What the Hell is an English degree?

There are few sights more terrifying on UCL campus than an English seminar at 10am.

Inside a dimly lit room somewhere in Foster Court, twelve exhausted students sit around a table discussing a book nobody has read, nobody enjoyed, and nobody fully understands. At the front stands Dr Auld Hwyteman, speaking passionately about “textual instability”.

This, apparently, is “higher education.”

English Literature at UCL remains one of the university’s most mysterious degrees. Unlike medicine, engineering, or economics, its practical function has never been fully identified. Researchers currently believe it consists primarily of:

• saying “liminality”

• pretending to enjoy (or even understand) modernism

• and hearing other people speak for alarming amounts of time

“I haven’t understood a lecture since October,” admitted one first-year while highlighting random sentences in A Room of One’s Own without blinking.

Teaching within the department appears governed by a strict institutional policy against clarity. Lecturers routinely speak in sentences so incomprehensible that students initially assume they are quotations from the reading itself.

“You stop asking questions after first year,” they admitted quietly. “Eventually you just start saying things like ‘the text destabilises itself’ and people nod.”

English seminars themselves have evolved into deeply performative social rituals in which students compete to sound the most intellectually tortured.

“No, because, like,  I think the silence of the text actually speaks volumes,” said one student named Luca, who then continued speaking uninterrupted for fourteen consecutive minutes.

Others contribute by beginning every sentence with:

• “building on that…”

• “to complicate things…”

• or “I actually disagree with Foucault here”

Nobody knows what this means.

The books themselves remain another major point of concern.

Despite arriving at university claiming to “love reading”, English students quickly discover that the degree mostly involves forcing yourself through 400-page novels about industrial despair while annotating the phrase “the body” repeatedly in the margins.

“You can write literally anything if you mention Foucault enough,” explained one finalist while highlighting fourteen separate uses of the word “subversion” in their coursework.

Seminar preparation has similarly collapsed across the department.

Multiple students admitted attending classes with absolutely no idea what the assigned reading even was. One first-year confessed to spending an entire seminar attempting to squint at another student’s book cover from across the table in order to identify the title.

“You can survive for around twenty minutes just saying ‘that’s really interesting’,” they explained. “After that you need to start mentioning symbolism.”

Others rely on scanning Spark Notes summaries five minutes before class before confidently announcing that the text “raises important questions”.

Despite this, participation remains bizarrely enthusiastic.

English students possess an almost supernatural ability to speak extensively on topics they do not remotely understand. Entire seminars routinely pass without a single concrete point being made.

One observer described the atmosphere as “twelve people trying to out-abstract each other until the tutor mercifully ends the discussion”.

Still, morale within the department remains high, largely because nobody can admit the possibility that they are spending £9,250 a year discussing curtains metaphorically.

At the time of publication, Dr Hwyteman was reportedly preparing a lecture entitled The Semiotics of Dampness in Post-War Northern Realism, while half the seminar group searched online for a PDF they will never open.

 This article appeared in CG98.