Whitney Strong

It was never a question, really.  Books have always been my refuge.  I am fascinated by words, the workings of a sinuous sentence, and the minds whose muses master them.  I escape to the worlds I find in books, where I can live vicariously, dream big, and come into contact with other people who I either wanted to emulate or whose lives made me feel that much better about my own. 

Or, maybe it was because my grandma always said, “If you have a book, you’ll never be bored.”  Honestly, I haven’t really thought about being an English major in the context of “How it Happened” because books, words, language, culture are what I love and I figured the whole “real world application” thing would figure itself out later.   

So, here I am: an English major in the early years of the twenty-first century.  As far as the questions Donadio tackles concerning canons, I profess similar views to Lilla’s: ''What Americans yearn for in literature is self-recognition'' (3).  Literature, to be powerful, must speak to its audience in a way that changes them; it can open their minds to new ways of being, teach them about other cultures, or simply teach them more about themselves.  Either way, the outdated “classic” language of many highly lauded, traditionally relevant pieces of literature has been lost on the times.  While they are important points of reference, traditional works are best juxtaposed against the contemporary.   

Yet, no matter the work, it is the author and the reader’s discretion that decides what is pertinent.  Gopnik spends a great amount of time in his article discussing additions and subtractions to literature when the bottom line is we English majors and literature lovers alike eschewed math for a reason.