Kate Elgee

How It Happened That I Became An English Major In The Early Years Of The Twenty-First Century

            My father’s only advice to me as he waved goodbye from the driveway of our old house, my green station wagon stuffed full of books and pillows and George Foremans, was “Make sure you major in something that will get you a job.”  You can imagine his disappointment when I announced at the Thanksgiving dinner table that I had declared English as my major.  And no, I didn’t want to teach.  My rationalization at the time was that I liked to write, I had always been given A’s in literature class, and it sounded at least a little more promising than “General Education,” although now rounding the corner of my senior year at the University of Idaho with no prospective jobs, General Education is starting to sound not so bad after all.  It was supposed to be a temporary solution, only until I could find a “real” major.  But somehow, I could find nothing else that would hold my attention quite like reading and writing – it satiated in a way that numbers and Petri dishes didn’t.  I always knew I was “that half of the brain,” as my mom always said, ever since my sixth birthday when I got 48-count set of Prismacolor colored pencils instead of Barbie dolls like all of my sisters.  But still, English just isn’t practical.  My parents have since decided that law school is practical.  And no, I don’t want to teach.

            One of my frustrations within the curriculum, however, is mirrored in Donadio’s essay.  I find it curious that I can be a graduating English major and yet I still haven’t read even the “enrichingly abridged” versions of works like Beowulf, the Odyssey, and Moby Dick.  What little knowledge I have of the classics can be attributed to high school and since then I have encountered a great many “bored” professors who prefer Jewish-Indian minority literature to the “out-dated” canon.  I understand the need for the literature we read to reflect the issues and criticisms of our time, I even understand the need for the encompassment of voices that have been left out of literature for hundreds of years to be heard, but I don’t understand the extent to which we seem willing to accomplish this.  If I wanted to repeatedly read Maxine Hong Kingston’s struggle for personal identity within America, I would join a book club, not spend thousands of dollars a year going to a university.  I suppose I could order Orion’s version of Jane Eyre off Amazon.com and look up the really important passages on Sparknotes, but that just seems a contribution to commercialization at it’s best which I refuse to support.  And I haven’t completely given up hope on English just yet.  Although I think I am going to have to teach.