Students demonstrated how literary messages could help make social progress in the working world at Critiquing Literary Employment, a presentation by the Alpha Sigma Eta English Honor Society as part of Quest Day Wednesday.

ASE members Tasha Burgess, Keturah Hancock and Emily Rundle presented excerpts from books and poems and related it to workplace struggles women and English majors face. ASE member Kirsten Staller read her poem, “Politics Scrawled on my Arms,” to comment on discrimination of people with tattoos in the job market.

Karol Cooper, an associate professor and faculty sponsor for ASE, said the presentation, the result of a semester-long project, was all about taking the literary skills the students learned in the classroom and applying it to analyze how language works in different professions.

“Critiquing these texts is a practice that allows them to make a claim that literary critique is a valuable practice and is quite similar to being a critical writer and thinker in a job,” Cooper said.

Hancock, a senior creative writing major, presented on “Daughters of the Stone” by Dahlma Llanos Figueroa. She said it was important to draw attention to the misconception that a creative writing degree is not as valuable as others.

“Creative writing, specifically…is impactful,” Hancock said. “Writing and language is something that is the nucleus of everything else that we have. The speeches that presidents give, the speeches that social activists give, all of those things work to kind of challenge the world in the same way that the hard sciences do.”

Rundle, president of ASE and English and biology double major, used “Through the Looking-Glass and What Alice Found There” by Lewis Carroll to demonstrate the struggle of women in science, technology, engineering and math fields. She compared a passage about human chess to how women have to work twice as hard as they can to make any progress in STEM positions.

“If you want to get anywhere, you have to be published,” Rundle said. “If you have a female name and you’re less likely to be published, it puts you back. It makes you jump over hurdles.”

Burgess, senior and English and human resources double major, addressed minority struggles through “The Workers Who Build Our Nation,” a poem by Hispanic author Carmen Tafolla. She said she wanted to challenge those in the majority to see how minorities feel when they do not see others like them in their professions.

“When you walk in a room, see how many people look like you in that room,” Burgess said. “[For] those people who don’t look like you…imagine how it may feel for them to access resources…[and] attempt to succeed when they feel like they’re being a threat or they feel like they’re being too mean or they feel like they’re being silenced because they’re not like you.”

Patricia Clark, associate professor of English and associate dean, attended the event and said the presenters brought attention to social problems other students will face in the future.

“I think that one of the key issues that they kind of cut through was this sort of divide between the hard and the soft, STEM versus the humanities and creative arts, and the way that they gave voice and relevance to what they were studying,” Clark said. “I was just really floored by it and proud.”

James Bowe, an English graduate student, said it was great to see the students trying to counter common misbeliefs about writing majors and women in the workplace.

“It’s good to break the stigma that English majors are unemployable in some way,” Bowe said. “I think it’s important to assert the value of intellectual work rather than just producing products. So, I think they did a good job of showing that.”

Jessica Wickham | The Oswegonian