What a Book Represents About Individuality
Written by Sophia R.
In “Death of an English Major,” Gary Taylor, Florida State University English Department Chair, reflects on the meaning of English majors while grappling with the murder of his student Maura Binkley. Maura, an English major at FSU, died in a premeditated shooting: from the eight billion stories shelved in the library of the population, the book on her existence was torn apart. In addition to his personal grief over an English major like himself being killed, Taylor captures the overarching dangers of discriminatory violence in America. While resonating with English majors, Taylor speaks to me and all Americans that we must strive to notice — and encourage others to notice — particularities over the generalities fixated on by society; the words that make up each person’s story count more than the genre the book is in.
Taylor, by breaking down the study of English, emphasizes the importance of noticing the small details. Within English, “what [academics] celebrate and investigate … is human particularity” (191). The way I just did, they pull out specific thoughts, analyzing what makes each one so special. This is the beauty of language that English majors such as Gary Taylor, Maura Binkley, and all of Maura’s classmates fell in love with. But what happened to Maura completely erases what her major stood for: “Before the gun killed Maura, the generalization did” (191). Taylor argues that the murder, caused by a gunman’s hatred for women, crushed Maura down to only her gender. That she, someone the gunman never knew, deserved to die because she fit a category he believed wronged him. That she, an English major studying the unique sophistication of particularities, deserved to die based on the overall unworthiness of an entire gender. The murderer could not see past Maura’s front cover to the beautiful lines that made up her story. And this killed her. In this way, this essay (and an English degree) teaches us to highlight the small but powerful details that are deadly to miss.
In contemplating what an English major means to me, I’m struck by concerns over my college applications — specifically, how I exist with both generalities and particularities. Unlike Maura, in my applications, 1) I may benefit from generalities, and 2) I am not in harm’s way. Firstly, Maura “was a treasury of particulars,” in a place where the emphasis on generalities ended her story (189). However, when presenting myself to the admissions officers, I want a balance that shows my generalities too. I want to show that I match the general category of the university’s ideal student but also write my own chapters of particularity and prove why my story — over many others on the same shelf — deserves to be chosen. In terms of the second point, if I don’t get accepted into my top schools, it won’t kill me — a key distinction between my juggling for particularities and generalities and Maura’s.
But upon second thought, am I really any safer than Maura was? On the mental side, sharing a page of myself with colleges at risk of rejection still threatens my sense of security. I’m scared. Then a physical standpoint: Maura’s last moments were in a yoga studio. Is that any more dangerous than my dance studio? I share the same generality that killed Maura. From the gunman’s eyes, I too am Maura. To him, we’re both the same “specimen of the category ‘woman’” — a genre not worth reading closely (191). So despite the occasional advantages of fitting a category, Taylor’s prioritization of particularities is reassuring. Ultimately, the details that make me me are barely remembered by admissions offices — they’ll be remembered by people like my future college English teacher (regardless of the school I end up at); similarly, while the pain of college rejections is temporary, the legacy of our particularities on the people who care is permanent. Particularities hold immense power. The way English majors “savor specificities of phrasing” and “pounce upon and explore a single word” in the books from their university libraries, we must all savor, pounce upon and explore, be in awe of — and most importantly — celebrate people based on the unique diction that make up their book (191). We must individually hold ourselves for our little characteristics, then collectively tackle the sweeping generalizations and oversimplifications our society makes before it kills more of us. In truly understanding this, perhaps we can see that studying crucial particularities, such as through an English major, has an undeniable significance that cannot be outweighed by generalities; perhaps I’m less terrified of college applications now.
If you’d like to read the original essay that Sophia responds to here, please click here.
