English Club Chatter

I read a lot, and always have, so I can't really nail down the exact novel or author that made me want to be an English major. At the moment, my favorite author is Jennifer Crusie in all her many forms. I am very excited about her new book "Anyone But You," and have pre-ordered it from amazon.com, like I always do with her books. She has a funny, quirky style that keeps me interested and entertained. I especially enjoy that she sets her books in Ohio, which I can identify with easily.

You asked. I answerd. In a very LONG WAY. :)

Why am I an English Major? I would not say it was because of my enthusiasm for books, but rather my enthusiasm to write (and I am not saying I don’t love books, because I love books). Since I have been in grade school I have had this dream to be an author. I don’t even know where it came from. I still remember scribbling during recess and lunch--when I could have been playing hopscotch. I remember winning a young authors contest in sixth grade and getting to go to a conference and listen to a speaker. (For me it was a real thrill, I knew I wanted to be a writer.) Now I am not sure what happened in high school because although I was involved in all the writing activities I could hold onto, and I still wrote like a crazy --story after story…when I graduated I wanted to go into Special Education. (Someone had put in my head that I couldn’t write as a major--so I kept it as a minor.) That lasted for about a year at OSU-M. I transferred to Kent State University, and tried to start a major in Recreation Therapy--minor in creative writing. (And I probably would have stayed given different circumstances).--but something has me back at OSU-m and what do you know--that minor that I have had for the past three years has finally been changed to my major.

And I have never changed in my writing habits--I doodle small poems and quips on my notes in class (sorry about that professors), on napkins during lunch ( my friend actually bought me a mini-notepad to solve this) and my computer is full of short stories (most unfortunately unfinished) I even have a large file for all my “treasures.” I don’t know where I would be without words, without my English major.

I can’t tell you what compels me to write, or to read--to be an English Major but here is a list of my favorite books/authors (Classics and non): Books: The Awakening, This Bridge Called My Back--( Audre Lorde piece in this collection), Harry Potter, Riders Of The Purple Sage, The BIBLE (had to throw that in) Authors/poets: EE Cummings, Jane Austen , and feminist writers

…oh AND you know what literary think I love to read: The Immaculate Cauldron--WOW it is amazing-- If you like to write, paint, draw, take pictures, you should submit your work to it. I know I AM!!!

"litterary think" ...I think I cioned a new phrase ally...hahaha...

When I first started here at Mansfield I thought that I wanted to study philosophy. Along with my first writing course I took intro to ethics—which the instructor basically taught as a "how to argue" class. I ended up using a lot of the principals from the ethics class in my 110 papers and it was a successful connection. When I took 367 Dion talked about the differences between philosophy and rhetoric and I realized that the connection I had found to be successful was nothing new. This led to a small obsession with rhetoric and specifically praxis...i.e. – “what's the point.”

A problem with philosophy is that there's really no end to the questioning and the arguing – a similar problem that I found with theology when I was in seminary. But, with rhetoric the practical connections are not only important but absolutely necessary, and it is this connection that caused me to fall in love with the study of effective language practice.

I needed to start some sort of career, and teaching seemed like a decent fit for me. As far as what I would enjoy teaching, English also seemed to be the only thing that might be enjoyable.
One of the problems was, however, that I was a terrible reader and still am. It takes me forever to read anything, particularly if it is something which requires any thought beyond plot. My mind tends to drift rather easily, and I find myself pages later having no idea what words I had just been looking at. Still, I had managed to get through a lot of books. The authors I read the most were John Irving, Tom Robbins, and Kurt Vonnegut, though I also attempted to tackle Gunter Grass, Italo Calvino, and Thomas Pynchon, among others. While I still couldn't tell you some of the deeper meanings in these, I recognized that there was some very interesting writing going on within.
So, for me, I had no idea what college English classes would entail, but I fell in love with it immediately. While reading remained a chore, thinking and discussing filled an important void in my composition, and I miss it terribly when I am away from it.
Writing was the one area where I thought I might have some success going into the major, but, again, the idea of what writing at a collegiate level might entail was an unknown. Fortunately, I was able to raise my writing level along with my thinking and discussing levels.
So, unlike many of you, the English major was chosen by default for me. Luckily, it became a love affair. I attribute that largely to the environment at OSU-M.

for all you harry potter fans http://harrypotter.warnerbros.com/ watch the previews! POTTER RULES. ( okay so that was immature. but he does.)

I'm with you, Jim, I love Tom Robbins and Kurt Vonnegut, too. Vonnegut's been one of my favorites for a long time, ever since I read 'Slapstick'. I go through phases when it comes to picking books, i.e. I read one that I like, and then I have to read everything by that author. Right now I'm on a Joyce Carol Oates kick. When I want to find something new, I always just go to the Pulitzer website and pick a winner or nominee. I am never disappointed. Try Michael Chabon's 'The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay' it's excellent!!
As for why I'm an english major, I too went to the 'Young Author's Convention' and I spent most of my time with my nose buried in books instead of playing outside (so I was a pasty, soft kid). It was a natural choice. When I was a kid, I formed a 'Reading Club', (in which I was the only member). And I was a regular at the library; I would take out ten or twelve books at a time.
I love everything I learn in my classes here, even the grammar! I finally came to terms with my nerdiness a few years ago, but Mary Joyce did laugh at me last quarter because I said I went to the library for fun.

That's funny. When I was your age, I went to the library to meet people like you.

Another great thread! Although, it may shock some of you to hear it, your profs were all undergrads once too, so they faced the same choices about what to major in, what career to pursue. My own path to English is fairly bumpy and wobbly. I enjoyed reading when I was young, but not in any kind of disciplined way. I read a lot of fantasy and sci-fi, and also some works in the long background of those genres (myths, epics, tales of knights and vikings and such). English in high school was something I more or less enjoyed, but it wasn't my main thing (music was). Two literary works I remember enjoying very much were King Lear (the first Shakespeare play I really connected with) and T.S. Eliot's poem "Rhapsody on a Windy Night." I didn't know much about poetry, but I had to do a presentation on this poem, and I really liked it. I don't know if I knew what it meant, but the vivid images caught me, and Eliot has such a powerful sense of rhythm. It's moodiness and even slight sleaziness probably also appealed to me as an adolescent guy.
I started in university as a music major, studying clarinet at UToronto's Faculty of Music. I loved music, but I got increasingly depressed by the narrowness of the program and at how little intellectual activity went on among musicians (a lot of performers aren't interested in thinking even about music!). I was taking an elective course on the building blocks of Western Lit. You'd think of it as a CompStudies course. Over the whole year (most courses went that long in Toronto!) we read Homer, Plato, Virgil, Augustine, Dante, chunks of the Bible, and Greek Tragedy. It was an amazing course. We had lectures twice a week and then a tutorial on Fridays with an amazing TA. He turned the whole tutorial group on to what we were reading. Often our discussions would carry on into the lunch hour, and we'd move our tutorial down to the cafeteria. The more excited I got about what I was doing in this course, the less satisfied I became with the music program, so I transferred into Literary Studies and English.
Even so, I still kind of bumbled along. Especially early on in my BA I was a very mixed student. I loved taking philosophy courses, for instance (Plato and Aristotle, Nietzsche, Kierkegaard, Camus, Martin Buber), but I did terribly in them. I took a Shakespeare course with Northrop Frye, one of the great Shakespeare scholars, but I'm not sure I got much out of it. There were some literary highlights, though. I loved the moderns. Joyce's Ulysses really excited me (sorry Trish!), and I had a group of friends who were keen on it too. (One of them went mad, but I don't think it was Joyce's fault.) I also got into Faulkner, Kafka, Borges. And I took a course on Modern Poetry that was one of the most influential courses I ever took. The professor open my eyes and mind about poetry, and I began to get some sense of how poems worked. Eliot, Yeats, Hopkins, Wallace Stevens.
Anyway, I continued to wander away from and back to literary study. After my BA I spent a number of years working as a singer (classsical music -- Renaissance and Baroque). Then I came back to university for an MA in English, loving courses in Beowulf and Old English, biblical allusion in poetry from Milton to contemporaries (with the same poetry prof), and Shakespeare (who now started to make more sense!). Then I taught high school for several years, which had its ups and downs. Finally I was drawn back to school again to do a Ph.D. in Renaissance Studies, and here I am, finally (I think) reasonably comfortable.
I think maybe Norman mentioned in an earlier post that most of us are profs because the job allows us to continue doing what we love best: reading, thinking about, discussing, and writing about literature. That's certainly true for me. Sometimes it feels almost embarrassing to get paid (though I must say at other times it feels like we don't get paid enough!!). Those times are generally when we're in the thrill of a hot class discussion, conveying what we've learned so far, and learning even more from all of you. Or when we're doing research, deeply immersed in something that moves us, and struggling to express our conclusions (however tentative) to our readers. Or even just reading something new (or old) and wonderful. Writers I've discovered recently, for instance, include W.G. Sebald (amazing and totally original -- is it literature? history? memoir? who knows), Ian McEwan ("Atonement" is outstanding -- READ IT), and Philip Pullman (his trilogy "His Dark Materials" is supposedly a children's series, but it takes off from Milton and Blake and does a kind of quantum physics/Gnostic riff on the death of God -- WOW!!).
Sorry to run on so much, but my route to where I am now has been a bit roundabout.

HH

Well, you've inspired me to try Ulysses again... though I will probably need the Cliff Notes.
I do tend to stick to more recent literature, but I need to expand my horizons (I'm going to take your Shakespeare and British Lit next summer, Dr. Hamlin). So, I might be knocking on your office door with all sorts of questions like, "What the heck is going on here?"

Knock on my door anytime, Trish! If you're interested in tackling Ulysses, I'd recommend a book by Stuart Gilbert called "James Joyce's Ulysses." I read it when I first read Joyce's novel, and I helped me a lot. Basically, Ulysses is modelled on The Odyssey, and each episode in the novel is based on an episode in Homer. Each episode also has a corresponding art and technique. All this sounds a little schematic, but that seems to be how Joyce's mind worked. Once you figure out what he's up to, it's easier to read and enjoy. Gilbert bases his explanation on a scheme that Joyce himself supplied. Recent critics have suggested that Joyce -- always a joker -- was playing with Gilbert and that the scheme he gave him was exaggerated and overprecise. This may be, but I still found it helpful. For instance, there is an episode called "The Oxen of the Sun" (the titles aren't actually included in the novel as we have it). It takes place in a maternity hospital where a woman is waiting to give birth. The technique, according to Gilbert, is "embryonic development." What Joyce does is narrate the episode in a way that gives the history of the English language (as the language develops, so does the birth scene). Each chunk of the narrative immitates a different writer or period in English literary history, from it's primitive origins in chants, songs and rhymes, up to a kind of slang-filled American-style street scene. Weird but amazing!

HH

Well, I am not yet an official english major. I fear academic committment.

I didn't choose my path. It chose me. I can't add, graph, experiment, or color inside the lines, but I can read a 300 page book in under an hour, and sometimes, I can take people on a journey through language. I was quite young when I realized that I am what most people would lable a speed-reader. My parents bought me the complete "Little House on the Prarie" series by Laura Ingalls Wilder on christmas when I was about 10 or so, and I was through the first 3 volumns by that night. It's just what I do. I am very lucky, in that I don't have to work at reading. But it's also a curse. Like I said, I can't do math in any way shape or form. My brain is lopsided. In highschool, on the ACTS I got all of the language comp questions right. My guidance counselor thought it was the greatest thing until she realized that I'd only gotten 60% of the math problems correct. I still remember seeing her face fall, like damn, she though she had a prodigy on her hands or something. That's how highschool was for me. I have always had a problem with people of supposed authority who believe that I should respect them entirely because of their position. I just cannot do that, and many of my teachers expected that. I wrote in class to escape, to create a space where I was safe and free at the same time. I've never thought much of security. I won various prizes with my poetry throughout my highschool years, with no encouragement from my teachers. I went to banquets at universities where the other participants would attend with their english teachers or their blessings, but I did not have that. That's why being at OSU-M has been like encountering an oasis in a vast desert. I actually know people who speak my language now. I had very close friends in highschool, but no one I could truly share the literary part of myself with. It's refreshing and challenging.
As for the authors who have shaped me throughout the years, there have too many to name. Jack Kerouac was the first author I read who really just handed me a key. I would sit in study hall and read the dharma bums or desolation angels and be far away from the grungey grey walls around me. Joyce Johnson, Bret Easton Ellis, Chuck Palahniuk, Gary Snyder, the Golden Bough, Joseph Conrad, books of paintings by the pre-raphealite painters, especially J.W. Waterhouse... these are what shape me and continue to shape me.

Monica -- move toward the light. Don't go over to the dark side. It's time to come out as an English major!

HH

I agree. Monica, we are here for you just stand up and say " Hi, my names monica, and Ive been writing all my life...." and lovingly we will all respond ( in wonderful prose) " hello monica"

I love that this blog is becoming quasi-confessional! And I love that I keep meeting people for the first time and then connecting them to their comments here. I will spare you my path to the English major and eventual junior professordom (dumb?) except to say that I started off as a History major in college and realized that I would never know for sure who sunk the USS Maine to begin the Spanish American war. I panicked when I realized that one couldn't locate historical truth and became an English major instead. I'm not sure why I though truth wouldn't be an issue in lit studies.

But back to the original question: I love Michael Chabon's _The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay_ (which someone else mentioned) as well as _Wonder Boys_ and his short stories _Werewolves of Pittsburgh_(?). Others that have moved me and I feel the need to push upon anyone who will listen: Edward P. Jones's _The Known World_, Ann Petry's _The Street_ (think Wright's _Native Son_ but by and about a woman), Ralph Ellison's _Invisible Man_, Sherman Alexie's _The Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven_. Enjoy!

I didn't realize that Michael Chabon also wrote Wonderboys- I loved the movie, though (Oola!). I think you and I have similar tastes; I read The Lone Ranger and Tonto for a class with Dr. Burdette and I really loved it. And I just bought The Known World and I plan on reading it over the break. You'll have to give me your insight on it :)

aw, how sweet! OK, I am an english major, as in, I major in english, as in I'd rather write something, read something, or argue about something that I am writing or have read, and...I never finish anything.
I believe that is what is required.

Monica, it's probably not a requirement, but it sure puts you in some decent compan

This is funny. I wish I could romanticize my journey towards, and my love for the English field as many of you have, but, truthfully, I decided to finish my English degree because I was already half done (lol).

Granted, after all my prior bad mouthing of the discipline out of ignorance, I have realized the importance of the uses of literature as an explanation of a particular time period through my English classes here at OSU-M(especially in relation to my experience with History), yet still, I find discussing literary theory and the contours of rhetoric more intruiging (and just flat out useful) with what I am trying to accomplish before I take my final breaths so to speak. Yeah,I never had an epiphany when I was younger about what I wanted to do - besides effect some sort of change.

I really did not really read any classical literature till college - which was because i had to...and I still find reading some fiction to be a chore sometimes (I'm still struggling to get through Fight Club and that is one of my new found favorite movies)...I did not write any poetry till college (you may be able to find me scribbling in a journal - thanks sarah, but to me everything that I write is just a building block) I really did not have this life long aspiration of being a writer...I just knew I could do it and that I always had a lot to say(especially after my last paper in English 110 where I could finally express myself in a way that I knew I could - I got an A on that paper, but I earned a C+ in the class, my lowest English grade outside of high school - mostly because I would get bored and just walk out of class(lol)).

I hope I didn't offend anyone with this post, because I feel the same way about history - I just chose it because I was at my best with it at the time. I think I'm becoming more of a writer by trade than anything else. After my mom saw the newest copy of our mag (make sure you pick it up!) and she struggled to say (b/c of the slurred speech due to a stroke) that it was hard for her to believe that I was able to write what I did, I think my belief in myself writing more out of a wierd providential purpose (in a secular sense) than out of love re-ascended itself to the fore. Thus no matter what I end up doing, I think I'll always think of my writing and other forms of expression in a similar fashion.

*Authors whom have inspired me are Howard Zinn, Cornel West, Martin Luther King, Jr., Staughton Lynd, Langston Hughes and some others, but i'm more inspired by some of the instructors that I've had - both in the English and History disciplines.

This post was way too long, but knowing me, it'll be my first and last one (lol). Oh yeah, if I had to do the whole English thing over again - the focus would've probably been in rhetoric...

peace

"I write for the same reason I breathe - because if I didn't, I would die."
Isaac Asimov

"When I was a young boy, they called me a liar. Now that I'm all grown up, they call me a writer."
Isaac Bashevis Singer

"It was unavoidable, my writing. I feel I had no choice in the matter, no more than I had about an unfortunate bone structure and a healthy head of hair."
Maureen Howard

"Writers write for fame, wealth, power and the love of women."
Sigmund Freud
(that ones for Austin)