With everything happening in my life lately, I haven't had time think about the thing that most of my friends are either setting out to accomplish or giving serious thought about: what I want to be, ultimately. Yes, I got a degree, but it means very little in terms of pinning down an actual career because it was in English. In order to do that I would need to 1) almost certainly get more education, 2) actually decide what I want to do/study. The second one is the hard part. Because it changes like every two minutes. Some people just know that they just love editing, or writing, or studying modern British fiction. I can't seem to set any of my interests in stone; I'm a dabbler. I kind of like editing. I like writing well enough, sure. I like research (is there a job where you can just research for someone else? Like your job is finding their sources for the paper they are writing? Because I might be okay with that). I don't have one enduring interest that I am certain could sustain me through years of higher education. Also, the fact that getting a PhD in any literary topic does not guarantee for even a 50% chance of getting a real professorship is a deterrent.
So, for purely selfish reasons, I'll parse out (some of) my options, at least in the literary studies field. The ones that don't exactly seem horrible. The ones that I catch myself thinking: I'd like to go into that.
Children's Literature. What could be better than reading kids books, right? I mean, there is a lot there and it seems like I could apply any of my other interests to this pretty broad topic. I could study food, or place, or industry/farming in 20
th century American children's lit. This is the only topic for which I've actually looked into grad schools, found one of interest, and recoiled at the 6 year (at minimum, without allowing for dissertation) program. 6 years? Reading kids books? More than half a decade spent studying something that gives me less than 50% chance at getting a job I like? (Probably way less than 50%, because how many schools are looking for Children's lit. specialists? not many.)
Environmental Literature. This is like Walden and stuff like that. Generally non-fiction (
blerg)
memiorish type stuff about going out into the wilds. There is poetry and fiction, too, but it mostly all feels non-
fictiony. I do like
eco-criticism and theory: looking at the role of place/environment/ecology and ideas about place, etc as it applies to literature. Though I did apply these theories to a novel that isn't in the "
env. lit" realm for my senior thesis, something tells me this isn't normal (and maybe slightly frowned upon in the Environmental Literature world). I do love this topic, but I don't love much of the material (I can take or leave Edward Abbey). Besides, am I really that crunchy?
American Studies. This isn't even English! it's not even a valid major. However, I actually think that it is perhaps the most all-inclusive, because you can do a degree based on literature, rather than say history or politics or something like that. I minored in American Studies and nearly all of my classes were literature-based. I think it might be what I've been looking for all along, because I have a constant urge to reconcile Literature with the world and specific culture around us. Like a cause and effect kind of thing. I like exploring relationships between things like technology and culture as it is addressed through literature. I also like taking something known and almost culturally iconic and finding out how our culture came to embrace it through history, using lots of different fields sources. Also, I love applying cold hard facts to literature. It feels more significant, like I'm actually taking a more solid and less whimsical approach.
It's not that I'm so into America or whatever. I hate America. But it's what I know and how can I remove my own
embedded "American" ideals, values, norms, whatever enough to actually think something valid about anywhere else. I have no idea about anywhere or anything else that isn't affected by my
American-ness. And that's the question posed, I guess: "what is American-ness?" and how does it relate to....everything.
The two things I learned the most from in college were my English Senior Thesis and my American Studies final project. One was on how ideals specifically applied to the American landscape affect farmers in a technologically advancing world in
The Grapes of Wrath. And the other was about the creation and acceptance of what
Americans think of as Chinese food. (the idea of applying what I've learned about
foodways to food represented in literature is very exciting, I have to say.)
At the end of the eight or so months I spent writing my English Senior Thesis, as I handed in my final draft to my advisor, she took a good long look at me and said, "You know this is really an American Studies paper, don't you?"
Anyway, somehow it seems like these interests of mine are worlds apart, and other times it feels like there is an invisible cord connecting them. I just can't seem to fully grasp how they relate to each other and how I could make use of that connection to create a totally fulfilling experience for myself. And then comes the question, "yes, but what would I want to
do with all of this?" And I think I need to save that for a later post.
