24 August 2009 at 2.20 pm (Ben, MA studies.)
Tags: Ben, Jacques Lacan, Judith Butler, Luce Irigaray, Sigmund Freud, Sir David, thesis
Most of my possessions are residing in my new home . A third of the boxes are unpacked even. I need to acquire about two more shelves to accommodate most of my books (the rest I plan to place in strategic piles around the place, build a fort with, and maybe construct some book mobiles). All my furniture is installed, so I can now sit/nap/read upon my chair/couch/bed/table (rather than the floor). I can also shower, control the amount of light that comes through the windows (blinds are under-appreciated furnishings, I’ve discovered), arrange the magnets on my fridge into absurd poetry, make coffee (a somewhat more lengthy process without a proper kettle, but I make do), and microwave and eat soup (I really do need to remember to bring up some utensils).
All that’s lacking is food, my Jonson plays and David Attenborough dvds, and Hero and Leander. They’ll be moving up with me in about a week and a half, after I finish some work and visit with some decent people (whom I’ll be sad to leave). Then a few last days of reading, preparing for thesis writing, reshelving books, and generally feeling sleepless before my first class on the 16th.
Thesis preparation goes well (much thanks to the several hours without power this week that ensured I had no alternative but to sit down and think about the thing). I feel fairly confident that I can justify why I want use Lacanian/post-Lacanian theory for my work. Lacan, Irigaray, and Butler are each concerned with the way desire, performance, and the (audience’s) gaze interact to construct the way genders, communities, and economies (I want to look at how Jonson represents female communities/economies in his works). A number of the problems Irigaray locates in both psychoanalysis and classical literature — women failing to be represented on their own terms, rather than as “not men,” the way Oedipal narratives place women in positions where they compete rather than identify with, other women — also exist on the early modern stage. (Jonsonian comedy, though, especially as it frequently avoids marriage as its subject/means of conflict resolution, also resists the Oedipal narrative.) I’m currently considering dividing chapters and selecting my plays using a trajectory of Freud, Lacan, and Butler/Irigaray’s representations of women.
Lots to think about.
24 August 2009 ~ St. Catharines
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22 August 2009 at 11.29 am (MA studies.)
Tags: Edmund Spenser
for the year. This term, to no one’s surprise, I’ll be taking a course on Spenser’s The Faerie Queen. (This time around I promise to gravely reflect upon Sir Guyon’s many follies — “lost horse” will probably continue to head the list.)
Somewhat more surprising is my willing enrollment in a course titled “Gothic, Sensation and Victorian Discourses of Body.” Well, the program does ask its students to choose courses outside of our research field, and the Victorian/Gothic are among those few areas I avoided during my undergrad (in literature, at least; I did take that course in nineteenth-century art history).
The theory part of the course looks fun: Freud and Kristeva make the list, and Elizabeth Grosz (and Butler makes it into the introductory paragraph — I’m well prepared for the theoretical part of this course). More daunting, in terms of reading load at least, is the primary text list: Collins’s The Woman in White (700 pages or so), Bradden’s Lady Audley’s Secret (500 pages), Marsh’s The Beetle (36o pages), as well as some shorter works: Eliot’s The Lifted Veil, Stevenson’s Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, LeFanu’s Carmilla, Marsh’s The Beetle, and Oyeyemi’s The Icarus Girl. (In sum, it’s a novel course, with a novel course’s-worth of reading. That I requested a Gothic novel course worries me more than the reading load itself, I think.)
The courses are on consecutive days, so I’ll be moving from reading/discussing holiness, temperance, civic duty and nation building (and mages who are strangely and persistently opposed to these things) on Wednesdays to Thursday seminars on grotesque, monstrous bodies, vampires, ghosts and incest.
Actually, I suspect there won’t be much difference between the two.
22 August 2009 ~ St. Catharines
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15 August 2009 at 1.53 am (MA studies.)
Tags: Jacques Lacan, Luce Irigaray
I’ve finished Irigaray’s Speculum. I can understand how the work might have “provoked the wrath of the Lacanian faction,” as the book jacket informs me. Irigaray explodes three structures of western thought (Platonism, Christianity, and psychoanalysis) accusing them each of the same logical inconsistencies and of ultimately committing the same crime of deliberately forgetting (to Irigaray, an act synonymous with murder) the female/(m)other/maternal body. And she does so with irreverent intelligence. Speculum is one of the most fun theoretical texts I’ve read, and I look forward to a rereading (and writing on) of the work.
But before that, some Lacan.
15 August 2009 ~ St. Catharines.
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6 August 2009 at 8.01 pm (MA studies.)
For those who have been inquiring, I am, at the moment, about half moved in to my new home. Half of my books are currently piled on the floor in Hamilton, and the other half are packed away awaiting their removal this weekend — excepting my tiny collection of Jonson’s works, a few books I’m currently reading, or which I naively hope to read in the next four weeks, and a few with which, for one reason or another, I can’t bear to part, even for three weeks (yes, yes, I have an addiction).
I currently have about me my summer clothing, Hero and Leander, and four years’ worth of notes, articles, and papers to sort through (and dispose). And a number of boxes. This does not make for any sort of comfortable nor productive work environment (there have been long days at the library and various coffee dispensaries lately).
I’m pleased that I’ll soon have a furnished apartment. In the mean, I miss my shelved books. And my French press.
Here’s some pictures. Not many. Empty apartments are sorry-looking:
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