The Humanities Are in Crisis. “Students are abandoning humanities majors, turning to degrees they think will yield far better job prospects. But they’re wrong.” Atlantic article by Benjamin Schmidt, August 23, 2018.
Six Myths About Choosing a College Major. New York Times article by Jeffrey J. Selingo, Nov 3, 2017.
How Lit Majors Become Professors (FAQs). Every once in awhile a student comes to my office to ask me what it entails to become a professor of literature. I started this document to give the basics of an answer as a way of jump-starting the conversation. Later I added answers to other frequently asked questions, and the result was a brief general guide to what Literature majors and others interested in literature ought to know. For some reason this document does a better job of conveying the quixotic nature of graduate study at the present time than my scary speech ever did.
Essential Poems in English to 1900. When I was a boy my father’s friend Owen Corrigan gave me a tiny book called Fifty Best Poems of England which he’d carried in his breast pocket during his service in World War Two. The book was too slender and frail to stop a bullet but it kept him company. By the time I knew him his eyes were going and the print was too small for him to read, so my mother typed out the poems in a little binder and I got the original. It was my first collection of poems and I quickly knew many of them by heart. The choice was wide-ranging and included some haunting anonymous works like the “Lyke Wake Dirge” and “Edward, Edward”; some sentimental favorites like Leigh Hunt’s “Jenny Kissed Me” and Charles Lamb’s “Old, Familiar Faces”; and some of the great songs and poems of the English language–“Full Fathom Five” from The Tempest, “Kubla Khan,” “When I Consider How My Light Is Spent,” “The Tyger,” “Ode to a Nightingale,” and so on. My own Essential Poems in English to 1900 includes the poems whose lines are most firmly lodged in the heads of everyone who loves English poetry and has at least one poem by all the essential poets. For a more complete tuning of the poetic ear it would have to be supplemented, of course, with passages from longer works, especially by Shakespeare, Milton, and Wordsworth.
If you are seriously considering graduate school in English, you must be able to endure the gruesomely funny cartoon “So You Want to Get a PhD in the Humanities.”