Hi Everyone! My name is Kaitie Hewlett, I'm a senior, and a History major with an Asian Stuides minor. I love studying history because I subscribe to the cliche that history repeats itself. I believe that by taking a hard an analytical look at the past you gain insight into what is happening in the present.
I have taken many different english courses in my time here, and iI haven't really had a bad experience with any of them. I usually take an english course as my "fun" class so that i know I will enjoy at least one class per semester. My favorite english class that I have taken was the Englsih Renaissance Literature class with Dr. Danner ( I would recommend it to anyone).
I hope to gain a better understanding of African American History formt this course. I have taken the history courses with Dr. Smith but i think that by studying the literature of a certain era allows a new window to be opened on the subject. By Analyzing the material I hope to improve and expand on the knowledge that I allready have.
I don't really know what my heritage is, my family has been in America for many generations and its just not something we ever talked about. I will say that I am a proud native of the North Country. I live in Russell, its about 15 minutes away but if you blink you will miss it. I come from a lower-middle class home, my entore family has always been a part of the working class and we are rather stubborn and proud of that fact. Since coming to school at SLU it seems that I have been balancing on a tightrope between being and insider and an outsider in my home town. When I applied to SLU all of my friends gave me grief for wanting to go to school with the SLU snobs. When I came here it was like stepping onto an alien planet, I was surrounded by people very different from myself (which is what college is all about) and suddenly I was an insider who knew all about the surrounding community. I now find myself defending my friends and peers here at SLU to my friends at home and because of this I have become an outsider. Although I love the North Country and I will encourage anyone who is not from here to go out an explore it, I am not a true memeber of the North Country anymore.
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
Wow. Sounds like your experience of coming to SLU is an incredibly interesting and revealing one. It's another good example of the adage "you can't go home again"--I think there's at least a little resonance here with Saidiya Hartman's feeling when she visited Ghana, or with the experience of the protagonist of Lawrence Hill's wonderful novel Someone Knows My Name, who is born in Mali, becomes an American slave, and decades later tries to go back to Mali but is unable.
ReplyDeleteI'm also very happy to have a history major in the class--history and literature go so well together!
I'm also curious: What counts as a "true member of the North Country"?
ReplyDelete