What universities have the best English programs? (Specifically for undergraduate)

What universities have the best English programs? (Specifically for undergraduate)
>inb4 majoring in English is a meme

Just go to an ivy or oxbridge. BA degree is a meme. When you're getting the same experience anywhere for a BA you might as well go somewhere prestigious for the connections you'll make.

They're all pretty garbage across the board now. I would never advise anyone ever to get an English degree
t. Have a joint major in English

Ivys obvs (Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Columbia, and Cornelly being the best)
UC Berkeley
U Chicago (of course)
Stanford
Georgetown
UNC Chapel Hill
U Virginia
Boston University
Johns Hopkins
Rutgers
U Michigan Ann Arbor
U Wisconsin Madison
U Iowa
Wesleyan
Georgetown
Kenyon

There's a few others in america, but i agree with the memes: oxbridge or bust

But also dont get an english degree. I can wholeheartedly say that i have learned nothing and have only ever encountered frauds in academia

Can you expand on this more? I plan on getting my masters and i thought English would be a good starting point for such.

Wow thanks this is great.

>But also dont get an english degree. I can wholeheartedly say that i have learned nothing and have only ever encountered frauds in academia

Can you expand on this? I've thought about it a lot and I don't think i fit anywhere else except English but I'm keeping an open mind.

>forgetting Duke

Im doing a double w/honors in english and phi (i picked up honors and philosophy once i became disenchanted with english)

There's only one class that i've learned anything from, and it was mostly bc we used a good anthology and i got the time to do my own research project. Somewhere along the lines, i realized at best i was learnining something details about the canon (which is easily done on your own using a norton anthology) and then how to write good criticism for publication. Except the people telling me how to write criticism were themselves too busy trying to figure it out to actually teach me anything. And all their scholarship was just taking a textbook critical theory, picking a fashionable text, and then saying "hey look i found an example of so and so ideology" in 30+ pages of shitty prose.

tl;dr Get a Norton anthology, get a critical theory reader, get a guide to academic prose, and look at a couple contemporary literary journals and you'll save yourself four years and 60k a year. Your teachers will be uninspired hacks who occassionally have trivial insights to texts they've just been reading linger than you, the work you do will be constrained and monotonous saved only by the fact that fifty pages of Virginia Woolf is a lot easier than fifty pages of linear algebra.

majoring in English is a meme

Tru tru

Though honestly id only go to duke to bully mikey hardt and tell frederic jameson he's a discount lyotard

Skip school. Work manual labor. Read a lot. Write a lot.

I'm doing literature & linguistics for my undergrad, plan on majoring in germanic language and literature so it's my only real option for a starting point. Major in english if you plan to go to grad school for something related.

Hi is it okay if I finish up undergrad and then do the whole manual labor/read lots/write lots thing? Sounds comfy

If I could do it all again I would either go to vet school or do a BA and MA in English lit. I think the latter would be a blast. Doing grad school is a unique experience, a time where you can totally immerse yourself in a topic. I threw myself completely into my MSc and PhD work, it was a very intense but wholly satisfying period of my life.

To do the same for literature would be worthwhile. But I don't think I would do a PhD in English lit, unless I wanted to be a prof. If the goal is to write, do an undergrad and learn more about language and theory and then read and write lots. A MA would be fun to dive deep into a thesis, but of course unnecessary if you "just" want to write.

My advice to anyone thinking of going to college is to only do it if you have some passion or it will provide you with employable skills and credentials. Don't just do it because it's assumed you go to college after high school.

Bright eyed faggot who never did english grad

It's hell op, the job prospects are grim, don't do it. You don't learn to read better, write better, or anything you couldnt just figure out going at it alone.

Might as well. Undergrad years are when you're at your most retarded anyway.

I did a BSc, MSc and PhD in a STEM field. I had a period of pessimism but I still have the naive belief that if you are good at what you do, and have social and networking skills, you will find employment.

If you are genuinely passionate about your field/path you will have a leg up on the competition. And I mean passion, not simply telling people you love it and refusing or being unable to put in the sheer amount of work required to be successful.

>Sounds comfy
Until you can't afford to raise a family, don't have a viable retirement plan, injure yourself or simply succumb to natural senescence and still have to somehow do physical labor. It sounds romantic but there is a reason so many laborers are retards who live for adjunct beer and corporate sports.

I really don't know what else to do with my life, I'm only good at thinking and writing about things. I work manual labor at the moment and find that my personality is not only completely unfit for what the work demands but that I would be completely empty doing something like it every day for my entire life. My prospects are grim aren't they? Every where it seems the humanities is getting cut, and finding employment as an English teacher means facing a shit-ton of competition. I fall into this delusion that I'm better than the other English majors and that I will somehow be safe with a job in 10 years but who knows maybe the delusion is justified, or maybe literally. One thing I understand about myself is that I love to learn about ideaas and read beautiful prose, I want to incorporate myself in an intellectual environment that holds those things as important too.

>or maybe literally
or maybe literally every other English major feels the same. My b

You're vain and you want recognition but the truth is any recognition you'll get through academia is a hollow and meaningless one. Focus on material reality and learn in your own time. Think about the talents you claim to have and how they could be applied to other areas of financial demand like law or regional studies instead

Exactely this. I can think of maybe five English lit academics/critics who have said something meaningful, ever. And the boring thing is that they are the regular suspects you'd probably just encounter on your own (Johnson, Hazlitt, etc.).

But the sad reality is that your 6+ years of work culminating in a paper on Homonationalism and Tibby Schlegel in Howards End or a critique of Body in the works of Rubert Brooke (both of these fake examples are way too general for the hyperspecialized crit. lit. market, actually) will really be an unfulfilling, compromising attempt at beating out every other sad hack in your program/in grad programs generally, and any momentary joy you experience in the process of research will be undermined by the fact that your CV looks like shit compared next to homeboy in the comp. lit dept. who just released his book-length commentary on the untranslated letters of Spivak (and you're not even really sure how he got ahold of those) and won a grant to continue his work on Indian Postcolonialist Queer Representations as a result. And if somehow, someway you manage to make it out with a modicum of self-respect left, you will cringe when you come to realize you are now multiple thousands of dollars in debt, in risk of poverty, and the only think preventing you from fulfilling your dreams of assistant professorship or good publication or anything like recognition is some 58 yr old roasty who got into Princeton for being a remotely self-aware woman and who got big on being the first to point out some minor detail in fucking Jacob's Room (back when, yknow, that's all you had to do to get published), and has since locked down the local dept./journals/etc. in the name of nepotism for all her other roastie/token friends.

Beautiful summary. Don't fall for the meme OP

Majoring in English ruined my life

Are there any non-american unis with funded MFA programs?

Its not really a degree type that exists outside the US (mainly because its a scam)

>U Iowa
LOL nigga what?

Iowa’s creative writing department is generally considered the best in the country.

They pay you to take it, so i don't see why you'd care if it's a scam.

Money has to come from somewhere they're not running a charity