Hello, I’m Emily, and I study the human experience. Humans are a social species; from the moment we’re born, our minds are instinctively straining to communicate. Communication is our survival mechanism. It is so steeped in our bloodstream that we long to communicate even with those we’ve never met. As Shakespeare famously put it in his 81st sonnet, “When all the breathers of this world are dead; you still shall live, such virtue hath my pen” (Lines 12-13). We grasp to be understood by those we are separated from by endless time and space. We invented legacies and started feverishly writing, painting, sculpting, making in order to build our own. 

When it comes to words, I’ve always been an exemplary student. I’m entranced by the sound of them, by the music they make. They lodge themselves in my head, and the only way to get them out is to speak or write them, to visualize their shape and hear their sound. This love of words drew me to study the many ways words can carry meaning, even covertly; how they can say one thing and whisper another when you look closely. When it comes to communicating the human experience, one tends not to describe it simply. There is nothing simple about the human experience. There is nothing simple about each and every one of our lives. So, in most cases, those who wish to be truly understood must package meaning with wordcraft. I decipher literary techniques so that those who pour their life into writing can be understood. 

That is literature. Literature is the collective human attempt to be known and understood. It’s a work of art one makes with the intent of communicating their worldview and history. This is what distinguishes it from, say, an instructional booklet: the booklet has a purpose, but that purpose is not for one to understand something about the author or others or even themselves. The message must be about what it means to be a human. The folktale of Little Red Riding Hood and the wolf, for example, passes on the feeling of being vulnerable, of being prey. Someone – rather, many someones – spun that tale one day to impart that shared experience to those who haven’t felt it, and thus a literary tradition was born. My work is to dissect literature like this to uncover what it culturally represents. I spend my time trying to know how literature connects us, what we might gain from it. I listen to the music of words and look for patterns woven in the letters that suggest there is more beneath the surface of the page.

When I was younger, I was subjected to my father’s performances of what he liked to call “reading aloud”. Through his often silly oral renditions, I grew up with the idea that reading was something to enjoy. It was my first exposure to the world of words, gorgeous creatures that fly like flocks off of the pages and settle on the branches of the readers’ minds. Like a biologist might be curious about the flight patterns of the pigeon, a few years later I became curious about the inter-workings of this flight and fester perfected by word. My love for reading was a bottomless cavern, where I learned that I could consume words then scrape at the jewels within them, pulling them out to examine and use later. That was when I became curious about creating, nurturing my own flocks to then have them fly off. I came to college to mostly expand my curiosity and my ability to ask questions, to study the flight path of words and to learn how best to examine the mined jewels.

So far, I believe that literature is not one defined thing but a collection of various types of written and oral word, evolving like a flock to new environments and needs. Trying to fit things into a box, especially something so up to interpretation, creates unenviable spillage and a mess. I believe that, instead of trying to define what literature is and getting so caught up in the little details, questioning and thinking critically about everything you read is far more important and worthwhile. Like with our current discussions of fairy tales, whether they are literature or not isn’t as important to me as exploring my curiosity of their inter-workings all while enjoying a set of fun tales.