Language, literature, and “What the hell are you going to do with that degree!?”
Written by Kellie Elrick, Arts & Entertainment Editor
Designed by Mia Helfrich, Design Editor
This fall, security guards flooded the campus, the West Coast burned, the library sat empty of books, and thousands of students walked into classrooms to study art and literature and film.
When I was applying to university, I thought I wanted to study oceanography, or marine biology, which morphed into an interest in primatology, then anthropology and archaeology, and eventually into languages and literature. I stumbled across disciplines, taking courses in physics and classics and Japanese poetry, relentlessly confused and at one point registering for a class only to discover that it was in fact being taught in Africa. I eventually landed in McGill’s Liberal Arts major, wracked with doubt and joy.
Anita Parmar, Co-Director of McGill’s innovative education space Building 21, also began university torn between the humanities and sciences, and ended up with a PhD in Theoretical Condensed Matter Physics.
“I distinctly remember in high school thinking, well, artists use art to dive into their understanding of the world. Authors or storytellers write stories. And all those philosophers use philosophy. I chose physics [….] I think there is this fundamental wanting to understand the world,” Parmar said in an interview with The Tribune.
Inversely, Anastassios Anastassiadis, a History and Modern Greek Studies Professor at McGill, studied physics as an undergraduate student at a Liberal Arts college before ending up with a Doctorate in history.
“The important elements in physics are space and time [….] And, as a matter of fact, it’s the same thing for history,” said Anastassiadis in an interview with The Tribune.
The questions I wanted to explore through science—how we understand landscapes and animals, how to change our relationship to the natural world, how we ended up in this ecological crisis—are in many ways the same ones I’m exploring now through the environmental humanities.
Disciplines are often different versions of the same questions, the same sentiment in different clothing.
“I think that I’ve learned so much more about, let’s say, philosophy, from my English degree than when I actually took Philosophy classes. And I’ve learned so much about history that I did not take away from my History classes,” Gaëlle Perron, a U3 Honours English Literature student with a Classics minor, said.
But increasingly, students do not only come to university to understand the world; they come expecting prospects in return. And what’s education for, anyway? To learn hard skills, or how to live? To become a better person, or an employed one?
“From the 1980s onwards, we had this development of the corporate university,” Anastassiadis said. “Now the idea is not that education is a public good that has to be provided, but education is a consumption.”
My friends and family will ask, for instance, why I decided to study literature in Italian, a language that is not my own, and why I decided to write an honours thesis on Natalia Ginzburg, and what within her work could possibly be so important to me. The answer is that I still don’t know—it’s the unknown that propelled me into the humanities in the first place. I read her six-page essay “Winter in the Abruzzi,” and somehow felt that when I looked up from the last page, things around me had changed—I had emerged from the text a different person. I wasn’t sure how it happened. I had to try to understand it.
I’ve heard a few times that humanities graduates make good CEOs, which never resonated with me. I didn’t want to be a CEO; I wanted to read novels. Learning languages does not come naturally to me. But, very simply, they bring me joy, and open up my life.
Pasha Khan, now an Islamic Studies Professor at McGill, initially accepted an offer to study Computer Science as an undergraduate.
“I kind of cried and wept and threw a tantrum, and my parents allowed me to do an English Lit degree. So it was out of love. It was out of desire for literature, for language. But it was never really about the English language as such. During my undergraduate degree, and even before that, I was relearning the languages of my heritage […] I learned to read Urdu. I learned to read Punjabi, both scripts,” Khan said.
I feel fundamentally that the end goal of education should not just be to make enough money that you can buy something to dry your tears with. I’ve encountered numerous times the sense that happiness is impractical; meandering curiosity is a hindrance on the path to employment; learning for joy is a treat for only society’s most privileged. However, it’s also what Ginzburg, a Jewish writer and intellectual who suffered under Italian Fascism, wanted for her children: “Not a desire for success but a desire to be and to know.” Ginzburg knew hardship; she knew pain—the Fascists tortured and killed her first husband—and yet she wanted her children, above all else, to be curious, and to love.
I often feel like the world is—for a lack of a better term—going to shit. But then I stumble across Gaspara Stampa in 16th-century Venice, writing about being heartbroken and hopeful and lost, asking and struggling with the same questions that I have now. When stories reach through time, across land and language, and somehow end up with us, I can’t help but feel that it means something.
“You’ll hear about Orpheus in Hozier’s music [….] Why are we so obsessed with this man that goes back to save his wife, and then looks back at her? Why does that speak to humanity thousands of years after the original myth was written?” Perron said.
My paternal grandmother was supposed to attend St. Olaf College and become a wife, or a Lutheran nun. Instead, she got a scholarship to attend the University of Wisconsin. She studied nursing, then education, and somewhere along the way, she read The Golden Bough. The book changed everything; she quit the Young Republicans’ Society and the Young Lutherans’ Society and joined a theatre group and started skinny dipping and married a Canadian soil physicist and travelled lots.
She’s now 87 years old and has dementia, and there are lots of things we can’t talk about anymore. But books are one of the things that stayed. We can talk about novels she read when she was young and that I’m reading now, and she remembers everything. The humanities stayed with her throughout her whole life. Perhaps the intangible, subtle, wide-ranging nature of its impact is precisely what has allowed it to last.
During an anthropology lecture, my professor sent us outside for a few minutes, asking us to look at the world ethnographically and notice things we hadn’t before.
The next day, walking out of Parc La Fontaine, it really did seem as though I had never laid eyes on these streets before: The trees and brightly coloured doors and balconies seemed completely novel. It was only when I hit Boul. St-Joseph that I realized I had in fact walked the wrong way out of the park, and had not unlocked a new register of perception; everything was actually new, and I felt very, very silly.
The humanities can teach students how to exist in the world, how to be fulfilled, how to be good. Reading has altered, on an essential level, the way I am—but this has its limits.
Fiction is much more difficult to put into practice. Tolstoy’s argument for abstinence in The Kreutzer Sonata had such an effect on one 18-year old reader that he castrated himself, and dedicated his life to farming a small plot of land. When he was 30, he went to visit Tolstoy’s estate, and discovered that the great writer—who asked “How Much Land Does a Man Need?” and concluded six feet (enough space for a grave)—lived on a sprawling estate, and had around a dozen children.
Sophia Tolstaya’s diary from Aug. 31, 1909 recounts the reader’s visit: “He was obviously very hurt, said he wanted to cry, kept repeating, ‘My God, my God! How can this be? What shall I tell them at home?’ and questioned everyone, seeking an explanation of this contradiction.”
Last spring, lectures became punctuated with protests. My classes kept going, as protestors proclaimed through the door that there was a genocide going on in Palestine; that McGill was exploiting its TAs; that there were unmarked Indigenous graves on the grounds of the university’s New Vic Project. It was hard not to feel like the real world—where the things that mattered were happening—was somewhere out there.
I didn’t know how to reconcile all the images around me, scrolling past shiny red shoes and libraries in Europe and wildfires and floods and cats on windowsills and my friends travelling and drinking and dancing and hippopotamuses and protests and rubble.
“So maybe I’m studying theories of injustice, but can I actually ever apply any of this to solve a problem of injustice in the real world?” wondered Elisia Wong, a U2 Joint Honours English Literature and Political Science Student. “I think I’ve slowly come to realize that it’s not really about whether or not that whole thing transposes onto the outside world, but I’m learning little things that […] can help me navigate it […] I think that there is real value in understanding what the consequences that you want are and what is possible.”
The realm of beauty, fiction, and language is also fundamentally imaginative, and therein lies a kind of power to think beyond material conditions and understand minds that are not our own.
There are times when big-picture thinking feels very small—I still struggle sometimes to justify my education to my family. My maternal grandparents don’t know what I’m studying. They never learned English, and no one in my family knows how to say “Liberal Arts” in Cantonese. “I told them you study history, and other things,” my mother said. “Even if I explained it, they wouldn’t understand it.”
They gave up their whole lives for their children and fled their country on foot and worked in factories, inhaling toxic fumes, and now I study paintings in buildings with stained-glass windows.
When my grandmother died, my grandfather started spouting stories about their lives before they immigrated. I didn’t know how to explain that this was what I wanted to study—people, places, languages—that the world of the humanities was not that far from ours. But justifying the study of marginalized voices, the literature of oppression and resistance, to people who had actually lived through these things somehow rang hollow.
I don’t know what my role is in all these stories and paradigms; I live at some sort of crossroads between identities and privilege and oppression that I can’t quite get at. I’ve spent most of my life terrified that I’m not “getting” what I should from my identity. That I’m not who I say I am because I’m not feeling the right kind of pain.
Grasping at these intangible things that affect me in ways I don’t understand—race, power, art, science, family, history, language, poetry—may be the only way to begin figuring out what I’m doing here. Curiosity asks us to think beyond transaction: To give yourself over to questions and problems and pain bigger than yourself and expect nothing in return.
“We have to allow people the margin of thinking uselessly. If you’re driven only by what is concrete— ‘I need to have an answer today!’—we don’t allow our minds the liberty and the capacity of being imaginative,” said Anastassiadis. “Human evolution requires the capacity for our mind not to function according to what has been passed down to us, and what we have been asked to do, but [rather] what we’ll be able to invent ourselves and to imagine.”
The lovely ambiguity and contradictions of the humanities, of studying poetry in times of crisis, trying to understand lives that we can’t live, making sense of the endless stream of information and images being thrust upon us, asking how things can be so beautiful and so terrible all at once, learning to live in new languages, dreaming of a future in a world where tomorrow is uncertain, are a fundamentally true expression of the contradictions and complications within the real world, and within my own life.
“I think anybody would say that the most interesting questions,” Parmar said, “are the ones that seem impossible.”
