The English Major at Rice University

At Rice's commencement last year, more members of the graduating class received their degrees in English than any other discipline on campus. This means there were more English majors than there were biochemists, chemical engineers, computer scientists, political scientists, or students double-majoring in Managerial Studies. A small percentage of these English majors went on to graduate school in English. The rest are now doing something else. Are you surprised? Curious about why so many Rice students are English majors in the first place? Here are some reasons.

Legal briefs, research reports, grant proposals, marketing strategies, mission statements, ads, investment brochures, patient narratives, letters of acceptance and rejection, and absolutely everything you will send via email. These are all reasons to make sure your writing skills are what they should be. After five years into the profession of your choice, what you have learned in college will be far less important than what you have learned at work. But no one there is going to teach you to write. English is the language of the Internet and, therefore, of international trade. Clarity and precision have never been more important than they are now with readers for whom your English is their second or third language.

You are also going to have to read critically all those things that other people are writing to you: to read the conventions of their arguments, the strategies of their rhetoric, the real message behind the smoke they're blowing. And most of you will also be reading the kind of literature that will deepen your imagination and ability to experience your own life. There is a reason that so many adults now belong to book clubs and take extension courses in literature. It is not simply that they finally have the time.

The courses available in the English Department range from traditional courses in English and American literature--Romantic poetry, the American novel, Shakespeare, and Faulkner--to courses in African American literature, Chicano/a fiction and poetry, the literature of the postcolonial and Third World, women writers, literary theory, the European novel in translation, and the relationships between literature and the visual arts. A surprising variety of classes, many of them seminar-sized, with innovative methods and concerns, all of them involved with reading and writing in every way, taught by a faculty distinguished for its number of teaching awards.

And finally, there is the pleasure of it all, the pleasure suggested in John Updike's sentence about James Joyce: "A splendid man . . . to feel the curious and potent, inexplicable and irrefutably magical life language leads within itself." You can learn to feel this yourself and to explain why this sentence works so well.

Imagine!