In university, we tend to gravitate towards others within our department of study. It’s only natural that we identify with others who share our passions for the subject matter that we engage in daily, so it can be a nice shift of perspective when we spend more time with people from other departments.
My major is in Rhetoric, Writing, and Communication. Once upon a time, I had planned to major in English. I soon recognized that I’m a rhetorician at heart, not an English student, so I made the department switch. This semester I am taking a class in the English department, however: Creative Writing.
On the first day of class my professor asked us the question, “what gives something ‘literary feel’?”
He continues to ask this question every class, and every time he asks it, it perplexes me. When people offer suggestions for what gives something “literary feel,” he says that he disagrees with them.
In Rhetoric, we would instead be looking for a definition for the term “literary feel,” and we would be examining how the phrase affects a piece of writing, and how we are affected as an audience. I find it incredibly frustrating because I feel that my Creative Writing professor is taking this approach from an angle in which we simply won’t be able to come to an agreement or, indeed, any satisfactory answer whatsoever.
English and Rhetoric may appear to be quite close in similarity, but they are vastly different. A more obvious difference between departments is Rhetoric and Geography. As Mr Science and I studied together this past weekend, I was reading a 30-page article that analyzed the iconic “Flag Raising on Iwo Jima” photograph. He was using Microsoft Excel to chart data of white earlywood tree rings over a certain period of time.
These disciplines are clearly very far apart, but this does not necessarily mean that one discipline is “right” and one is “wrong.” We learn about the world because of our variety of disciplines; we may always feel as though “our” department is the most relevant to study, but each discipline of study is essential to the development and progress of personal and societal understanding.
There is a benefit to studying everything. It is how we use it, and how it impacts our learning, that will make the difference.