So You're Going to Major in English (1)

Essays on the Teaching of English
Raymond Stopper
Based on Teaching English, How To....

So You’re Going to Major in English….(1)

Your first step, if you’re going to teach English, is to major in English in college. To help you get through that, you will need three indispensable reference books: an encyclopedia of literary works and authors; a listing of major events in the history of the world; and an encyclopedia of literary terms.

Check on Amazon.com. You will find some of the most recent works available. Here are the three I used:

Benet’s Reader’s Encyclopedia. An Encyclopedia of World Literature. Fourth Edition. Ed. Bruce Murphy. New York: HarperCollins Publishers. Summarizes every major work of literature and supplies a biography of every major author. Order the most recent edition.

A Dictionary of Literary Terms. JA Cuddon. Middlesex, England: Penguin Books Ltd. Defines every literary term in practically plain English. You can’t do without this reference tool. Again, purchase the most recent edition.

The People’s Chronology. A Year-by-Year Record of Human Events from Prehistory to the Present. New York: Henry Holt and Company. The most readable history I ever read.

Before you even start your first course in literature, read the summaries of each literary work you will be assigned to read and the biographies of the authors. Go over the major events of the period. This information will give you a tremendous amount of background information with which to begin your course.

One of my teachers told us that in the “old days,” English majors were expected to have already read every literary work to be studied in class so that the majority of time could be spent on literary criticism related to each work. Reading these reference tools will bring you as close to that ideal as is possible if you have not even read the works scheduled for class.