To be or not to be an English Literature student: Just black dots on white pages

English literature is an underrated art. We’ve all sat in school reading a Shakespeare play and wondered why on earth were there 50 pages about someone almost getting their head chopped off, getting possessed by something evil or falling in love with a donkey. (Don’t ask until you've seen A Midsummer's Night Dream).

By the end of the lesson, those tattered books will be thrown into piles, put back on the shelves, and all the words written on every torn page will be forgotten. But only a small number of us will pick that book up again and appreciate the beauty behind the story, poem, or play.

Being a literature student myself, I cheered when I heard that English literature is ranked one of the top ten humanities subjects in the world, and it warmed my heart to know there are millions of students out there who share the same passion for those tattered books.

Writing literature is creating your own entire universe with simply just words, as most of the plays and novels you read started off purely as a figment of an individual’s imagination. The characters you meet, the plots you discover, the settings you see, and the speech you hear, are all based on someone’s creativity.

So here is the question I’ve been asked too many times: KJ, what’s so "magical" about English literature? Have you ever read a book or watched a series where you started to feel connected to a character, almost like they were real to you? If we really engage with the piece we’re reading or watching, the characters can almost begin to feel like real people to us. Now this isn’t me being delusional and telling you that I think Hamlet is my best friend or anything, but I do admit, I've started feeling like I’ve known these characters for a while.

Characters are so important in literature because they allow us to form opinions about fictional people. What do we think of them? Do we love them or hate them? Do they deserve what they’re going through? I remember having the most heated debates in my classes while answering these questions, until I finally got to the end, and it hit me that this person wasn’t even real, and I just spent the last hour debating about them.

My A-level English literature teacher would always repeat the same quote to our class that I still find inspiring to this day. "Everything that’s written in this book is just black dots on a white page." It leaves me in awe of how characters who are merely "black dots" on white pages help us understand and relate to the real people around us. Through a make-believe story, we begin to understand mental health, world-wide issues, and society.

Some argue that English literature is a useless subject and that it makes no difference to society whatsoever, which I couldn't disagree with more. It is one powerful subject that consists of almost everything else that you can think of. History, politics, psychology, sociology, philosophy, even science! The list is endless.

We can’t understand a piece of literature without knowing its history and what was going on during that era, as knowing its historical context teaches us how the writer tried to appeal to its audience or reader. Shakespeare would always add tonnes of supernatural elements to his work because he knew that the Elizabethan era loved things scary things like witches back in the day. We can’t fully grasp a text without understanding sociology either, as it teaches us why certain characters behaved the way they did and why they treated each other in a certain way. For example, things such as class systems and gender inequality date back many centuries, which explains why classics such as Oliver Twist were a hit back in the day and even at present. You won’t fully understand a character if you don’t really understand how their mind works either. Thanks to psychology, literature teaches us the challenges of mental health. Arthur Miller’s Death of a Salesman speaks a thousand words about how a character may be portrayed quite negatively because of their mental suffering. It really brings things into perspective.

One of the things I love most about English literature is one simple thing. There is no right or wrong answer. Growing up, I always struggled with maths and science. I’d spend an entire maths lesson having ten breakdowns on one question, simply trying to figure out an answer. In complex subjects, there’s always going to be a right answer, and your job is to use the right method to figure it out.

Not in English. In English, you’re in control and, whatever you’re studying, you’ll be asked that special question. Four words. What do you think?

And that’s where you start. You’re free to express and communicate what YOU think on the subject. There’s no destination to reach, and no one can beat you to it. It’s all about individuality and creativity, and as cliché as this sounds, without an imagination, there would be no literature. There would be no method of expressing ourselves and our emotions. No method of telling the world what we find beauty in. This brings me to one of the most amazing quotes I’ve ever heard, and a quote I’ll always treasure, from the film, The Dead Poets Society, starring Robin Williams. He portrays a charismatic English teacher who instils in his students the value of literature and life. A quote I keep near my bedside. "Medicine, Law, Business, Engineering: These are all noble pursuits necessary to sustain life. But poetry, beauty, romance, love. These are what we stay alive for. " John Keating