One of the first things that people say to me when they find out that I'm majoring in English Literature is "oh, that sounds like fun." However, this remark is rarely sincere. It's usually said with a strange sort of pity, as though because I'm not majoring in something in the STEM field, my major has been designated as "easy" or "useless." As if linguistic arts and grammatical analysis aren't necessary in today's society even though they definitely are, as anyone who has read a poorly edited article on a major news site can testify.
People often react this way whenever I discuss my homework load; making snide remarks about the fact that my homework often consists of reading. Sure, I might not spend endless amounts of time in a lab or completing complicated proofs, but I do spend hours on end reading, rereading, and analyzing culturally, historically, and politically important texts. I usually have at least one novel to read per week, per class, on top of novel-related homework or intricate research papers.
And the reading isn't always "easy;" authors like Shakespeare, Faulkner, and Tolstoy are hard to digest. Their prose is intricate, or in the case of Faulkner, completely ridiculous, and deciphering the hidden meanings of such texts often ends in more questions than answers. Reading such literature is a process, one that people making these snide remarks often do not understand, and one that is just as important and difficult as completing a complicated math problem.
Just because I actually enjoy reading some of these books or writing some of these papers doesn't lessen the validity of the effort that I go through to successfully complete my classes. No one ridicules an engineering major for their homework and classes being easy simply because the engineering major enjoys them, because for some reason STEM majors are held in a higher regard in today's society. So the same should go for Arts and Humanities classes such as English Literature. People are always going to need engineers, just like they're always going to need people to decipher engineer's tech-talk into something the general populous can read. Or people to write the next Harry Potter. Or people to edit the next Harry Potter.
English Literature as a major is looked down upon because people take it for granted. Everyone learned to read and write in school, so what could possibly be so hard about it right? Wrong. You pick a major in college for a reason: not everyone is good at everything. If we didn't have people that specialized in certain fields the world wouldn't work. Therefore, the Arts are just as important as STEMS, and people in either field aren't really smarter than the other, they're just smart in different ways. A STEM major probably wouldn't be able to complete my grammar homework, just like I probably wouldn't be able to complete their calculus homework. And I definitely wouldn't want to.
