For as long as I can
remember I have always loved to read. I have always found the process of
literature to be fascinating. I love the use of words and I love the theories
and the ideas that need to be used in order to understand and to use language. Growing up, I was constantly told to get my nose
out of the books and to start paying more attention to what was happening
around me. I was, and still am, terribly oblivious when I have a book in my
hands. The funny thing I found, though, is that the more I read, the more I
began to feel like I understand the world in which I live. They say art
imitates life, and I found this to be true when comparing the pages of my favourite
books to what I experienced on a daily basis. I
even majored in English. And some so-called “educated” people ask me: “Who does
that”?
I usually meet these weird people who get
competitive about the difficulty of their degrees. The accepted line for them
is that “Science is harder than Arts”, and for them, everything is harder than Literature.
As for them, literature is only about novels. And they call themselves
“literate”. Well, I suggest them to at least go through Encyclopaedia and read. I bet, after going through it, you won’t
even dare to pursue your career in English.
If you really want to
understand literature, you can’t just read a few books or poems over and over
(“Hamlet,” “Anna Karenina,” “The Waste Land”). Instead, you have to work with
hundreds or even thousands of texts at a time. By turning those books into
data, and analysing that data, you can discover facts about literature in
general.
They say – Life of Arts’ students is so damn easy.
I beg to differ and let me clarify. Us - Arts
students have to decide to work. We have to get ourselves up, preferably in
the morning. We have to choose to do today what we could do at 2am tomorrow. We
have to turn down a pub trip in favour of an evening alone with our books.
Hangover and exhausted, who wouldn’t rather sit watching acid drip into
alkaline for a couple of hours, rather than trawling through Derrida or
Greenblatt. Like any other academic, there is not really a pro typical day.
Some days are mostly teaching, others mostly writing, some mostly reading while
others might be service. We have to set a goal for what we want to get done in
a week. We have to manage our choice of projects. This leads us to jump from
project to project chasing after the “shiny new object”. You can imagine how
this hampers our productivity. Personally, I now try to decide what enters my
portfolio in three stages. First, I make sure that any new idea leverages an
area of my expertise. I want to avoid one-off projects that require me to learn
an entirely new literature each time. Second, I go ahead and write a potential
contribution paragraph to flush out whether this idea could be in an ‘A-journal’.
The worst outcome is for an idea to work perfectly yet have no chance to be
published. Third, I try to run a quick study to see if the idea seems promising
at all. If it works, I try to quickly replicate it so I’ll know I have
something real. If it fails at first, I’ll give it one more shot if I think the
idea is super promising. If it works at first and fails on the replication,
then I’ll often give it one more go as a sort of tiebreaker.
Well, till now, I don’t find my life easy.
But, there is a difference. People who find it effortless, in reality, it is
enjoyment. We- Arts students enjoy their work. Of course, we do have fun.
Otherwise, what is the point? Writing papers for journals, Thesis, Reading innumerable
books, Going to conferences and refresher courses and meeting some real learned
people from all over the world, I mean – just some people are lucky enough to
have this.
Science is great, but an Arts degree is
neither the dead-beat option nor a route to unemployment.
