It Averages Out

A new semester. My last semester.

I don't know what to think about that. See, people inevitably ask me what I'm going to be doing with my English degree, and I tell them that I've got lots of options open, which is to say I'm not so damn sure. Truthfully, there are quite a few opportunities for English majors in journalism, publishing, law, and marketing to name a few professions that, coincidentally, present great potential for evil.

My most likely starting point is an internship at the Gazette with a side racket of copy editing, all the while scoping out other writing forays with the assumption that the world is my oyster. If nothing works, I'll pull the cord and apply to grad school...

...

Classes! That's right! I want to talk about classes now.

Before graduation, English majors at UCCS are required to take a Senior Seminar course that obsesses over some of the faculty's favorite authors, and two choices are offered every semester. I waited on this, repeatedly rolling the dice to see if any appealing authors would come up each successive term, but seldom emerged a class that didn't revolve around Jane Austen or the Bronte sisters. Naturally, I jumped on the novelist who was oft-accused of misogyny.

Philip Roth is (and I'm using this term loosely) widely reknown as the greatest living American novelist. It is no exaggeration to say that he's won every major American award for fiction, and that he "does not smile." For the course, we will be reading the following novels:

-Goodbye, Columbus
-My Life as a Man
-Portnoy's Complaint
-The Ghost Writer
-Zuckerman Unbound
-The Anatomy Lesson
-The Prague Orgy
-The Counterlife
-The Facts
-Patrimony
-American Pastoral [won the Pulitzer]
-Operation Shylock
-The Human Stain
-The Plot Against America

... which is everything he ever wrote, ever. I had to double-check and make sure no Updike got in there by mistake.

(Recognize The Human Stain at all? It was adapted to film a few years back, though unsuccessfully. Let's start with casting, which starred Sir Anthony Hopkins as an African American and Nicole Kidman as an illiterate janitor. That'd be a tough sell if the movie were animated. The book, though woefully unfilmable, is terrific in ways that I might expound on some other time.)

So I figure that since I started on this list during Winter Break, I should finish all these novels before I can file for Social Security. Dr. Rubin-Dorsky admits that this reading load outdoes even any Graduate or PhD courses he'd taught before, so in his defense, he's fully aware of what he's doing. I asked him if he was excited to have an entire shelf in the campus bookstore. He said there was a mildly satisfying intimidation factor in that. "Prof-cred", if you will.

Literary Criticism is another class I'm taking, which serves as a foil to the aforementioned one. This will become immediately apparent.

Its course reading is as follows:

- Regeneration by Pat Barker

That's it. We spend the semester dissecting a single book with a half a dozen different scalpels (Deconstructivism, Psycho-analysis, etc.) Find this book title in my Profile over there and you'll know why I'm peachy keen with this.

So I'm not quite feeling overwhelmed, even when taking my four other classes into account. For one thing, it gives me plenty to think about in terms of literature. Which is the easiest thing to think about nowadays.