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Brittini Reid’s Defense of English Majors

From the time I was very little I have loved stories. I used to beg my mom to read me anything: the newspaper, subtitles, stories, poetry, everything! She got so annoyed that she finally bought me some books on tape. I remember sitting in the bathtub, listening to my Beauty and the Beast read-along tape. Finally, I was old enough to read myself, and I immersed myself into a world that I had never known. The world of literature. I stayed in a boxcar, taught in Cutter Gap, visited Avonlea and lived in a log cabin with Laura Ingalls Wilder. There were places I could go, and experiences I could have without ever having to leave my room. This was when I began to seriously think about being an English teacher someday. When people question this goal it not only is nonsensical, it is absurd! Writers are the ones who create stories, and stories are everywhere.
My obsession with the written word is not unlike Don Quixote’s, except that he went insane because of reading, while I just enjoyed it, “with these words and phrases the poor gentleman lost his mind, and he spent sleepless nights trying to understand them and extract their meaning” (Cervantes 20). For Quixote it was the romance stories, lovers in peril being rescued in the end. Such romantic notions can be difficult to overcome, and sadly Quixote’s condition seemed to be worse than mine. While I was happy reading about them, he actually wanted to experience them, thus leading Sancho Panza all around the country. This story is clearly a ‘mise en abyme’ because most of the story is about the characters from other stories, which follows my theme clearly, because this story is entirely about this novel being a story.
Northrop Frye believed as I that stories are all around you, in everything, waiting to emerge, what I call ‘stories’ he calls ‘archetypes.’ From the life of your dentist, to the poems written by Edgar Allan Poe, each person, film, book and poem contains a tale. Throughout all of ‘Archetypes of Literature’ every point Frye makes is backed up by a story. From The Little Mermaid to The Tempest he categorizes and joys over each plot, each character and each narrative. Although the way in which he presents his case may be considered a little boring, his love of the written word has no match, beating both mine and Quixote’s. A critic’s job is to determine the quality of a work of art, but for the literary critics it would seem instead they are judging the story, not merely the quality of it. It is human nature to look at something and try to make sense of it, we are taught this act from the time we are young, and is that not the same as finding it’s story? Northrop Frye describes Greek New Comedy as such: "the plot structure… in itself less a form than a formula, has become the basis for most comedy, especially in its more highly conventionalized dramatic form, down to our own day. What normally happens is that a young man wants a young woman, that his desire is resisted by some opposition, usually paternal, and that near the end of the play some twist in the plot enables the hero to have his will” (Frye 163). As Frye says, he just described every romantic comedy made since the time of the ancient Greeks. This format of story is so universal that it transcends time, and appears in all works.
As for the poets, each writer obviously believes as I, that there are stories everywhere, but they take it one step farther and create them. Each poem, stanza even sentence of a poem is its own story and can stand alone. Even their defenses of poetry are so beautifully written there is no doubt that they are talented, passionate and completely correct in thinking this way. As Matthew Arnold wrote: "but for poetry the idea is everything; the rest is a world of illusion, of divine illusion. Poetry attaches its emotion to the idea; the idea is the fact. The strongest part of our religion to-day is its unconscious poetry” (Arnold 358). To him, poetry was everywhere, and it was only through poetry that a person could really live and experience the world around them. And as Stanley Fish said “poetry is that which we see with poetry seeing eyes” therefore, if we get some ‘story-seeing eyes’ then people will see the stories around them, like Arnold saw the poetry surrounding him.

Keats agreed with Arnold and I that stories and poetry are all around you, but he took it one step farther by saying that we need our imagination to see it, and that we can experience something mundane can actually be inspired because of it. He wrote: "Have you never by being surprised with an old Melody—in a delicious place—by a delicious voice, fe[l]t over again your very speculations and surmises at the time it first operated on your soul- do you not remember forming to yourself the singers’ face more beautiful than it was possible and yet with the elevation of the Moment you did not think so—even then you were mounted on the Wings of Imagination so high" (Keats) to describe the way the imagination can make a normal occurrence spectacular. Perhaps because he was so young, he was able to understand the world in a way that many older poets cannot, and that his lack of life experience worked in his favor. This innocence helped him to understand the stories around him and to look at them in a way that was refreshing and exciting.
There are stories all around us, our very lives are stories. Each movie has a story, which is what prompts people to go. The film industry is one of the richest and most popular in the world because people love to be entertained, and what is more entertaining than a story? For these reasons there is no excuse for those nonbelievers from other majors to judge and question why someone would want to be an English major. They unknowingly are English majors themselves, therefore degrading us, is degrading themselves. You cannot escape from stories, so why condemn their authors?

*if anyone wants a detailed works cited page, contact me :)