The OWU English Department Blog
You asked and we answered! For our first installment of “Ask an English Major (or Minor),” we are answering an anonymous question from one of Prof. Allison’s ENG 150 students about on-campus opportunities for English majors. Because there are so many of them, we have decided to break this answer up into installments!…
In the Spring 2019 semester I took Dr. Allison’s seminar on the aesthetics of British socialism. For this class we read William Morris’s News from Nowhere, a novel about a character who falls asleep and enters the future, where he finds it to be a socialist utopia. Before this seminar, I had taken multiple classes with Dr.…
“The Yellow Wallpaper” (1892) by Charlotte Perkins:
Written in first person as a collection of journal entries, The Yellow Wallpaper details a woman who is diagnosed with a “slight hysterical tendency” following the birth of her child. Her husband, a doctor, prescribes a rest cure in a mysterious colonial mansion that does not sit well with the woman.…
1. DO THE READING
I shouldn’t even have to say this, but I do. You may be laughing, but it’s serious! It’s a little obvious when you don’t. Nothing is worse than being in class when you didn’t do the reading and no one is talking. It is terribly awkward; it’s worse than when I called my 3rd-grade teacher “mom.”…
If I had to recommend something that every English major should do before they graduate it would be to go on a literary pilgrimage. My mother read me the first Harry Potter book when I was in fifth grade and I have loved the books and movies ever since. Last year I went to London with my mom and I turned a mother-daughter trip into a hunt for Harry Potter book and film sites.…
When Dave Lucas became Ohio’s second-ever Poet Laureate on Jan. 1, 2018, he approached the position with a mission. Despite his impressive academic background–B.A. from John Carroll University, MFA from the University of Virginia, and MA and PhD from the University of Michigan, Ann Arbor–Lucas firmly believes poetry belongs outside the classroom as a staple of everyday life.…
The Book of Salt, written by Monique Truong, is one of the reasons that I became an English major. We read this in Professor Comorau’s English 145 class, “Reading the Global Kitchen,” and I continually find myself recommending it to anyone who will listen. Truong’s work fascinated me due to its ability to excellently pose the question of how we, as readers, take narrators at their word, often not ruminating upon the idea that this character may be untruthful and unreliable.…
I’ve always had an interesting relationship with writing. I often have periods of loving it so much that I can’t stop writing and then other periods of not liking it at all. The difficulty lies in what I like to write. Usually, when I come up with a story idea, I think of the exciting event that kicks off the story or that ends it.…
Kiese Laymon is a Black Southern writer and professor of English and Creative Writing at the University of Mississippi. His writing has been featured in a plethora of major publications, including The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, ESPN The Magazine, Oxford American, and Ebony.…
