#6. The Literacy Narrative of an English Major: Why It's Time to Write a New One

For today's post, I want to feature a literacy narrative that I wrote in 2021, which I just submitted to the Digital Archive of Literacy Narratives (DALN). You can read my literacy narrative at this link. The literacy narrative genre has had a long presence within the field and for this reason I think the post is relevant enough to the subject matter of this blog. 

To give some context, around 2021 I was finishing up my master's degree in literature at CSULB, and while most of my master's coursework pertained to American literature, I completed this literacy narrative as part of an assignment for a rhetoric and composition seminar. As I wrote this literacy narrative over five years ago, while I think I have significantly improved as a writer since then, today I am mostly happy with the quality of the piece other than the fact that I think it contains too many commas. It is also important to note that this is the only literacy narrative I have ever written.

Another scene from the UC Davis "Death Star."

Though I am a compositionist now, this piece is very much a testament to the way our identities shift as time passes and we move on to different interests. Writing about James Joyce's Ulysses, one can perhaps appreciate that I was in a much different scholarly headspace than I am now. This might be a strong argument for the idea that we as writing studies scholars might opt to write a new literacy narrative every five years or so, as different memories and parts of our past might resonate with us at different points in our lives and careers. With this realization, for my next post, I will commit to writing a new literacy narrative that demonstrates my evolution over the last five years from English major to compositionist.