Welcome

Why study English?
Don’t – just speak it. But do study those texts, written in English, that fascinate and obsess you, even though they’re “just” texts. After all, everybody who wants to learn has to read, and every department in this university will load you down with texts. Most of these, however, are explicitly a means to an end: designing software, or understanding the categorical imperative, or putting together a business plan, or whatever. Our texts – which we call literary – seem like ends in themselves. Everybody learns by reading; but in English, we try to learn what reading is.

It turns out to be a lot. In English, we study the cultural history of the English-speaking (and wider) world, from its twenty-first-century manifestations, back to its medieval and classical origins.  We uncover the hidden structures of narrative, style, writing and rhetoric, gaining insights into how texts attain their powerful and instructive effects. We investigate the interactions between literature and other advanced social categories: politics, economy, sexuality, etc. All the while, we undergo a rigorous training in the cognitive skill called judgment: recognizing if a text is any good, a character a certain type, an argument or a line beautiful or bogus. Philosophers teach us that judgment can’t be taught; but as a kind of practical knowledge, it can indeed be practiced. Literary and rhetorical analysis, precisely because it isn’t directed toward any specific purpose, offers a training in interpretation and understanding that is applicable to all purposes.

And the resulting degree – what can you do with that? A lot more than the backstroke. You may become a teacher. You may become a writer. Or a lawyer, or a filmmaker, or entertainer, or (m)ad person, or journalist, or politician, or activist, or businessperson, or academic. A minor, major, or honours degree in English is an excellent basis for any of these. But whatever you do after leaving the university, by studying English while you are here, you will be learning, no holds barred. An English degree will identify you as somebody who has taken the time to struggle with extremely difficult texts; to think critically, creatively, and independently in response to these; and to put your resulting ideas and arguments into clear and persuasive prose. Employers of all kinds want graduates like that. In the SFU English department, we try to make them.

So: if, as an SFU undergraduate, you want to think of yourself as a student of culture; if you wonder (among other things) how the modern world relates to the old, why Shakespeare wrote none of his own plots, or what global English sounds like in its local accents; above all, if you want to understand why you care so much about certain poems and novels and plays and films, and why they make you want to speak and write in response; then you study English, because you have to.

Please feel free to email me (jfleming@sfu.ca) and/or to drop by my office (AQ 6149) for further discussion of our undergraduate programs.

Sincerely,

J.D. Fleming
Undergraduate Chair