Alumni
For more news for and about alumni, check out Annotations, the English department's newsletter.
Why major in English?
A number of alumni sent in reflections and memories about majoring in English in response to this question, posed in the Winter 2003 issue of Annotations.
"I majored in English because I thought I wanted to be a writer," comments Douglas Downey, who received an MS in English in 1952. Drafted into the army, he became an editor of the daily newpaper for the troops in Inchon, Korean andthen went on to a career in editing. In 1997, he returned to his early ambitions after attending the Kenyon Review Writers Workshop and has had some stories published. He especially remembers his classes with Mark Eccles (Shakespeare), Merrit Hughes (literary criticism), and Fred Hoffman (American novel).
Elizabeth Shulman (BA, '92) remembers the effect a Michael Drayton poem read for Professor Sherry Reames had—teaching her "that one never knows the endings or beginnings of things... I realized for the first time that life is cyclical and that the breakup I had suffered in my nineteenth year of life had neither really ended or begun but that I was now part of a constant flow of things in life that both loved and hurt." After receiving her MA in English and now enthusiastically starting her PhD program, she remembers "what the Master's degree lacked that the Bachelor's degree thrived upon was its purity, its rawness... I miss like a child missing his first blanket, my first interaction with text, my first nerves developing a critical awareness... I long to read Middlemarch and King Lear not for the twentieth time, but for the first time."
Read more responses in the Spring 2004 edition of Annotations, available online in .pdf format.
Which book are you most glad you read?
As an English major at the UW, you read dozens of books, stories, poems and essays. If you had to choose one work, literary or scholarly, you’re most glad you read and studied as an English major at the UW, which would it be, and why?
Alums, we want to hear from you. Please e-mail your response (even just a few
sentences) to Professor Anja Wanner at awanner@wisc.edu
or send her a letter addressed to the English Department, 600 N. Park Street,
Madison, WI 53706. We’d like to post your answer here or include it in the
next issue of Annotations; please indicate in your reply whether we have your
permission to do so.
(rev. 8/2004)
