723837
They are always these brilliant old treasures, latin teachers. =)

>>9723863
Well it depends. Do you learn Greek and Latin?

Also, thinking about enrolling to the St. John's school but I'm afraid it'll shoot off my chances of grad school because it's not really specialized

Marxist criticism is passé now, isn't it? Literally never encountered a professor advocating it.

>>9723794
Majoring in English Lit and Creative Writing.
What the hell kind of uni did you go to if that's the case? I go to one of the most notably liberal unis in England and we're still taught a bilateral approach.

>>9723919
>>9724170

Stereotypes always have a grain of truth in them.

It is going to vary from college to college, but speaking from my experience (and I tried so hard to be magnanimous, receptive, open-minded) my english department at an Australian university was full of hamfisted critical theorists and chardonnay leftists. Only the "I love Shakespeare" types provided some kind of counterweight. I also appreciated the avowed Marxists a lot by the end because they at least could honestly explain their arguments.

One of my professors actually made us watch Anita Sarkeesian videos during the Gamergate controversy.

>>9724671
Because low GPA literally stops you from being hired which makes everything you did useless. If you don't get a job straight out of college it only gets harder from that point forward because there's blatant age discrimination in almost every field where people who are older but lack first hand experience are seen as if they have deep black marks to be avoided.

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>>9724858
>literally shapes every aspect of your life
Retard

>>9723868
>the I bullshitted my way thru critical theory and ended up with a B+ and didn't retain anything I learned

It also helped that I would flirt with professor :3 seriously I don't know why so many gays complain

>>9725356
You're an idiot.

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>>9724240
>"I chose to be an English major because I enjoy reading"
Why else major in English :^)

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>doing English as minor
>Need one more credit to complete
>Sign up for Shakespearean theatre course
>Did drama and Shakespeare in high school so this would be an easy A
>The instructor is a failed actor whom I've seen in various small TV roles
>She announces that we are doing Midsummer Night's Dream at the end of term
>Familiar with the play and begrudgingly accept
>There was a second class that she also taught that
>Our class was logistics and the Lovers
>The second class was set design and the Mechanicals
>Both classes never met throughout the 4 months of rehearsals and planning
>Finally arrive at the day of the first performance and actually see the other class
>Waiting backstage for the Lovers sequence and watching the Mechanicals
>They've completely scrapped Bottoms aspect of the play in favour of a conversation between two Mechanicals about how hard it is to design a play
>One obsese and extremely flamboyant gay guy starts breaking open mason jars and starts lamenting all the while finishing every sentence with "#hashtag"
>A gothlike girl walks into the stage and begins to complain about the government and how they are attempting to keep fairies down
>Fat gay jumps up and starts yelling out #REVOLUTION
>Scene ends
>Transition to Lovers scene
>I was playing Demitrius and because of what happened before I forgot most of my lines

I wish I was making this up. During the after party I asked the instructor what was the point of that and she told me that she wanted it included because it would excite crowd.

Nobody on /lit/ has a degree

>>9724495
Yeah a professor is much deeper in debt

This is why I majored in Biology instead of English. It just doesn't make any sense to major in English in the current academic climate even if you love it.

>>9726180
I also major in biology instead of english.

>>9726180
Majored in neuroscience

shut the fuck up and go back to /pol/

literally the only place where this even remotely happens is in dedicated classes for particular types of criticism.

>OP takes classes about critical race theory to complain about there not being enough white people probably

>>9726408
>Everyone who has an opinion or post outside of my own viewpoint is automatically from /pol/.
Not an argument.

>>9723794
noice miniature, i love them.

>>9727231
Fuck off to reddit

I wouldn't even minded a decent Marxist interpretation of Shakespeare but I was lucky if my lecturers knew how to pronounce interpretation.

>>9726408
I lean left but you're blind if you think English departments aren't very left leaning and not immediately open to other viewpoints. They're certainly not neutral and I think that stifles discussion and independent thinking. Leaning to one side or the other weakens the intellectual experience we all could have in class.

>>9727281
He's just ignorant and hasn't actually set foot in a English department, If only /lit/ knew how bad the teaching was outside of a few select schools; did you know that some departments still teach symbolism even though you're more than likely going to get a automatic fail if you actually write a paper about symbolism in fiction.

>>9723794
Hey, don't blame this shit on Marxism. Neither Marx nor Engels ever wrote about, let alone advocated for, this SJW trash.

>>9724645
OP here. I get As. It's not about getting poor grades, just the poor environment.

What sent me to /pol/ in the first place was being an English major. I probably wouldn't even realize how much racism and sexism there is in this world directed towards white males were it not for taking these liberal arts classes.

/pol/ is correct insofar as it identifies the problems with identity politics, but /pol/ is wrong insofar as it thinks the solution is.. identity politics. Old /pol/ was heaven, new /pol/ has literally fallen for its own extremist rhetoric and become an echo chamber for essentially backwards hicks who don't understand anything anymore.

Good luck finding a job as an English major.

Reading is a hobby you loser, learn a trade, get a good job and read in your free time.

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>>9728024
>learn a trade
>be replaced by automation in a decade
what did zhe mean by this?

>english major
>muh white genocide
can't wait for the wimpy left pseudointellectuals to fight the wimpy right pseudointellectuals

>>9728030
Try again.
>Tool and Die/CNC
>Mechanic
>Plumber
>Electrician
>Millright
> Welder
Skilled Trades, not some dope at a factory.

>>9726127
Posts like these are why I keep coming back to /lit/

>>9728045
>implying there are actually shortages of those and it's not just a ploy to bring in more immigrants

yeah and i bet you think there is a shortage of programmers too

kys, but first fix my toilet, faggot

>>9728056
Probably that shit degree and huge debt clogging that shitter of yours kid

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>>9728045
all of those trades will be done by drones before you retire.

>>9728024
I'm a technical writing intern.

Y'all must have gone to fucking community college or a state school or some shit to actually think OP's story is close to true.

I guess I'm sorry for you; you'll never get to experience the joy of discussing the greatest books ever written with the most perceptive students and best researched professors in the world. Why even try if you aren't going to try hard?

Or are you actually /pol/ and blame your skin color for not getting into a top uni?

>>9728425
My state school gave me a shit ton of money to bring in out of state talent and I didn't want to be saddled with massive debt. I'll bite the bullet for grad school because that actually matters.

>>9725504
>I also appreciated the avowed Marxists a lot by the end because they at least could honestly explain their arguments.
I shifted from liberal to Marxist during my time at an Australian university, that was a part of it.

>>9728079
Speaking as someone who deals with automation, that's going to take a while. Just automating an assembly line takes hundreds of man-hours in CAD/CAM, automating jobs that require more finesse won't be widely doable until we have some pretty fucking strong machine intelligence/learning. This whole sudden obsession with automation after 2017 is more of a PR move to browbeat the working class if anything.

>>9723837
My latin professor was a giant autist.

>be sitting in class, early
>Prof comes in
>the projector screen is down in front of the whiteboard
>he raises it
>on the board there is something written from the class that was previously in this room
>"Joyce, Reading 3" or some shit like that
>he walks over to this, about to wipe it off
>I'm close enough to hear him mumbling to himself
>"hm... must have been a lit class in here...
>thats interesting, considering Joyce is garbage"
>he erases the board, I hold back laughter
>he looks over at me and smirks the goofiest smirk
>the lesson begins

But yeah OP, I feel your plight. Most people in the lower levels of my major didn't even read the assigned material, let alone be well-read to begin with. But once I got into my 400 level classes the real studious people emerged and conversation became useful.

I had a Chaucer class that was absolutely phenomenal. Our final project was a free-for-all, so I took the opportunity to study Medieval Medicine and apply it to Chaucer's various works.

>>9726015
But I just got the shipping notice for my BS in Finance diploma...

>>9726180
>current academic climate
Which is what exactly?

>>9727281
This is entirely false. Prove your claim. I bet you can't.

>>9727281
99/100 discussions about literature in college are apolitical.

>>9728024
>learn a trade
People that actually advocate this are retarded. Yes, let's have a nation that's 100% dumb uneducated labor. That will certainly make us all better off.

>>9728024
>>9729666
I sort of failed to learn a trade, some people aren't good at it and are destined to be eggheads.

>>9723834
>you'll get a nice foundation in the Greeks and the Romans

I mean, this will happen, but if you expect to do any work in classics the focus is really on the formerly marginalized/erased i.e. slaves, foreigners living within the empires/cities and women.

>>9729705
why would you focus on literal plebs?

>>9729705
Patently false

>>9723794
One of the only good threads on /lit/ right now, thanks OP. What happened? Why is every other thread either about vain pictures of books you'll never read or bait posted by leftists?

>>9729658
What more do you people want? There's a clear progressive bais in English departments. Besides your personal political beliefs, departments leaning to one side or the other is bad for discussion. I'm not saying /pol/ rants belong in a classroom but that departments are predisposed to not agree with less progressive viewpoints.
>>9729664
Apolitcal in the sense they're not directly referencing politics. But discussions often lean twords more progressive viewpoints when they're not necessarily more valid than less progressive readings.

>>9728030
>Be white
>Be hunted within a decade

>>9729744
>There's a clear progressive bais in English departments.
According to this thread, there really isn't. It's mostly just a conservative feeling attacked because his shitty papers got bad grades.

>>9729775
I think in this thread there are two types people arguing there is a liberal bias. /pol/ posters who got bad grades in their general English courses for obvious reasons and English majors who recognize their departments aren't entirely unbaised. I'm the latter and I get good grades but I still recognize the hypocrisy.

>>9729775
>According to this thread, there really isn't. It's mostly just a conservative feeling attacked because his shitty papers got bad grades.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A8427-2005Mar28.html
> The most left-leaning departments are English literature, philosophy, political science and religious studies, where at least 80 percent of the faculty say they are liberal and no more than 5 percent call themselves conservative, the study says.

>>9729738
Classics can encompass a lot of work -I had a professor who was a papyrologist using lasers to read charred/unrollable scrolls- but a lot of the literary focus is on those people

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>>9724598

>avoiding Jewish professors
>especially in English Lit

Never gonna fucking make it.

This has seriously not been my experience as an English major at all.

Clearly most if not everyone in the program is left leaning, but unless you're bothered by literally the most innocuous of "leftist" political stances (e.g. some women and minorities actually have interesting things to say in literature) then the instruction is basically apolitical.

The most political thing I experienced was last year during the election where a few comparisons were made between Voltaire/Rousseau and Hillary/Trump, and even then it was just about their tendencies towards populism/elitism. I mean it's clear people didn't like Trump, but that's just due to the nature of the people who are going to be attracted to majoring in English. No one's being fucking indoctrinated, if anything threads like this show how people who are already resistant to leftist ideologies are not gonna be persuaded by their professors.

I studied English because I was depressed and it was easy. I still dropped out eventually

>>9729851

What did you end up doing? I fucking hate writing and really don't want to do it as a career (and fuck retail management), but it seems that I'm out of options.

>>9730021
I work in my uncle's restaurant

>>9729639
Oh fuck lmao that's great

>>9724295
>T. S. Eliot
Historically important, yes, but not very useful for understanding literature when you get down to it. Read Northrop Frye and Wayne Booth instead.

>>9724428
Read that again and tell me whether you seriously think he meant to present this story as actually true.

>>9723794

I've actually met a few English profs who seemed conservative, these days they just tend to become grammar nazis or move into the classics dept.

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>>9724598
>creating a bubble for yourself to live in

>be CS major taking Algorithms class
>relatively easy math class which involves proving the time complexity of algorithms
>teacher is a female visiting professor
>she never teaches
>ever
>talks about how to teach classes in ways that aren't racially or sexually biased
>talks about how much money she gets for game development grants
>talks about the importance of a noncompetitive teaching environment
>talks about how grading is bad
>talks about her old friends in college
>never, ever talks about curriculum
>literally never demonstrated how to solve any problem because she starts talking about irrelevant shit and pedagogy
>assigns a lot of homework, never returns any of it
>assigns weird projects with nebulous specifications that are wholly unrelated to course material, doesn't return any of them
>every previous semester she gave everybody As
>department wonders what the fuck she's doing
>start off semester with department chair sitting in the back of the class to find out what's going on
>she convinces him we learn more when he's not there, he stops sitting in
>she genuinely believes previous semesters got all As because her noncompetitive teaching method made them work together and actually learn the material
>while we learn nothing at all
>people start complaining to the department
>she starts resenting the class and telling us that we're sexually harassing her, says CS departments are by far the most sexist
>most people stop doing homework after three or four weeks
>half of the class stops showing up in the second half of the semester
>she assigns a difficult Natural Language Processing assignment as the last project, almost wholly unrelated to anything in the homework or the course
>half ass it but turn it in
>she emails me three weeks after the semester ends telling me she didn't receive it, tells me I'll get a B+ if I don't turn it in ASAP
>even though I submitted maybe a fourth of the assignments and didn't show up roughly half of the time
>I email her a link to where I submitted it two days later
>she doesn't respond
>I get a B+
By far the worst teacher I've ever had.

I have an MA in English Literature with a focus on postmodern American Literature and post-WW2

>>9724591
It's not that I use conservative readings or theorists. I use a conservative lens or perspective.

>>9725427
absolutely

>>9729775
I am a leftist with a BA in English and my department was leftist as fuck

>>9730226
What are the contemporary conservative perspectives in literary theory?

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ma medieval english literature master race
god spede the plough

>>9730261
does such a thing even exist anymore?

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>>9730204

Thank you for that. I had some shit teachers at uni which I've long resented, but none as shit as that, I feel much better. I wouldn't believe that story if I hadn't encountered similar.

>Hand in group coursework done by myself and 4 others
>Fail the module because the lecturer literally just forgot to assign me marks when marking it.
>When I finally prove this to everyone with evidence he just gives me the average marks of the other students I worked with (who could barely speak English, let alone form an essay)

>Get 88% in a coursework presentation
>Have to resit the year, due to similar bullshit mentioned above
>Reattending the class, he hands out the lecture notes
>This part looks familiar
>It's my fucking coursework

>>9729744
You still haven't proven that there's a bias that you claim exists. Not to mention that if a conversation "leans" to a political position then you're not having an apolitical discussion. It sounds like you're looking for things that aren't there.

>>9729789
What hypocrisy?

>>9729850
>some women and minorities actually have interesting things to say in literature
This is not a political stance at all though but I think the problem here in this thread is that it is being presented as one by those arguing that a bias exists.

>>9723919

My English department had teachers' offices in a little corridor between classrooms, so every day when I was going to my mandatory African American poetry class (for my, shit you not, "multicultural credit") to be hoped at by the semi-literate octaroon professor about how everyone that opposed Obamacare is a racist (again, verbatim, "Republicans oppose Obamacare because they want to 'break' the first African American president" — MANDATORY) I had to see a flier taped to a prof's door depicting a cartoon of Fidel Castro and Karl Marx in rapturous embrace, beards a-tangle, slobbering all over each other, with the headline "HISTORY OF GAY MARXISM". I would then chuckle to myself and wink knowingly at the 5' tall 80 pound girl from my creative writing class who dressed like a homosexual man, insisted she was transgender, and literally screeched autistically if you did not address her as "he".

This was a fairly conservative public university in the south east with a prominent sec handegg team. This was not UCLA. This was also four years ago, and things have only gotten far worse since.

I did not take a single class that covered post-renaissance literature without involving a "Marxist analysis" in some way. I was required to read about a half dozen members of the Frankfurt School across several classes, English, philosophy, and history.

Nothing will confirm your racism more than reading "We Real Cool" two days after you read "The Flea". Kind of like listening to a pair of Australian Aborigines chanting and clacking hollow sticks filled with dried peas as the follow-up act to the magic flute.

Why are people trying to deny the reality of my experience? First I went to Northern Illinois University, now I go to Virginia Tech for my Masters. This was the case in both of them. Obviously the departments are not monolithic in their push of Marxist interpretations, but the majority are obviously leftists, just as the majority of my peers are and have always been leftists. It is because of this that I first started to develop, in reaction, a political ideology of defense against these attacks against me as a white male. I would not have even realized that there exists anti-white and anti-male feeling were it not for participating in these liberal arts programs.

I cannot deny what I feel and what I experience. These things are true. There is significant bias against whites and specifically white males in the liberal arts, which is just a subset of the society as a whole, where clear white male bias exists.

This is a problem and has always plagued.me in my academic life.

If you were an English major and did not encounter this, great! But I see no point in denying what I have experienced. It's dishonest.

>>9730445
The entire department felt like someone had killed a professor the day after the election. I don't like Trump but I'm a grown-up and accepted the results. In one of my English courses I sat in class as the professor and other students went on and on and on about why they hated Trump, what they were scared for, and what they wanted to do to protest. For an hour and a half. We didn't even talk about the reading and instead only focused on Trump. Weeks before, one of my favorite professors, a Canadian citizen, said that if Trump wins he'd look for positions in Canada. Last semester, I wrote in a paper that Southern Gothic literature was primarily a genre developed by white authors focusing on white culture and cultural problems yet black authors have done an amazing job finding their voice through the genre and expanding it. My professor didn't grade by points but said that statement pushed my paper down from A/A- to A-/B+. Like I've said before, I'm a leftist but English departments have issues with bais.

>>9730512
Define anti-white and anti-male. Is it the simple academic analysis of how Europeans and males have had more social mobility and impact on the arts or is it fostering personal self-hatred?

>>9730512
Fucking this. None of the reasonable people in this thread are saying English departments are liberal indoctrination centers where the white man can't even speak in discussion because it would trigger the rest of the class. However, they have a deep internal bais to liberal idealogy which weakens the departments. I like my English department and the professors in it but it's not a neutral environment.

>>9724580
Stop victim blaming. You are clearly a bigot.

>>9730261

Deconstructing the crypto-marxist bias which is built into contemporary literature and literary study by a privileged intellectual class that insulates itself from criticism and competition of ideas through the screening and selection of their own peers, and the disregard of any who fail to cross that bar.

Or, to be nonsarcastic, I study "controversial" literature (mostly pre-1960s, before the new western orthodoxy asserted itself) from two perspectives: number one, the historical, i.e. no author or artist of any kind can be studied, understood, or criticized outside of the context of his life and times, no author or artist can be held to anachronistic, subjective and arbitrary standards of morality and "social responsibility", and no author or artist can be disregarded because his work makes us uncomfortable or, worse, because his physical characteristics are offensive (genitalia, dna haplogroup, etc.); The artist has no responsibility to anyone or anything but the art. "Like" or "dislike" may be subjective but talent and skill are objective.

Number two, the reactionary perspective. The artistic media can be used to experiment with, convey, or demonstrate any political ideas, not only offshoots of the Marxist tree, nor enlightenment "liberalism". Many authors, primarily in the 19th and early 20th centuries, express a love of their cultural traditions, of the notion that some things are inherently better than others and deserve to be acknowledged as such. That it is a kind of madness to force Michaelangelo's David to serve the function of a footstool in the name of egalitarianism. That preservation of what makes us unique is preferable to the boiling of mankind into an indistinguishable, uniform sludge. Some household names belong under this heading, such as Dickens (chronically misinterpreted as a proto-marxist), Lovecraft, Dumas, those English and German romanticists who became nationalists, and most Renaissance, medieval, and classical authors. A great deal of Marxism coats and undercoats most of the contemporary western Orthodox weltanschaaung and must be flensed away in order to study a historical text impartially.

>>9730527

It manifests as a rejection and/or criticism (in the non-academic sense) of works written by "dead white males" based on the fact that they are white, male, and dead, and an "emperor's new clothes"-style placing upon a pedestal of anything written by a non-white and/or non-male author because of that author's physical traits, wholly independent of the works' merits in their own right. There are skillful and meritorious female poets. Sylvia Plath and Maya Angelou are not among their ranks, and none, of which I am aware, deserve a place among the ranks of the masters.

So what is academic bias against white male artists? As I mentioned in a previous post, being compelled to read We Real Cool alongside The Flea and being made to fear the consequences of openly stating that the emperor wears no clothes.

>>9730527
Anti-white and anti-male as in "whites, specifically males, have been historical oppressors of women and minorities, and this means today we should elevate women and minorities to have special victim status, including special programs, special scholarships, special treatment, even special degrees and certificates, simply based on their identity, while you, the white male oppressor, must be lectured about your PERSONAL guilt and wrongdoing. You cannot have pride in your past or your identity as it is hateful."

>>9729705
Just finished my undergrad in Classics, about to start a 100% funded MA program.

Simply put you're wrong. I don't know if you're simply misinformed or lying or blinded by your spooks, but it's clear you have no idea what you're talking about

>>9730615
That's such strawman bullshit and you know it.

I have had three English teachers.

First was left leaning, but was open to arguing and gave grades objectively. Didn't matter what you were presenting, if it was well constructed, researched, and supplied she gave you what you deserved.

Second was also left leaning. Liked him more, as he had the same objective stance towards grading but he also engaged more deeply with us on what we presented. It caught me off guard when he started asking questions related to the material, but outside the bound of what was presented as previously we just stayed on target and moved on in other classes. It was fun to develop a position, give that position, then have meaningful discussion and natural evolution on the topic as opinions and reasoning came.

Finally however, I reached the teacher described in college horror stories. She was overweight, colored in clown like make-up and hair dye, and clearly the kind to knock points off grades if she didn't like what you had to say. I liked her at first, she was very knowledgeable about certain subjects and it was fun discussing some of them, but the amount of line towing ruined it.

We had a packet with predetermined questions for the different types of literary analysis. Every work we all selected questions at random from this list, we could ask none of our own. This lead to people never reading the book asking the questions that were then answered by people who only read the summary.

Another time, we had to analyse music videos. The two randomly chosen for classroom analysis was Viva la Viva and The Ghost of You. One of the fellow classmates was well versed in Roman and classical history and philosophy and I had a personal love for World War Two. She kept trying to push a narrative to each video that the two of us kept rejecting by citing in video and outside materials. Eventually she got fed up and "put us in "Tupperware" preventing us from talking and having the other student stop discussion and only listen to her and answer questions she asked and directed.

Those are just a few small examples of stuff she did. Police brutality essays without the ability to cite statistics (except those published by 3 unaccredited organizations against police brutality), discussion of the Bible and how it destroyed literature, rejection of Greek and Roman philosophers because they are "out of touch" with today's societies about how Western society is garbage and contributed nothing compared to other cultures. Lucky I was able to switch to a different teacher later on.

My overall point is that English is left leaning, but that is not necessarily a bad thing as long as discussion can still happen. When you can't get a word in or have the discussion specifically directed towards a desired end, you have stopped learning and are now being indoctrinated.

>>9730674
I don't know it. This is what I experience, hear, and feel. I can't be wrong about my perceptions.

>>9730674

It absolutely is not, sadly. All of it is implicit, and most explicit, in nearly all curricula that I experienced under the umbrella of "the humanities". And I went out of my way to select professors during enrollment which seemed least likely to aggressively push these assumptions and assertions into their course.

If you don't see it, you likely just take it for granted.

>>9724420
Narrative theory? Can you enlighten me to other lit crit theories? Sounds interesting.

There is no creativity, no individual thought only passion and ideology.

>>9724426
>>9724426
Strange, my school has a required critical methods course, and a higher level course that requires using the critical methods explored in the aforementioned course.

>>9730566
You believe talent and skill are objective? What lead you down the path of trying to judge art with objectivity?

>>9730480
Hey, your post is fine, but don't bang on Australian Aborigine music, they got some pretty good tunes.

>>9726127
zing

Sometimes I envy the American university experience, where everyone think they're some political revolutionary. I would have loved to walk around Evergreen College with a smirk on my face, I would have loved having to walk over a bunch of people just lying down on the street because muh black lives matter and I would have loved to have waken up to a bunch of alt-right posters all over campus.

>>9732852
Europeans are too fatigued with life to really give a fuck. I wish we had some American naivety and playfulness.

>>9723794
>Do a summer session
>I'm not an English major but I decide to take a course on Fantasy and the Epic tradition because it seems piss easy and I need the credits.
>We cover The Iliad; it all focuses on how everyone's a misogynist, swords are extensions of penises, and how Achilles was really a sissy and was also like totally gay for Patroclus (Tee Hee)
>Beowulf; swords are still penises, and it's misogynist because of Grendel's mum
>Eventually get to The Hobbit and the prof only focuses on the lack of women
>The rest of the course is shitty modern stuff
>At one point we covered a short story that was hardly even fantasy because it was about gay bashing

>>9727249
fuck off to reddit

>reading The Day of the Locust in college English class
>refer to the scenes of the child dressed as a grown man and singing sexual songs, crossdressers, and the rape imagery in the paintings as "abnormal sexuality" in an essay
>get a paragraph-length note about it

>>9732915
As someone who enjoys fantasy immensely and has followed it for years that is absolutely disgusting. I hope you gave it abad rating on the recommendations.

>>9734423
you should have gone full-/pol/ and just written "degenerate sexuality"

>>9730480
>confirm your racism
lost me there. the fuck, anon?

>>9723886
Not caring about politics means you are apathetic towards the proles, which makes you right wing by default

>be white male moderate liberal from the suburbs
>class challenges my preconceived notions with radical progressive ideas as a means of kicking my critical thinking into gear
>block it all out, subscribe to sargon of akkad, "maybe racism isn't a bad thing," whine to /lit/ about how the professors are all propagandists
These wishy washy fags are the weakest race. The professors want to know that you're engaging deeply with the text, not that you agree with any line of politics. choosing to put your fingers in your ears instead is why you will always be mediocre. You don't strengthen yourself by disengaging from all possible opposition.

>>9732852
That's just a small amount, most people are more concerned with normal stuff, like dating, parties, or studying.

>>9723868
>go to Masters program in English
>6 weeks later i drop out
Such a fucking waste of time doing the same shit over and over for practically no gain. Humanities really is just adult babysitting because they have to reach so hard to make you think about shit no one cares about. Dracula is a good book but I'm not spending 15 weeks reinterpreting this shit over and over.

>>9723956
>none of them are even remotely attractive

When the fuck am I supposed to use affected or effected?

>>9736063
And if they are attractive they have anxiety/depression/etc and they're too crazy to seriously date.

I've had left leaning professors in English obviously but most are incredibly fair.
As for politics we're a big University in my country and had a bunch of political unrest over a mememan recently and BLM always does some stupid shit but overall I still found a group of friends I can make edgy jokes with so I think this leftism conspiracy in Academia is mostly silly.
English also isn't a "compromised field" or whatever.

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The entire point of school is to get your seal of approval. Why bother spending money for things like english and art when the internet exists? Unless you guys are pushing 40 and attended 20 years ago.

>>9728024
>Major in English
>Apprentice in HVAC on my summers off

Get on my level, pleb.
I'm actually really shitty at the trade, respect to anyone who can somehow manage through this because it's a nightmare for me

>>9736185
You just contradicted yourself, smart ass.

>>9736074
effect is noun and u can remember because 'the' ends with e and 'effect' starts with e, 'the effect'

>>9724576
Yeah, but come on dude. It feels like every class that can possibly involve the dildo is turned into an ideology factory.

>>9728024
>be a brainless retard!!!

made me think