A Note to the Graduates
The English majors, specifically
On the Thursday before Mother’s Day, the English Department hosted a reception for our graduates and their families ,and I was tapped to give some brief remarks. I thought I’d share them here.
Something like 15 years ago, as I was leaving journalism and moving into academia, I attended a conference at the Radcliffe Institute called “Why Books?” It was there I first heard articulated this notion that books are interesting mostly as the focal points in an ongoing conversation. The real action was in the marginalia.
I could not dig up the exact quote in my own unorganized pile of notes, but the gist was that the books are fixed points and the most interesting stuff is in the notes the author makes as she prepares to write her book and the notes her readers make in response — which may in turn be preliminary notes to another book or other response.
I carry this idea with me, in my teaching and in my work as a critic: that any given text — book, podcast, film, play, song, et cetera — has value insofar as it spurs us to have thoughts about it and make notes about those thoughts, to ask questions: What does this say to me? What does it do to me? For me? What does this text (book, podcast, film, etc.) want me to do? Why? Who’s asking? Who benefits? What is present but unsaid?
If the text in question speaks to us strongly enough, we might be moved to say something in return. Maybe it’s as simple as “Get a load of this!” Or “Are you seeing what I’m seeing?” Your readers or other interlocutors may respond in their turn: “Yes, that’s wild!” or “You’re right!” or “That’s not it at all.”
I am not overstating things when I say that this attention to the brute fact of disparate experience — which is an acknowledgment of a fundamental truth: that my experience of the world does not and cannot match your experience of the world — is crucial to the functioning of a civil society.
The ability to interrogate sources of information — to ask who (or what) is telling me this, and why? — is only going to get more important, not less.
What I hope you’ve gained here is the permission to ask those questions, not just of the latest show on Hulu but about the messages you’re receiving from all corners. Who is speaking? What do they want, and why do they want it? What aren’t they saying?
I hope, as one of your fellow students says, your time here has “empowered [you] to question and challenge the narratives of the world around us.” Or that you’ve begun to ask them of yourselves, as another of your classmates has done. Describing herself as “a mouthful of seemingly contradictory adjectives,” she says she’s been on “an exhilarating and empowering journey of reflection, recontextualization, and recreation of this multifaceted identity.”
And even if you’re not moved to speak about your experience — to say “get a load of this” — I hope you’ll use these questions, this interrogative mood, to make sense of and make your way in the world.
And so, I offer my heartfelt congratulations. And I withhold the usual self-deprecating joke about the under-employability of English majors. Not only because it’s not true, but because any employer worth working for will value someone with the critical faculties you’ve been exercising here. The ability to interrogate sources of information — to ask who (or what) is telling me this, and why? — is only going to get more important, not less.
This is great. Literature must be part of an ongoing dialogue with the authors, ourselves and others. To re-read a book after many years is to understand a friend (the author) in a more complete way and a chance to speak with out younger self. Looking at old photographs does some of this but not nearly as much as re-reading a bood or re-viewing a film.