The English Major (pt. 3)

3) 1 course from the start of the twentieth century to the present

As very much the 90s child that I am, my interests most definitely skew towards the new. My favorite authors all wrote in the twentieth century: Wilde, Beckett, Steinbeck, Hemingway, Wharton. As such, the number of classes I've taken that would fall under this category are too many to count: basically, every class in English that I haven't had to take to satisfy the major requirements in the other categories have been in this group.

I wrote earlier about how I took American Drama with Donald Pease, a class which changed my life. I have a stack of Pulitzer plays to read on break -- cute little paper pamphlets printed by the Dramatists Play Service that are typeset atrociously, but are cheap and do the job. Law school applications (I saw online in a fee summary that I've spent $1280 USD in total) have entirely bankrupted me. But I still try and scrounge up money to get reading material. From what I wrote earlier on the class:

ENGL 047: American Drama, Professor Donald Pease

Pease is the rock star of the English department. He lectures to a standing-room-only class of 250 people, and we rent out the Loew Theater in order to house all these students. Legend has it that he has a photographic memory, reading books flipping through pages like a magazine. He also remembers all of the 250 papers he grades, and greets each student by name and talks to them about the intricacies of their paper topics. My best friend, Rebecca Armistead, calls him the "commercial guy", because he is unflappable and never stumbles or gets a single word wrong in his perfectly scripted lectures, which are delivered extemporaneously without reference to notes. His class is known colloquially as "A Play a Day", and we read a play each class day (about twenty to thirty plays) throughout the term, surveying the development of American Theater from Eugene O'Neill onwards. He takes a psychoanalytic approach to the characters and authors of plays, and speaks at a level of complexity so high other professors can't understand him in departmental meetings. Even when telling jokes his level of discourse is higher than most: he once compared the temperament of New Englanders to flowers not opening at the many false starts of spring, a flowery poetic anecdote for a commonplace event that had happened to him on the way to visiting his apartment in New York, which he maintains in order to be able to watch plays. He is the leading scholar in the nation on Americanism, and heads the Master of Arts in Liberal Studies program at Dartmouth. He is a cult figure, and since so many students have taken his class, you can find throngs of students doing imitations of his booming, unflappable, voice delivering lectures at uber-levels of complexity whenever the name Pease is mentioned.

I've also taken Postcolonial Literature with Bed Giri. To be fair, he's not always the greatest lecturer and his classes sometimes wander, but he's the nicest guy and knows his stuff well. We read Salman Rushdie, Jean Rhys, Arundhati Roy, Chinhua Achebe, Wole Soyinka, et al. All the writers that have appropriated the English language and infused it with the vibrance and energy of the particular experience of the regions in which they write. My favorite will always be The God of Small Things, a book I read for the International Baccalaureate but didn't find myself liking (since my professor over-dissected it) but on second reading, and with the benefit of two or three years of intellectual growth, I see how its narrative and the way time is woven throughout as one of the prettiest things I have ever read.

My freshman summer I took a class with Melissa Zeiger in British and American Poetry since 1914. The post-World War modernist poets were a bleak read, and I still reel sometimes from the stridency of people like T. S. Eliot. They were so sure about the world, at a time when things were so unsure. Even the way in which they expressed their doubts were coherent and monolithic. I suppose it's all the critical theory that I've been reading as of late. In Zeiger's class I discovered Sylvia Plath's poetry, which is a hundred times better than her prose, which is not at all shabby in its own right.

I often think English classes are reading lists on which we apply critical lenses, which sometimes makes me feel guilty for taking them given that I think, I could recreate the way in which I learn at home, on my own -- and would be better served taking a class in something for which I couldn't construct such an exercise. One of my forbidden pleasures is walking about Wheelock Books, copying down the reading lists for other English classes, and reading the books on those lists in my own time.

I took Black Women Writers with Shalene Vasquez. As I mentioned, she's one of the toughest women, toughest professors that I've ever met in my entire life. The whole class was filled with black women, and I stuck out like a sore thumb. But, somewhat similar to my readings in postcolonial literature, here was the writing of a social and cultural group that was set aside by the mainstream, and their writing portrayed both their angst and their views on how to resolve these particularist differencs. There were so many books that have ascended to the top of my favorites, like Zora Neale Hurston's Their Eyes Were Watching God, that I wouldn't have read otherwise. The best essay I've read on Black Women Writers is by Zadie Smith, entitled 'What Does Soulful Mean?' in which she describes the first time she read 'Their Eyes Were Watching God". I found the essay in a preface to Beloved in a Dublin bookstore, and I was absolutely riveted and I wrote Professor Vasquez the very next day. What I wrote earlier:

ENGL 067: Black Women Writers, Professor Shalene Vasquez

First day of class all of the people in the classroom including the professor were black women, except me. Professor Vasquez handed out a questionnaire with three questions intended to be used for shaping the eventual pedagogy and focus of the class. It read: "1. What does it mean to be black?" "2. What does it mean to be a woman?" "3. What does it mean to be a black woman?" Obviously, I was at a loss for words, especially since the second class was a reading (out-loud) of the responses given earlier. I managed to sneak by with some nonsense about how the subaltern lacked a voice, the position of the disadvantaged commenting on society through literature gave a perspective that was worth considering. No, that was not what my professor wanted. She was one of the most dedicated, organized and strong people I have ever met, pushing my writing further through two-page reports each and every single class on the assigned novels. It was always not succinct or concise enough, and if it were, I had not gone into sufficient detail. My writing improved leaps and bounds after meeting with her extensively during office hours, and I fell in love with a set of books so culturally distinct with my background that it is not likely I would have picked them up on a bookshelf, books that are now on my list of favourites, such as Zora Neale Hurston's 'Their Eyes Were Watching God". It was a privilege to read such texts surrounded by people who were culturally and ethnically invested in the subject matter we were discussing, and have my opinion acknowledged and reciprocated.