Kaylee
I’m a transfer student coming to BYU this semester. I have about a year and a half left of schooling. I am minoring in editing, and I am hoping to become a book editor when I graduate/grow up. I love reading and usually finish a book in a couple of days depending on my schedule. I also spend a lot of time looking up quotes online. I love being an English Major!
You know, just casually throwing a jacket over my shoulder in a field.
I was 10 years old when my mother handed me her copy of Pride & Prejudice by Jane Austen (now one of my favorite authors) and that was when my love for literature began. I will gobble up anything from ancient Homer, to 19th century Bronte, to more contemporary C.S. Lewis. One of my favorite things to do is talk about novels, poems, or plays and compare all of their movie adaptations (of course the books are always better). I am beyond excited to be studying literature at BYU and to do it surrounded by my fellow enthusiasts!
One of my favorite books is Les Miserables by Victor Hugo.
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Meredith
As a freshman, my enthusiasm for this major is matched only by my love for books – although the two might be connected. While packing away my childhood I realized just how much I’ve written and how I have dreamed my entire life about this career. I read a ridiculous amount. Half of what I read convinces me that I could write and half makes me cry in awe and humiliation. I love to review books and I participate in the National Novel Writing Month in November.
One of my favorite books is Charlotte Bronte’s Jane Eyre
My graphite incarnation.
All my life I have embraced language and literature as a second nature. (I was even chastised in elementary school for “reading too much.”) My love of stories has often inspired me to create my own stories, whether through novel-writing — especially NaNoWriMo — or through my own crazy style of cartooning. I enjoy learning about and experiencing many subjects, including biology, music, history and biking, but I always turn back to the study of literature because it tells us so much about the human experience and empowers us to see meaning in the world.
One of my favorite books is Norton Juster’s The Phantom Tollbooth.
Adam is the official cartoonist for the English Society blog. Watch for his humorous art in posts to come…
Working at the front desk of the Wordsworth Trust museum.
I sincerely believe that behind every English student is a great English teacher. Mine was named Mrs. Ringen. She also taught me how to think critically, write with purpose, and read with a passion. If it wasn’t for her, I wouldn’t have decided to study English literature at school.
For me, being a literature student is more of a lifestyle choice than an area of study. It runs deeper than a desire to be a teacher or a writer. I decided a long time ago that I wasn’t going to make a career choice based on money but rather on what would help me become a better human being. Reading literature helps us understand others’ stories, and these stories teach us how we can live and work together as human beings. I still strongly believe that being a teacher and a storyteller and can help me live the most Christ-like life possible, because what was Christ? A teacher and a storyteller.
One of my favorite books is Heart of Darkness by Joseph Conrad
You can see me blog, “Mere Ramblings” at http://shrpeter.wordpress.com/
Shane serves as the Vice-President of the English Society and manages the English Society blog.
Katie getting caught in the rain . . . again
When I’m not cooking curry or eating desserts, I’m usually traveling. I’ve been all over the United States, from California Adventures to Disneyworld, from Pike’s Peak to Times Square. Last Fall semester, I explored France, Italy, Scotland, and England, enjoying art, food, music, and cultures different from my own. While I love doing yoga in ancient ruins and being enraptured by nature, I’ve learned that reading—as cliché as this is going to seem—is another way to go on adventures by exploring how a writer expresses what it means to be human.
I first decided to be an English major because I had lofty goals: I wanted to be a writer and to change the world and to make people happy. Although these are still my goals, I’ve realized that there are many ways to learn and to feel that I had never before realized were possible. Learning how to think and learning new perspectives has enabled me to stretch myself—as a scholar, as a citizen, as a friend, as a daughter, as a child of God. Our universal status of all being children of a loving and an all-powerful God does not mean that our existence here on earth is completely and totally universal.
Modernist writers Virginia Woolf and James Joyce show me their world of determining who you are in a broken, changing world. The experiences of Buchi Emecheta and Ama Ata Aidoo show me their world of being African and the trials they endured. John D. Fitzgerald, just as much as F. Scott Fitzgerald, shows me a world of what it can mean to be American, of struggling in the American West or with the American dream. And there’s a beauty in that adventure, that universal search of what it means to be human.
One of my favorite books is Viktor E. Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning
Check out my blog! The bippity boppity beautiful blog
Katie serves as secretary for the English Society
Let’s get to know each other and show our pride as lovers of language, literature, and writing!
We’re going to imitate the recent “I’m a Mormon” campaign conducted by the LDS church and try to get English majors and minors to submit a profile for our blog. I posted my own profile as an example. How can you submit your profile? Easy! Use this Google form to get us all the info we need. It should only take about 10 minutes to complete. We’ll get your profile up ASAP and notify you when it is live. We hope you will come back and browse the other profiles to see your English friends and fellow English Society members!
Gideon & Karen Burton at home with books
Although it’s been many years since I was an undergraduate, I still consider myself an English major. Literature has defined my life, and the analytical and expressive skills I gained as a BYU English major have served me well throughout life. My wife is an avid reader and has been part of a book club for years. We are always talking about books. Just this morning I was telling Karen about a book I discovered in a Barnes & Noble in Denver last week called The Graphic Canon, which looks at the history of stories from a visual point of view (I might use it in a future history of civ course I teach…). She is reading a novel today called Voss set in 19th-century Australia. I have a passion for writing sonnets, which you can sample at my sonnet blog, Open Source Sonnets.
One of my favorite books is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick.
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Have you heard those tragic stories about people who, after spending four years (or more) completing their English major, don’t like to read anymore? To me, they’re sort of like the tales of the Loch Ness monster: people have supposedly seen it, but I certainly haven’t. And I don’t intend for it to happen to me.
I think the reason such things occur (this is all conjecture, though, since like I said, I’ve yet to meet a book-less former English major) is that people get so swept up into their reading assignments for school that they forget to make reading their own experience. Then, when they graduate, they’ve forgotten how to actually enjoy reading.
Of course, when I first started book blogging, I hadn’t thought about any of this. I just thought, hey, I read a ton. Why not blog about it for the world to see?
I couldn’t have predicted how simply joining the book interwebs would both propel my reading and make me enjoy it more. We think of reading as a solitary activity–but in our digital age, it doesn’t have to be. Continue reading
Welcome to the English Society! We serve the English majors, past and present, of Brigham Young University, as well as any others interested in what we do– which is mostly geek out about literature!