A small speech for our graduating English majors, Brooklyn College, 2026

I was asked to speak at this. Here’s my speech.

Good evening everyone. I’m so honored to be a part of this.

I thought I’d talk not about your futures, which I can’t possibly know, but about literary studies, which we both know a bit.

I’m going to talk about the studious side of things. How we read. What we’re looking for when we read. What we hope to get from it. Why we keep doing it and why it should never stop.

It’d be easier, I suppose, to talk about the advantages of an English degree. Here you’ve had space and time to get better at communication and learning how communication works. So far as I know, we’re the only species with written language, and perhaps the only species that thinks in words, or even that knows what a word is, as a concept, and not just as a particular communicative object: we wouldn’t have come so far without words. Words aren’t the only thing that matter but surely knowing how to use them and knowing what other people are up to with them matters as much as so many other things you could have devoted yourself to while you were here.

We’re enduring the catastrophes that come from those who don’t think words matter much. We need so much better than speaking freely without thought; we need so much more than automatic pseudo-language, so much better than noise. During your time here, you’ve become better, I hope, at dispelling some of that noise, and at making sense and insisting on sense.

But that’s all so serious. So: this afternoon, while shopping for some new bookshelves – a hazard of this profession! – I ended up on the website for The Container Store, and I laughed a little. It’s nearly a pleonasm, a tautology, a redundancy: for surely to contain something is to store it. You can’t get the one without the other. You had me at Container!

It’s that habit of thought that I hope you’ve caught while you’ve been with us. The habit of getting snagged on a word or a phrase; the habit of wondering why a word is, what other word might have been used, what else you can do with it.

Your habit should be the habit of not just recognizing patterns in language. Of course, you should be able to recognize allusions; you should be able to make something of the nuances of assorted forms English and other languages that aren’t quite your own, some quite old and some seemingly from the future; you should be adept at overhearing how one text talks, knowingly or unknowingly, to another.

For instance: when you read the first sentence of Beloved, “124 was spiteful,” you should be able to say something about Morrison’s play between the impersonal and personal. Like so: a street address is made of numbers that point to a place, regardless of what’s or who’s there, while also pointing, directly, at a place where people live and make sense of their lives. A street address is a marker of property and possession, of ownership and the public recognition of ownership, matters of no small importance to a novel about slavery, self-ownership, and how we’re disowned by the relentless claims of family. You should be able to say something, furthermore, about the relationship of those numbers, floating somewhere uncertainly between the general and the individual, and the spite of the house, and how that spite suggests that you’re about to read a story of house possessed, and how that knowledge that you’re in a gothic novel correspondingly demands that we recognize the story of American slavery as not just a catastrophe, but as a horror, an event as unsettling and unsettled as haunting.

You should be able to think like this, or better, I hope. You should be able to get snagged by the littlest things, or the things that only seem littlest, because, read like this, “124 was spiteful” is such a very big sentence.

Your habit should be the habit of not just recognizing patterns in language. Because what I’ve done is not just to recognize coherence but to make coherence. It’s too easy to wall off the creative side of the English degree from the literary critical side: too easy, because we critics are also creative.

Did Toni Morrison intend any of what I’ve just said. I have no idea. What we intend, consciously, is just one part of what we do. Did she intend for someone like me to get snagged on her words like this? I’d like to think so, although there’s no certainty there either. Is what I’m saying about Beloved true?

That’s the wrong question, surely. Does it work? Does it enrich our world? Does it make our thinking feel worth it? Does it give us something else to talk about? Does it surprise us?

Because we here in English Literature are, I think, not just in the business of knowledge, and not just in the business of language, but in the business, if we want to call it a business, of delight.

And my hope for you is that all this delight stays worthwhile to you as long as you are.

My warmest possible congratulations.