Why an English Major Would Love a Class on Memory and the Photograph

I’m an English major for many reasons. I love reading literature, writing, and discovering how others view the world. I am fascinated by the way humanity functions. I want to understand why people are the way that they are, and why they become who they become. The English major allows me to peruse and study and encounter the thoughts and perspectives of some of the greatest minds in human history. Each author has a different view of the world. Just as the eye is the window into the soul, I believe that the written word is the window into the soul of humanity. Our struggles, our passions, our failures, our successes, our outrageous and confusing and hypocritical complexities are all there on the pages of our literary history.
I think people are fascinating, and I like learning about how we work. In this way, everything we are reading in class about the way that human beings learn to remember and narrate who they are and who they become is very insightful. The article we read for class, “Narrative and Self, Myth and Memory: Emergence and the Cultural Self” by Katherine Nelson, was about the stages involved in how we learn to form our own self narrative, a story of memories that defines and creates who we are, and how able we are to remember that narrative, our autobiographical memory.
Something that really struck me as well was the excerpt we read of Marcel Proust’s Swann’s Way. Proust approaches this subject of memory and how our minds work from a sort of English-majory perspective. His beautifully written work spoke to me because I saw some of myself in it; both in the way it is written and the way he demonstrated how his memory worked. He too formed his autobiographical memory in the way the articles we have read spoke of.