Jason M. Wester

My junior year in high school I had a study hall that changed my life.  I was supervised by a tyrant of a woman who seemed to be angry all the time, and who, on several occasions, had sentenced me to detention for talking.  Who wanted to study when I could carry on with my buddy Chris?  But after a couple of detentions I got the message, and I gave up talking and spent most of my time with my head down, dozing. Concurrently, I had a great English teacher, Betty Crane, who managed to get me excited about literature.  I remember the first day of class she dropped Faulkner’s (1938) short story “Barn Burning” on us, and while it seemed that for most of my peers the story was completely uninteresting, I was fascinated.  There I was, having lived my entire life thirty miles from Faulkner’s house in Oxford, and I had never heard of the guy.  Then all of the sudden, there he was, a Nobel Laureate, a man from Mississippi who changed the literary landscape with his writing.  For some reason, as a Mississippian, I was proud of that.

Mrs. Crane and Mr. Faulkner opened the world of literature to me, and for the first time in my life I found something that seemed to matter, something that captured my interest like nothing had before.  I stopped sleeping during study hall and instead buried my nose in books.  Since study hall was held in the school’s library, I simply checked out a Faulkner book and spent that hour reading.  I read everything by Faulkner I could get my hands on.  I read Absalom, Absalom!, (1936) (and understood very little of it) but I moved on to As I Lay Dying, (1957) and it blew my mind.  To this day that is my favorite of Faulkner’s novels, probably because it was the first one I was able to access, but I still think it is one hell of a book.

Mrs. Crane recommended I move on to Hemingway, and I did just that.  I read all of the Hemingway our library held, and then I read George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), which is where I want to stop with this anecdote, because that novel taught me a powerful lesson.  It was a great book, but what it did to me went beyond just the reading experience.  Having read that book, all of the sudden, it seemed, I was hearing and reading references to Orwell everywhere.  Everywhere I looked someone had written about “doublethink” and “newspeak” or “big brother”.  It was as if those expressions came out of nowhere, but I soon realized that they were there all along, only I didn’t recognized them before.  I glanced over them, never letting them register because I didn’t have a context for them. I didn’t have a point of reference.  I didn’t know what they meant.

The above experiences are important to me because they illustrate a few things about me.  One is the genesis of my love of language, of writing.  It took exposure to Mr. Faulkner for me to realize that as a Mississippian, writing was part of my cultural heritage.  Faulkner showed me that a Mississippian could write, and he could write well.  Another is the awareness of the knowledge I could accumulate by way of language, particularly by way of the written word.  Yet another is that those experiences started me on a path to pursue English as a discipline.  I went on to earn a B.A. and a M.A. (Ph.D. in the works) in English.  Most importantly to this piece is that, in a manner of speaking, I woke up.  I realized that I was missing a whole hell of a lot, I became conscious, more inquisitive, and always looking to fill in the gaps, the things that I glanced over, the things that I missed. If I was glancing over “big brother” what else was I missing?

As it turns out, a hell of a lot.

I believe one of the distinguishing features of composition, as a discipline, is where it is situated among other disciplines.  Compositionists, in many ways, take scholarship where they find it: in history, anthropology, literary criticism, linguistics, you name it.  As a discipline, it seems to be far less dogmatic, far less insular, and far more willing to branch out than the literature side of English studies.  In studying literature, the boundaries seemed more clearly defined, which made research a little more direct, but that was probably the very thing that turned me off and, in my master’s program, made me question the direction that course of study was taking me.  It seemed so hermetic and lifeless.  It seemed so futile.  In comparison, I see composition as vital and dynamic, and I adore that aspect of the discipline, but at the same time, with information hitting me from myriad directions, I can become discombobulated at times.

But I don’t mention that as a lamentation.  Instead, I think it is a good problem to have.   I no longer feel like I am toiling in futility, and I feel like I am doing something that ultimately matters in terms of how it reaches out to a broader audience in the real world.   Instead of pouring over literature (and all of the connotations that go hand-in-hand with that word, the elitist, canonical distinctions that seem so important to that field), I am exploring how language is alive, and I can’t overstate how important that has become for me.