Rebeka Clement

How It Happened That I Became An English Major

In The Early Years Of The Twenty-First Century

            I began attending the University of Idaho in the fall of 2002 with a declared double major of philosophy and history.  I took a few upper-division philosophy classes and a history class and then started signing up for classes after getting someone to remove my registration block, based on personal interest.  I ended up taking all of the creative non-fiction classes and the poetry classes and became interested in seeking an English degree.  At this time, probably due to a lack of direction and post-teen twenty-first century existential anxiety, my grades continued to fall until it became necessary for me to take a year off.  During this year off I managed a movie theatre in Lewiston. 

I decided to come back to school because I was thinking of moving out of the area but it seemed silly that I hadn’t completed what I came here to do.  I was considering a business degree or specifically an international business degree with a Spanish minor, I also considered biophysics and bioethics because I think that these are very well paid fields that are doing and will do very well.  I also considered being a radiographer or something. 

After reviewing my transcripts I realized that one of my best options was to follow one of the paths I had accidentally begun to etch out for myself by choosing classes for personal interest. I also decided that I was probably interested in these things innately and might enjoy life better if I chose to be a writer and a painter instead of a bioethnitician.  It was between English, Philosophy, and the Fine Arts.  I chose English.  It kind of sucked because I had fulfilled my requirements for all the writing courses that I loved so much and was stuck with two years of literature classes, so I haven’t gotten to write for a class in a while.  In any case, the transition, from classes that forced me to work creatively, into more academic learning has been an amazing and changing experience.  I’m really glad that I came back to school.

The issues that Donadio raises about the canon are familiar to me because I have encountered them as concepts in education.  In my education I have experienced a wide range of authors with varying perspectives, voices, backgrounds, and modes of thought and have recently become aware that it wasn’t exactly always this way.  I think that the concepts  that we learn from literature are important but also that we can learn what it is we are to learn through many different people and not just from the expressions of who or what was once the exclusive educated class.  It isn’t important to have read certain authors, this is not the content that it seems is important for canonization; a list of authors and titles.  Rather it would seem that the knowledge that can we garner through our understandings of certain texts and the value of this knowledge should be canonized and it should be recognized that it could be gained from many different works and through many different modes of thought and pedagogy.  I guess that I think that there is more in this world to know than can be known in a lifetime, so it seems a shame to only learn as much as possible from one type of authorial character, the authorial character being the male of the educated class.

As a writer I would be concerned about someone abridging my work after I had been gone and was unable to make comment to their additions.  However, I can respect the practice and wouldn’t speak against it considering that the reader imparts reality experience to the text, and making the text more accessible to the reader makes the text more accessible to existence.  I think that if I were to write a great work, it would not exist until it had been read and responded to, and if an abridgement is required to make a text more readable and accessible to the audience then it is a viable and valuable practice.

One more thing about Donadio I was thinking about, where he says that most people don’t know that “Things Fall Apart” references Keats, it’s also true that most people also probably don’t know that a group called The Roots has an album which also shares this title and is referential to both works in its context.