Why are there so many branches of literature? How I'm finally making up my mind.

I think I’ve finally found out what I want to do.

Not in a general, wide sense, that I know since I was 14 years old: I wanted to teach English, and more specifically, English Literature. However, if you follow my blog you may recall that I once wrote I didn’t know which of the many areas of Literature I should choose.

However, two things have been helping to make up my mind. The first one was a subject I took this last semester, called “Literatura, Gèneres i Sexualitats” (Literature, Gender and Sexualities). It was the only subject I would take in Catalan since the first year, and I wasn’t really convinced, but the title looked promising. And it was good, oh dear, it was very nice indeed. With this subject I realized that I didn’t really know anything about Gender Studies, and it made me more curious about these studies, masculinities, femininities, Queer Studies, and pretty much everything related to this subject. I also realized that ever since I was a child, I had thought of myself as someone open minded and free from prejudices, but I discovered that I was the opposite. When we talked about transsexuals, the difference between sex and gender, intersex… all of this stuff, I found myself being skeptical and full of prejudices, which started to fall one by one by discussing things in class and by reading the authors that the teacher proposed to us. Not every single subject that you take changes your view of the world and your view of yourself, but to me this has been a turning point in my career (if you can call it that already) since it has opened my eyes to a part of the literature that I didn’t know and that I’m very much interested in. Even though it was the first time this subject was being taught and there are lots of things I would've changed and done differently, I still enjoyed it very much.

The second thing that helped me to make up my mind was the TFG, the project of the end of the degree, or however you want to call it. It is different depending on what degree you are studying, but in my case, it was basically a paper between 5,000 and 7,000 words about a topic of our choice. I chose “homoerotic subtext in Sherlock Holmes”. And with that topic, a whole world was opened to me. Before taking the subject and before thinking about the topic of the TFG I had never heard about Butler, Wittig, Sedgewick, Fuss… I had heard about Michel Foucault but in a very different context, not in the context of sexuality. And although I must admit that it was very complicated to understand and to apply the theory of Queer Studies to my work, I had enjoyed every minute of it. I’m very glad that I know these things now, but I’m aware that I’ve barely scratched the surface of a branch of literature full of authors, works, theories and knowledge that I really want to know.

Therefore, I think I will try to find a MA that follows this direction. I still don’t know how I’m going to do it, where, or how much it’s going to cost. I still have some doubts as well regarding the specialty, because every university has a specialist in Victorianism, or a specialist in Romanticism, or a specialist in Shakespeare. But for some reason Gender Studies is always relegated to a second term: it’s always optional, never compulsory; and therefore, the possibilities of finding a job related to it are narrower. But still, I think I should do as I have always done and go for something I like instead of going for something I’m interested in but not that much. And in any case I still have one more year to think about it because I’ve failed two subjects this year and I will have to take them again next year, but I think I’m moving in the right direction.