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Originally Posted by Satan's Onion
Are you allowed to reveal that "expletive known only to English majors" to us mortals, or do we have to guess what it is?
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What about those of us who do English Majors? Can you tell us because I can't think of one that the plebs wouldn't know?
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Originally Posted by Smarty McBarrelpants
My flatmate is an English pHD and his field is 18th century epistolary novels- nothing depressing about lots of them.
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1748. Clarissa, or, the History of a Young Woman published by Samuel Richardson. A young virtuous woman is drugged, raped and kept prisoner by a man attempting to trick her into marrying him. While yes, some of them aren't depressing, the likely hood is that you'll have to have to study the darker ones to get to the more pleasant ones.
Part of an English Major though is really the exploration of literature and trying to figure out why the author wrote what he wrote and what exactly he was trying to say. This is why you'll see so many different fields of literary criticism ranging from historic critics to psychoanalytical criticism. I mean, I'm not familiar with what books you're talking about but if you look at some of the authors and what was happening in their lives, such as (for lack of a better example) Jack Kerouac's
On The Road. It's so closely autobiographical that you can pretty much place the whole book into his life but the names are changed. The whole book isn't that dark, certainly not as much as the books you've mentioned, but it's depressing because the character mentions that he's just lost his father, he's split from his wife and he's recovering from an illness and by the end of the book, nothing has really changed. He's traversed America but nothing really changed, he's not much of a better person because of it, and if you look into the context of the author you see that he's writing this after his father has died, and his separated from his wife and he's recovered from an illness and travelled back and forth across America, so you can see why he's written this novel. Nothing changes in the novel because the writer feels that nothing has changed. And that's how it happens sometimes. You've got a writer who feels pretty depressed and down, but he's a writer and he wants to write, so he writes, but what he's feeling comes out in his writing and you even up with depressed literature.
I mean, Smarty does have a point though. Some genre's are less prone to it, so you could do 18th C epistolary novels and you might have to study some depressing stories like the one mentioned about but it's going to be less prominent in that than it might be in Gothic literature or post-war literature. Do you have the option of choosing your modules each year?