This is the nerdiest article I’ve ever written, if you couldn’t already tell from the title. This semester is truly the messiest so far, though I don’t have much to compare it to. The only thing that makes the long commute and the tons of work worth it is the fact that I’ve stacked English classes on top of each other this semester.
No exaggeration, I’m honestly taking three literature classes currently. Maybe I’m only saying this because my professors haven’t yet begun to drown me in analysis and close readings, but I’m truthfully having a good time.
I’ve known for years that there was always a possibility of going to college and realizing that I despise English, which would cause me to have no interest in going into it. Of course, the possibility is still there of course. The genuine happiness I feel when I’m sitting through three hours of British literature on a Saturday morning makes that possibility almost irrelevant to me, though.
If I’m awake at nine on a weekend, I obviously have somewhere important to be. I don’t know if I could ever call Chaucer’s "Canterbury Tales" important before but somewhere in between discussions of virtue and humanity, college literature classes have gotten me to legitimately enjoy even Shakespeare, an occurrence that I will forever be shocked by.
A lot of this zeal for my lit classes has come from some incredible professors and some actually insightful classmates. Now, that I'm taking classes filled with people who genuinely want to be there (or at least recognize that they are paying to be there), I don’t have to cringe every time someone opens their mouth to speak! High school English classes have taught me that there is, in fact, a wrong way to interpret a work of literature, but thankful that fact isn’t relevant anymore.
Instead, almost every comment made highlights the work through a different lens, whether religious, historical or social. Each lens of analysis enriches the discussion instead of driving it off-point. The professors don’t fish for specific answers and they get just as excited as the students when someone brings up a point that they haven’t considered before. For moments at a time, it feels like we’re not in a classroom anymore, but just in a room full of people that for some strange reason, care about the religious allusions in "Moby Dick." I can’t say why we care, but I can say that I’m glad we do.