Hello, my name is Jacob Meysenburg and I’m a senior majoring in Math and English here at Morningside College. Additionally, I’m minoring in economics. While these fields may all seem to be far-flung apart, I find that the diversity of my studies helps me adapt well to a variety of fields as well as enabling me to view my current fields of studies from a new and unusual perspective.
In terms of research, I think there’s a lot of ways to apply my diverse interests into this class. For example, I think it would be interesting to look at the prevalence of women’s texts in American history, both critically and popularly. There are ways to do this which involve detailed analysis from the perspectives of both a literary critic and a mathematician.
I’ve done a little bit of literary research before, mostly with Europe during the Middle Ages, whether it be looking at someone concerned with the common folk, like Chaucer, or a political scientist like Machiavelli.
The first article was something which I thought fit well with my area of study. In particular, I thought that how it went into an in-depth breakdown of the minority and female authors who were included in American anthologies. By showing how few minority and female authors were accessible to the American population, Lauter put the neglect given to these authors in perspective. A quibble I had with Lauter’s article was how long it took him to get to the point he was trying to make. Seven pages into his paper, Lauter finally got around to making his thesis statement, saying how he was going to organize his paper.
O’Brien’s article was insightful because it gave a specific case study to back up the work that Lauter did. The case of Willa Cather is particularly interesting given the fact that she was accepted into the canon before suffering a fall from the ranks of major authors. I didn’t know much about Willa Cather going into the reading, but I gained respect for her based on what I read. What impressed me the most was how at the end of her career, she refused to allow her works to be published in anthologies. How much of this was due to her genuinely wanting people to discover her work on their own versus how much was her being bitter over critical rejection is up to debate, but I still found the idea to be admirable. It takes a great amount of self-awareness and respect for your profession to not force your work onto others. On the other hand, it seems like Cather was just hiding from negative criticism.