SHAKESPEARE CALLING...

A humble attempt to explain why a course in English Literature provides the perfect grounding for someone planning to embark on a career in mass communication.

‘English Literature?’ shrieked my mother when she heard her beloved daughter’s choice of a major in her third year of graduation. That is the response most parents would give to a choice of a subject long considered to be an obsolete and non lucrative. English Literature is a subject reserved for girls whose immediate goal after graduation is to hunt for potential bridegrooms and for those forlorn bookworms who pride themselves on burying their noses into voluminous reference books for hours on end.

And there are several reasons for this irreverent and censorious attitude towards the subject. The general impression is that it can never lead to a profitable career and that is only suited for people who desire to pursue a career as a teacher or professor. Spending hours in the dim, gloomy and soporific confines of a library, breaking one’s head over ten critics' analysis of T. S. Eliot is definitely not a very enticing prospect. So why take it on? There is also the impression that to be a lit student one must have a profoundly rich understanding of classic literature, which can only be developed over a length of time spent reading a vast plethora of books. However, the truth beats all these misconceptions.

English literature does not hold any lesser prospects of a bright future than any other faculty in the Arts stream, the most popular of which seems to have become those related to mass media... In fact, a fresher majoring in English should have one basic qualification -an open, inquisitive mind and an active imagination. Only then can he/she feel the joy of capturing the gentle nuances, the analogies and comparisons, the ambivalence and subversions of what he/she reads. This also requires some amount of perseverance and patience. But once equipped with these basic tools, one can reap rich dividends with a so-called redundant subject like English. For example, a different perspective of looking at the world around us is something that all professors of English will agree upon as one consequence of the course. It initiates us into the exploration of the inner recesses of our mind, teasing our understanding of the language and different linguistic styles and finally enriches us through our experience with fresh new ideas.
It always helps to enhance theory with practice, say the greatest thinkers and this when applied to a subject like Literature can take the form of presentations, debates, discussions and projects that take one beyond the syllabus. This means that besides the tried and tested topics dealt with in the course, one can freely delve into unexplored vistas of mythological, children, comic, translated and chick literature. The regular four papers of the course are now extended to include two applied subjects. E.g. Paper VI i.e. Art of Writing/ Translation/ Popular Culture and Paper IX i.e. Drama and Theatre/ Feminist Writing and Criticism/ Post-Colonial Perspective on Texts/Film and Literature.

Such applied papers only help to embellish a largely theoretical and reasonably heavy course with lighter and more practical accoutrements that will help students crack the difficulties of post-graduate courses in journalism, advertising, television production, films etc.
Through the course, one immerses oneself in the knowledge of the great classics of Dickens and Bronte, one soaks in the stylized language of Wordsworth and Yeats and one elaborates on the allegorical importance of Tolkien’s trilogy ‘The Lord of the Rings’. And emerges triumphant in the art of seeing, understanding and using a language to its optimum level...