My English Major Experience, revisited

2005 Fall Semester, Major: Environmental Sciences
English Classes:
-College Writing I, short essays and papers

2006 Fall Semester, Major: Modern Languages & Literature
English Classes:
-Intro to Literary Study

2007 Spring Semester, Major: English
English Classes:
-Classical Foundations of Lit., with Michael Sexson, Ovid's Metamorphoses, Lysistrata...
-British Literature I, with Gretchen Minton, Beowulf, Canterbury Tales...
-College Writing II, wrote short papers, with Sydney Rimpau

2007 Fall Semester, Major: English
English Classes:
-British Literature II, Brit Lit from Romantic to Modern periods, with Lisa Eckhert, Wordsworth, Coleridge...
-American Lit. I, Puritanism, Rationalism, Slave Narratives, Amer. Romanticism, realism, with Lin Knutson, Anthology...
-Structure & Function of Lang., Diagramming Sentences, with Gwendolyn Morgan

2008 Spring Semester, Major: English
English Classes:
-American Lit. II, post-Civil War American Lit., with Robert Bennett, Norton Anthology...
-Survey of Lit. Criticism, Formalism, Structuralism, Semiotics, Deconstr., New Historicism...., with Michael Beehler, The Critical Tradition by D. Richter
-Oral Traditions, with Greg Keeler, The Road...

2008 Fall Semester, Major: English
English Classes:
-Child and Young Adult Lit., with Michael Sexson, Fairy Tales...
-Creative Writing, Poetry, with Greg Keeler, The Best American Poetry 2007
-Brit/Old/Mid English Lit., Drama Plays, with Gwendolyn Morgan, Medieval Dramas...
-Studies in a Major Author, Louise Erdrich, Linda Karell, The Painted Drum, Love Medicine...

2009 Spring Semester, Major: English
English Classes:
-Multicultural Lit., Critical Race Theory..., with Susan Kollin, Amer. Born Chinese, House on Mango St....
-Shakespeare, with Gretchen Minton, Hamlet, Troilus and Cressida...
-Emergent Lit., Metafiction: In search of the book, with Sharon Beehler, The Black Book, The Archivist...
-Text & Image, theories and histories of text & image in western culture, with Lynda Sexson, Corona, Wide as the Waters...

2009 Fall Semester, Major: English
English Classes:
-Studies in a Major Author, Vladimir Nabokov, with Michael Sexson, Pale Fire, Lolita, Transparent Things...
-Myth, Metaphor, the tale, transport, & transformation, with Lynda Sexson, Trickster Makes this World...
-Hebrew Bible, I was a grader, but learned a lot, with Susan Cohen, The Harper Collins Bible...

2010 Spring Semester, my final semester, Major: English
English Classes:
-Emergent Lit., Highbrow, Lowbrow, with Michael Sexson, Four Quartets, Haroun and the Sea of Stories, The Following Story...
-Capstone, Epiphany, with Michael Sexson, Four Quartets, Wind in the Willows...
-New Testament, with Mike Miles, The Harper Collins Bible...
-Mystics, Founders, Reform, with Lynda Sexson, The Upanishads, Margery Kemp...


I could not get my spreadsheet onto the blog so I had to create a list to revisit all the English classes I've taken here at MSU. All I can remember from High School English classes is reading The Scarlet Letter and To Kill a Mockingbird. I had to pull out the binders I could find from previous semesters here at MSU to remember what happened in the class or get the names of texts, or in some cases remember the name of the professor. Notice in my listing I only included a couple of texts for each class because it would be very long, but that doesn't mean I don't know what they are.

Where are the epiphanies?

I realized English Lit. was my major after taking Classical Foundations of Literature with Dr. Michael Sexson. During the class I was intimidated, unsure, and unmotivated. But the end of that class sparked many small epiphanies. I discovered I did have something to offer and I was inspired by the material. I also met Sutter. If you look back into my many blogs and find my Classical Foundations Blog you will find the story of how Sutter and I met. As much as I would like to take credit for my transformation, I suppose some of it belongs to Sutter. I found a partner with whom I could be excited about literature, and not about a good book I had read recently, but of the highbrow collection. My other friends were biology majors and never liked to discuss books.
There was never an 'aha' moment, just a small 'oh,' I think I will continue with an English Lit. Major.

It would take too long to discuss each English class I've taken, but while looking back through my classes I remembered loving Lisa Eckert's Brit. Lit. II class and being introduced to Coleridge,
"In Xanadu did Kubla Khan
A stately pleasure-dome decree :
Where Alph, the sacred river, ran
Through caverns measureless to man
Down to a sunless sea.

And to Wordsworth,
"For oft, when on my couch I lie
In vacant or in pensive mood,
They flash upon that inward eye
Which is the bliss of solitude;
And then my heart with pleasure fills,
And dances with the daffodils."

I wonder if this is an epiphany, the flash upon the inward eye, the memory. What Wordsworth remembers from his encounter with the daffodils comes to him in the form of flashes and spurts as he is lying in the pensive, navel-gazing mood. Just as William gives himself over to this sort of epiphanic inspiration, so too do Ratty and Mole during the Piper at the Gates of Dawn. What they remember of the Deity later comes to them in little epiphanic whiffs of the scents that blow through the willows after they have been blessed with forgetfulness. The flash is a showing forth, an epiphany that is found not through looking for an epiphany, but rather for Wordsworth, the epiphany comes in a vacant or pensive mood, like Ratty and Mole are looking for Portly, while their minds elsewhere and unsuspecting they have an epiphanic experience.