How It Happened that
I Became An English Major in the First Decade of the Twenty-First Century
I feel that words are one of the few ways that we can connect and impact each other. Each word I read gives me this impression of another world, life experience, or person close to my heart of far from it. These read experiences have almost become my experiences as I have often found my self closer to the people I read about than I am to many of the people I share daily experiences with.
Through the written word, I have experienced running around New York City with Holden in The Cather in the Rye, thanks to J.D. Salinger or shared in the disarray of a life spinning out from under you thanks to Sylvia Plath’s The Belljar. Not only did these and many others shape my life, they changed my life. These sense of living the experiences of the things I read reminded me of Jeremy Hsu’s essay “The Secrets of Storytelling: Why we love good yarn.” Hsu tries to examine what makes a story good and makes us attach to it. He points out that one of the elements that make a story good is the ability to experience the emotions and experiences of others, which is what makes me love literature and English enough to study it as a major.
This connection to literature is taken on in a different light by Lee Siegel’s essay “Unsafe at Any Read.” In a tone of Irony, he attempts to bring to question if literature betters peoples lives. In a series of examples he tries to show how it doesn’t only to step on his own words. I can only know how literature changes my life and makes my life a better and more enriched. It has introduced me to places, times, and people I would not normally encounter. It pushes me to think outside of my life and my world to question my thoughts, ideas, and beliefs by giving me examples of others. Whether or not literature is to be taken at face value or question, Siegel does not address. Most importantly, it makes us think.
Thinking and question everything, including ourselves is the greatest gift that we could ever be given. It allows us to not only partake in the great novels and stories but to engage a dialog of questions. While, as a student at North Idaho College, I began to study literature because of the worlds that it gave me, I continued to study literature at the University of Idaho because the tools that it gave me. The tools that it gave me were to question, analyze, process, and to dig for meaning and look for meaning in everything. These are skills that I have taken outside of reading literature to the greater sense of my life. I feel that by studying literature I have taken way these great tools for life. When I think about it, it is not the love of connecting with other people that made me love Literature, to major in it, but my love to question everything.