~from intern Joyce Bohling

Brittany Enos
M.A. Literature
Expected Graduation: Spring 2018

What are you working on today?

Lesson planning! This morning I worked on some lesson plans, this morning I worked on some research proposals for my research methods course. Later on I’ll be facilitating a discussion for my Teaching Composition course.

What do you teach?

I teach CO150.

Tell me about your particular area of interest in the literature program.

My focus is on modernism, which is the literary movement that occurred right at the turn of the century from the 1800s to the 1900s right after Victorian literature. So it’s kind of rejecting Victorian Lit. I particularly like works by Hemingway, Virginia Woolf, T. S. Eliot. I really like Edith Wharton as well. Anything that’s been influenced by World War I is kind of my favorite stuff to look at, but I also like looking at how Freud and Marx and Darwinism shaped that movement. Eventually, I want to connect it to Romanticism, which is kind of what I’m focusing on right now.

Tell me about a favorite class or teacher that you’ve had here at CSU.

I really like this class I’m taking with Paul Trembath. It’s a literary theory course. Basically, it breaks down Western metaphysics and talks about Modern Theory and how everything we’ve ever been taught is a lie and invented. *laughs* Lots of philosophy. But it’s interesting when he puts it in terms of language and looking at a text–a text can be visual, it can be audio, it can be written—but looking at that text and how is the way that we look at that text shaped by the language system that we are a part of.

What’s your favorite book or work of literature?

You can’t ask a lit student what their favorite work is!

What’s a favorite work of literature?

An all-time classic: The Sun Also Rises by Hemingway. That’s probably what sparked my interest in modernism, so I’ll go with that.

If you were to give advice to incoming CSU grad students in the English department, what would it be?

The first few weeks are the worst, but once you get past those few weeks, everything is great, and you realize, “Oh, wait. I can do this.” So don’t let the first few weeks taint you too badly. *laughs*

What’s your biggest goal or priority right now?

I guess to keep on learning how to balance teaching and being a student, and how to still love what I study and continue to remind myself why I’m doing what I’m doing and research what I love.

And read. I would really like to read more of what I’m interested in.