I found myself reading a very casual description of Henry V’s sex life [i]. Well, the paper was on 3.4, and Queen Catherine’s English lesson, in which she observes the similarities between the English “foot” and “gown” and the French “foutre” and “con”. (I’m trying to avoid spam: go look them up in your Shakespeare notes.)
I sometimes wonder if my students take my good-humoured manner in seminar as an invitation to be so casual in their written work. Or perhaps they take the “short paper” assignment to imply a degree of informality. Or they think that because Shakespeare uses informal, bawdy language in his play, they can too. Either way, it’s a drastic misreading of the genre of their assignment.
Sorry, third years, a formal paper is a formal paper: avoid those colloquialisms.
13 November 2009 ~ Hamilton
End Notes.
[i] Henry’s sex life. The phrase “get shag” was used. Then I had to explain to Jesse what the phrase means. Shag is a synonym for a female body part, guys. “La con.” Look it up.
At least it’s a very official-looking proposal. (And I finished well before midnight: if I can continue in this way I’ll be a very happy grad student).
Last night I found myself feeling fairly guilty at the way I behaved in my Victorian Gothic class. The presenter invoked some theory in which I’m particularly interested right now: psychoanalysis. While the secondary readings for the discussion were psychoanalytic texts (an article comparing the economic structures of Victorian banking and mental illness ala Freud, and Julia Kristeva’s “Approaching Abjection” from Powers of Horror), the discussion which I and about five other people ended up having drew from psychoanalytic texts well beyond these readings. The problem with this discussion was that it left out the other five or six people in the room who had not read those texts, and did not have a vocabulary to discuss the problems through which we were attempting to work (problems we could have discussed with a more strict adherence to the assigned readings).










