Posted 8:25 a.m. Friday, Oct. 20, 2023
True Confessions of the English Department
Students of English are famously obsessed with death. Here’s one example: Thomas Gray, a poet and professor of classical literature, spent his evenings sitting in a graveyard writing poetry about his friends buried right beneath him: a literal Dead Poet’s Society. Here’s another: Shakespeare regularly practiced the art of memento mori, meditating on death in order to feel awe and gratitude for his life, telling his lover “do not so much as my poor name rehearse” after he is gone. (That worked out well.) And you don’t have to be famous to be a grim reader: perhaps you, tortured soul that you are, feel like every single college essay you have to write is like a tiny, stabby death from which there’s no escape.
We get it. In the English Department, we’re all tortured souls, too. (Read more on our Write Here, Write Now blog.) And we’re constantly communing with the Dead. In some ways, our department is like one massive séance, and it’s happening right now: ethereal voices manifesting in the classroom, the spirits of authors past haunting our syllabi, and the words of the lost being transcribed on essays as though they were Ouija boards.
There’s a secret to all this gloomy visitation, however: death is what makes everything that is beautiful, beautiful.
Writers and readers have always known this, which is why death is such a powerful subject. Writing about death is actually writing about life: what we, as humans, most love, cherish, miss, and hope for. Reading others’ meditations on death can inspire our most noble ideas, our most creative work. Discovering the loss of what makes us human can actually make us more human.
Intrigued? Come read dead people with us. Spring offerings in the English department have all the makings of the darkest, spookiest semester ever:
- Worried about cyborgs taking over the planet? Take ENG 497: Seminar in Writing & Rhetoric: Writing With/Against AI to learn how to cope with our future overlords.
- Speaking of apocalypses: ready for the Zombie one? Get prepped with ENG 200: Living in Undead Times, where you’ll learn why philosophers think the “only modern myth is the myth of zombies.”
- Ever wondered if you can raise the dead? ENG 375: Writing Research is a chance to comb a scholarly graveyard that reveals all sorts of hidden truths about the living: the archives.
- Quick question: who’s deader than Shakespeare? Answer: no one. He’s the absolute deadest, which means he might have the most to teach. Take ENG 363: Shakespeare to conjure Banquo’s ghost over and over and over again. (Bonus points if you take a selfie contemplating a skull.)
- We’re always bringing the dead to life in English studies, so if you’re feeling brave, sign up for ENG 300: Introduction to English Studies and go ghost-hunting with us. Still a bit spooked? That’s okay: check out our website at www.uwlax.edu/english... but be sure to leave the lights on.