Colin McKnight
Unless you graduated high school with a boatload of AP literature credits, you’re probably planning out what to take and when for your required literature courses here at NC State. Most, if not all of us, will ignore the “what” of the courses we take and instead just focus on something easy and at a convenient time.
This is understandable, since we’re all a bunch of overworked students who rarely have the luxury to take a really interesting general course of our choosing. However, if you can afford such a luxury in your tight schedule, you should take some time deciding what to take.
While it’s tempting to take something that may already be interesting to you — like science fiction or the ever-present western fiction — I’d argue that you ought to be expanding a narrow amount of knowledge in an unfamiliar subject area. There is a litany of specialized and in-depth literature courses here. Don’t settle for just the easy way out. Take one of the many courses about a group of people you may be unfamiliar with and broaden your horizons for when you go out into the world.
I should acknowledge that I’m currently taking this kind of literature class, and I’ve also taken a standard American literature class. And while I enjoyed the latter, the former has made me realize that the high school I attended barely scratched the surface of the entire literary community. I almost went through my whole time here at NC State without taking a class in an unfamiliar area of literature because it wouldn’t be “convenient.”
But you shouldn’t let that convenience dictate everything you put on your plate here at college. Marc Dudley, a professor of literature here at NC State, said, “I think that whatever you choose to take, that’s fine, but in the back of your mind, as a student, you should have a caveat, and that is to learn as much as you can. When else in your life are you going to learn so much in such a constricted amount of time?”
Adrienne Rivera wrote, “What makes the history of women’s writing so interesting is that in many ways it is a new area of study. The tradition of women writing has been much ignored due to the inferior position women have held in male-dominated societies.” This can apply to all the groups I’m discussing here. The pantheon of “great literary art” has for centuries been dominated by white male authors, and while many of their works certainly are great, it’s only a fraction of the excellent literature out there.
While you may be comfortable with these areas, you’re missing out by sticking to them. As Dudley put it, “for somebody who’s a science major or an engineering major, you spend a lot of time on another part of campus, not exposed to this kind of thing, and maybe it’s a culture shock being exposed to a classroom setting like this. Part of my mission as an ambassador to this mission is to expose you to something different and get you to empathize a bit more.”
I completely understand why, for example, someone who is a fan of or fascinated by science fiction would want to take the science fiction literature course. And if you still have to take two courses, then definitely take one of those as well. But the point of college is to learn things you don’t already know to be better prepared for the world. So if you don’t know much about the literature of other groups of people and you get the chance to learn, take that step and expand your horizons.