re: Liberal Arts Majors: Did your college courses prepare you for your jobs?

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Poor example for a point (which I'm not completely sure, as you seemingly move the goalposts a lot).

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This is hilarious coming from someone who works in an English department. I'm moving goalposts? Ok. Then you are being a pompous jack arse about the average literary knowledge of everyone who is not an expert on American literature.

I got more women studying in then you liberals ever will at brcc and graduated to make 150k a year at the plant


whose laughing now?

I own my own company and often hire liberal arts majors. Any Monkey can program. I can hire a lib arts majors and know they will actually be able to read and write.

That's why there are certifications.

Statistics say no, but liberal arts is too broad a term to really be able to answer that effectively. I would say that much of what you learn in liberal arts can be taught through self-education later on in life.

A lot of people have mocked the idea of emphasizing STEM, calling it a "trade school" mentality, but I think that's pretty short-sighted. LSU has a 30k+ student body and is an A&M school. I get the idea of having well-rounded students and opportunities across the spectrum, but it serves the needs of the state best and leverages its resources most effectively when it's producing gainfully employed graduates.

Unless things change dramatically, no one will really ever think of a school like LSU as the premier school for English literature. But the school is positioned well to be a good engineering school, for example, if it wants to be.

Yea. Mark Twain's best work imho.

Sure, I love Steinbeck.

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Neckbeards

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Maybe the fatter feminists, but not really neckbeards who inhabit reddit and the like.

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Then why isn't he a household name?

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How many contemporary American authors of literary quality are a household name though? Outside of DFW and maybe some others, very few. I know that DFW is definitely the most popular. No one else comes close. His books have already produced multiple films. It took Raymond Carver nearly 20 years before one of his stories was made into a movie. Most of the ones who are a household name are from a different era (Roth, Pyncheon, Morrison, DeLillo). People just don't read in general anymore, especially fiction. The New Yorker might be the only major magazine that publishes short stories. That said, it takes time for the critical apparatus of the University to appreciate people. It takes a year or two to get a paper published. Wallace only died in 2008. The generation that reads him now will be the ones to write critical works on him later, at which point he'll become canon. He's basically in the literary canon right now, and that's very difficult for someone rather young. I think you want people to recognize his genius immediately, and that's just not the way institutions like universities (in any discipline, as the people who believed in an older method are usually the ones in charge and are resistant to change when something challenges their viewpoint). But I can assure you Wallace will be read 20 years from now, while you probably couldn't say the same for Franzen.

Yes. It prepared me for my job as a barista.

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Then why isn't he a household name? Why do so few college graduates of Humanities and Social Science degrees know nothing of him or his work. I'm sorry, but it is true. I think that you being on the "inside" of this debate actually gives you less understanding of this fact. He is an, relative to other studied authors, unknown individual.

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I don't know that I can think of anyone who reads who doesn't know who he is. It does not matter what their major was or if they have a degree at all. This includes my nephew who's 16. He is a household name. He has been for years. Maybe your friends don't like contemporary lit. Maybe your friends prefer less masterbatory lit.

The goal of a LA degree is to teach you how to think not what to think. Many schools don't require any contemporary lit courses for a degree in English. I can't imagine that any of the other LA's do. But it wouldn't shock me if a Victorian had no idea who he was because that's not their jam. I wouldn't think anything less of them or their education due to that. Contemporary lit is, largely, accessible. Someone like DFW is referenced all over the place in pop culture. A university setting is not required for exposure to him.