G[r]adding about.

22 November 2009 at 11.55 pm (MA studies.)
Tags: , , , , , ,

[It took me several minutes to decide how to write that title.]

Sometimes I look at my statistics here at The Blotted Line and think “why, for the love of Ben, does anyone continue to visit this site?” Alright, I seem to have tapped into that exclusive Jonson-Middleton-Marston-Thomas Dekker demographic — and it’s nice to see that searches for Cynthia’s Revels, humours and city comedy, and The Insatiate Countess are consistently queried and sent my way.  I suspect, however, this only counts for about twelve people worldwide.  Don’t the rest of you realise that I lack proper credentials, and that I lead a singularly uninteresting life? (One can categorise many of the entries in the last two months as concerning one of three topics: the way I’ve arranged my living space, the food I’ve eaten, or the exploits of my cat.)

Apparently not.  Here are the banalities of the last month or so.

I think an effect of grad school is that one always feels terribly behind in research.  I do feel terribly behind, but these feelings are irrational. I’ve completed all but two assignments in both my courses (and completed them decently well). I’ve made my way through not only all the readings for my course work, but also all of the optional readings (even Spenser’s A View of the State of Ireland, which added over one hundred pages to my reading load that week). I’ve also completed all my TA readings (excepting that one play the week we were on strike).  I’ve collected all the texts/articles I need for my research papers in Gothic (Lady Audley’s Secret, the circulation of art objects, and the traumatic histories they carry) and Spenser (a reading of the Actaeon myth in III.v of The Faerie Queen, and Spenser’s figuring of Ovidian rape and violence).  I submitted my MA thesis proposal (a psychoanalytic-feminist consideration of the performance of female communities around marriage in Jonson’s Caroline drama), and even a proposal for a conference next spring (a psychoanalytic reading of Jonson’s The Alchemist ). [My interior editor feels I should note that these last two feats aren't so impressive given that both proposals existed in some form six months ago.] Perhaps I feel behind in that I’m not sure I have enough time to finish all the reading I would like to do for my final papers, and to be prepared for beginning the introduction to my thesis once the proposal is approved.

Yes, but I never have time to do all the reading I’d like.  This is the sole reason I have yet to complete Gaiman’s American Gods, which I’ve been reading since the summer.  I have about 200 pages left.  When I finish the thing (I write with affection: it’s Gaiman, and so, good), I plan to get through a pile of young adult books that have been amassing on my floor: Joyce Carol Oates, Meg Rosoff (please please go read Meg Rosoff), and Ellen Hopkins are among these, and a few more texts in the vein of Hopkins (poetry for young adults seems on the rise, and I am both pleased and intrigued). Then I will settle in, one more time, with Anna Kerinina. One year, I will finish it.

I’m not a proper grad student if I don’t write about my cat. In her continued, but somewhat misguided attempts to win my affection, Celia has been practicing how to pull books off my shelves. If I can manage to teach her how to retrieve the proper titles, I’ll be thrilled.  As of now, she mostly makes a (loud) mess of things.  Also, the books, when they finally tip out onto the floor, seem to terrify her.  But she reasserts her dominance by falling asleep on them for hours, rendering them motionless and non-threatening.

Cats are all well and good, but people with whom to read, gripe, panic, eat, drink, and go to the opera are also a grad school necessity. I feel I should end this with compliments to Jesse who, even though he never reads these things, is a first-rate confederate in all these activities (he also carries our cats on trips to the vet, makes sure I go to the pub sometimes, and almost always walks me home). He reminded me the other day that he was, in fact, awesome.  A statement which is as accurate as it is narcissistic (but mostly it’s just accurate).

That about exhausts the goings-on here.

22 November 2009 ~ Hamilton

3 Comments

Now I just have to write the thing.

11 November 2009 at 11.59 pm (MA studies.)

ProposalAt 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).

11 November 2009 ~ Hamilton

4 Comments

Some thoughts on picketing.

6 November 2009 at 6.53 pm (MA studies.)
Tags:

Picketing is not fun.  Few people, I think, wake up at six in the morning thinking “I can’t wait to be out on that picket line!”  Picketing (in November, in Southern Ontario) is cold and exhausting (yesterday it hailed on the 11.30-3.30 shift).

Picketing is festive however: it’s disruptive, but controlled disruption.  There are codes of behaviour, both official (agreements about where to picket, what kinds of signs we can hold, how long we can interrupt traffic) and non (what to wear, what not say to drivers).  There’s a community that forms in the picket space: in spite of cold and wet, the physical exhaustion that comes with walking or standing outside for four hours at a time, and the psychological exhaustion that attends listening to drivers and students yell at one, and the worry over losing money and study time, we persist. And, knowing that we have so many discomforts and anxieties to work against, we persist in an effusively cheerful manner: we play music, sing, and dance, and cheer for the support we do get, we share food, and thoughts on how to keep warm.  We use the time to foster interdisciplinary friendships (or at least acquaintances), and to catch up on reading. And there’s food.

What’s fascinating is that not only does our forced good mood actually help make the time more tolerable, it also affects  the annoyed drivers, some of whom are visibly conflicted as they attempt not to laugh at the perverse cheeriness of the group.

I’m exhausted right now, and do look forward to the end of this strike: but if I have to picket, I’d rather do it with this lot than anyone else.

6 November 2009 ~ Hamilton

Leave a Comment

Erin’s guide to good MAing.

6 November 2009 at 6.05 pm (MA studies.)

Making a mess of things: what Celia does to my apartment.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).

Engaging in productive discussion involves opening that discussion to everyone involved.  I’m irked with myself because I noticed that the group of us were closing the discussion to other members of the group (and some of them looked uncomfortable being excluded in a such a way) — and yet I persisted in spite of that knowledge.  This does not make for good academic practice, and it violates the few rules I set for myself when entering a class environment:

1. Know what the group has read (in line with knowing your audience in a paper or presentation): clearly link all new material back to these shared readings, or the agreed-upon course vocabulary.

2. When using theory or referring to texts outside the course syllabus, clearly and  concisely define all new terms and concepts before using them in textual analysis.

3. Exercise rigour with theoretical terms: do not conflate or use interchangeably different terms from different theorists. Know the theory you introduce, and be prepared to explain it.

4. Only refer to texts outside the course material if it is relevant and necessary, and will add to course discussion.

5. Never use the seminar to work through problems in personal research (unless that research is relevant and useful to the particular discussion at hand).

I made a mess of things yesterday. Shall do better next time.

6 November 2009 ~ Hamilton

Leave a Comment

William Veeder…

29 October 2009 at 6.32 pm (MA studies.)
Tags: ,

has already written on (and has done so much more thoroughly) everything I wrote on Carmilla, both here and in the online portion of my Gothic class in his article “Carmilla: The Arts of Repression.” Texas Studies in Literature and Language, 22.2 (Summer 1980). 197-223.

Damn.  Should have read the article first.

28 October 2009 ~ Hamilton

Leave a Comment

The draining Gothic novel.

26 October 2009 at 1.28 pm (MA studies.)

I finished reading Carmilla this morning.  It models the type of Victorian repression and refusal to acknowledge British anxieties not so much about sexuality, but about the instability of the history of British patriarchy.  In the novel’s neat, and somewhat lengthy conclusion outlining the history and behaviours of vampires and revenants, narrator/victim Laura tells us:

The vampire is prone to be fascinated with an engrossing vehemance, resembling the passion of love, by particular persons.  In pursuit of these it will exercise inexhaustible patience and stratagem, for access to a particular object may be obstructed in a hundred ways.  It will never desist until it has satiated its passion, and drained the very life of its coveted victim,  But it will in these cases husband and protract it murderous enjoyment with the refinement of an epicure, and heighten it to gradual approaches of an artful courtship. (146)

And here Laura’s narrative breaks off, to be taken up by Baron Vordenburg’s description of how he found and murdered the vampiress Carmilla.  Yet no one comments, here, or anywhere in the novel, that the husbanding, courting, and penetrating parasite is, of course, a woman, nor that, of all the objects Carmilla could have chosen to seduce, she selects only young women.  Nor does anyone pay any real attention to the fact that Laura’s father (who seems to suspect, at times, what’s happening to his daughter) allows this seducation to happen, through both his absenses and his indulgent attitude towards both Carmilla and Laura.  Nor that Laura, following Carmilla’s death, remains herself disturbingly haunted by visions of the vampiress coming to her room at night.

Sheridan’s text is clearly anxious about both female sexuality and homoerotic desire (that Laura is disturbed by her queer desires suggests the text wants to condemn them), but it refuses to discuss these anxieties in any straightforward manner, burying them under paratext, and diverting the writing away from the moments when these anxieties erupt, with chapter divisions, descriptions, and breaks in the narrative.  And while I can’t figure out exactly how it differs from other writing, I find it an exhasting style.

Shall have to think more on this one.

26 October 2009 ~ Hamilton

Works Cited.

Le Fanu, Sheridan.  Carmilla. Three Vampire Tales. Ed. Anne Williams. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2003. 86-148.

2 Comments

Things learned.

2 September 2009 at 11.32 pm (MA studies.)
Tags:

I’m TAing an upper-level Shakespeare course this year.  This is a bit of a surprise as the course was not (as far as I remember) included among the list of courses with TA positions. 

Having no idea about Mac’s undergrad format, I have no idea whether I’ll be running a seminar (or, a “tutorial”, as I suppose I must now call them), or grading alone. I’ll know more next Thursday, after attending the first class.

The news is pleasant, at any rate: I had just resigned myself to a year in a first year survey course on short genres, or something similar.  (Not that short genres are a terrible fate: I just find the Shakespeare assignment a bit more interesting.)

2 September 2009 ~ St. Catharines

Leave a Comment

Currently…

24 August 2009 at 2.20 pm (Ben, MA studies.)
Tags: , , , , , ,

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

Leave a Comment

I registered for my courses…

22 August 2009 at 11.29 am (MA studies.)
Tags:

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

Leave a Comment

Finally.

15 August 2009 at 1.53 am (MA studies.)
Tags: ,

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.

4 Comments

« Older entries