Kelly Stratton
 

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

            I’ve always been a writer; I have boxes full of journals I’ve kept since the seventh grade, towering stacks of copies of the school newspapers I edited for my high school, and an equal number of creative writing binders full of revisions and final drafts. There was never really any question of what I would do in college, and no one who had ever read my work was surprised when I declared my major. However, when I reached college, and branched out into not only creative writing, but also literature, I was a bit dismayed to find that my knowledge of the books in the canon was seriously lacking. I knew what books I should have read, but for whatever reason, my fingers had never caressed Shakespeare’s pages of sonnets, never lifted The Iliad, never sifted through Dickinson.

            When I sat in literature classes, I saw syllabuses as opportunities, not burdens. I felt like it was a privilege, as cheesy as it sounds, to get to study these works; I almost felt as though I was meeting a celebrity upon opening a ‘classic’. However, after taking infinite survey courses, and then discovering the wonder that was creative non-fiction writing, I felt like I was studying a sliver of literature that was too narrow for what I was interested in. I wanted contemporary writing— not instead of the traditional cannon, but in addition to it.

            As far as the abridgment of great works, I think that Gopnik raises some wonderful points, and has actually changed my mind on the subject. The snobby, English major Kelly would love to say that if a person can’t get through the book, then its meaning is probably wasted on him or her anyway. However, after reading his points, and after begging my chemical engineer boyfriend to read some of my favorite books and hearing him say they’re too much and he doesn’t have the time, I’ve become an advocate (albeit a quiet one) for abridgement (but not for all books, or for all people… I could write pages on this, but am out of words).