Category: School Page 5 of 10

Okay, it isn’t really a NEW perspective. I’ve been utilizing this perspective on and off since I started grad school, but I’m now embracing it even more fully. The perspective is this: School is for learning. That’s it. Simple, right? But oh-so-helpful when most of the people around you are driven not only to learn stuff, but to produce and publish original research at an alarming rate, even as first-year students. Now, I have no problem with this; a lot of people want to do that, and they want the job that it will get them. I neither want to do it, nor do I want the job it would get me. And trying to compete with people who DO want those things stresses me out. So I’m vowing right now not to do it any more. If I start to try, stop me.

This new contentment in the face of a paper that’s due tomorrow (thirteen hours and counting) came out of a conversation with a fellow first-year grad student is also no longer sure this is what she wants–in fact, her thoughts on the subject are remarkably similar to mine, up to and including the probably intention of going into library science after the English degree. We came to grad school to learn. I certainly have no pretensions of being able to say ANYTHING new about nearly anything, especially not European Romanticism when I’ve had exactly four weeks of graduate study in Romanticism (in this class) and roughly two weeks of undergrad study on Romanticism in a survey course, and especially not when my professor is, like, incredibly knowledgable on the subject. So I’m going to learn all I can and not worry about whether or not my essays are publishable.

The last two weeks studying for this paper, I’ve read two or three full books on the sublime (my chosen topic, which is fascinating, but HUGE), plus bits and pieces of ten or twelve other books, plus Kant. KANT, people! I don’t know whether I’m overwhelmed by how much I struggled with Kant, or pleased by how much I was able to eventually comprehend. (It does get easier after reading six different commentators telling you what he’s saying.) And I have learned A TON. It’s not everything, it’s not even probably enough, and it certainly isn’t as many original sources as I’d like (except for Kant, because hey. I can now say I’ve read Kant, and that’s worth something, right? Even if it wasn’t ALL of Kant? Right? Never mind…), I still sort of feel like I’m drinking from a fire hose, and I feel like that though everything in my essay is TRUE, it may not be significant because I haven’t read everything out there on the subject. But you know what? I know a hella lot more about it than I did two weeks ago. And I’m considering that a plus.

So my new perspective is that school=learning and learning=good and whether or not the professor is totally entranced by my essay is, given my goals for this phase of my life, somewhat irrelevant. Not that I’m saying we shouldn’t do our best…just that our best can be somewhat qualified by our goals, and my best doesn’t have to look like the best of someone who’s gunning for a PhD and a tenure-track position in a few years. And I’m okay with that. And knowing that has kept me wonderfully stress-free even while reading all these books over the past few weeks, because suddenly my motivation wasn’t to quickly find all the right information to feed into my topic, but to learn as much as I could and gain as wide an understanding as I could before narrowing down my topic (which I did today). I know a lot more now than I would have if I’d done it the other way. And I’m rambling. Because being stress-free doesn’t mean I’m not tired at 2:30 in the morning.

(Rambling side-note: it’s much easier for me to be stress-free about papers when only the professor is reading them, like this one. My next paper is a seminar paper, meaning the whole class will read it before class, and I will read it in class, and we will discuss it. This scares me a whole lot more, because grad students are scarier than professors. I do not know why this is. They are not scary in one-on-one situations; they are my friends. But in class? Reading my paper? Scary. All this side-note to say that in two weeks, if I start stressing out, remind me of this post, and that I’m not competing with the other grad students, even with my seminar paper.)

So people are already turning in pre-registration slips for next fall, even though registration doesn’t technically begin until the middle of March, because of the trouble we had getting into classes this semester, because of the now-much-firmer 12-person-per-class cap. But I have no idea what to take. The list of course offerings are available, but not the specific focus of each course (i.e., I’m in Modern American Literature right now, with a focus of the Harlem Renaissance), because the professors haven’t all decided yet what the focus is going to be, because usually they wouldn’t have to narrow that down by JANUARY. It’s sort of a mess all around, but even just looking at the course offerings, I’m not terribly excited:

Old English Language – I heard horror stories about this class last semester, plus they’re averse to M.A. students taking it, as it’s geared for Ph.D.s

Bibliography and Research Methods – Already had it. Almost had a panic attack just seeing its name on the list.

Rhetoric and Composition – I don’t know if I’ve mentioned this, but I’ve always hated classes that were about doing things rather than about content. On the other hand, if I want to improve my writing, which is one of the things I came back to school to do, this would be good. On the other, other hand, I’m completely unenamored of the academic writing style, and since that’s probably what they’re teaching to English grad students… (On the other, other, other hand, I need to get over my hatred of “doing things” classes if I’m going to do Library and Information Studies or anything techie-related, because they’re going to be about “doing things” rather than content…)

Seventeenth-Century British Literature – This one has a focus on Milton already announced. Now, the Donne/Herbert/etc class was 17th-century Brit lit, and we know how much I loved that class. /sarcasm. And I have a strong distaste for Milton from an undergrad survey course in which we read parts of Paradise Lost and I thought it was incredibly pretentious and overblown. I know, I know, Milton’s one of those people I should know, though. But, ugh.

Victorian Poetry – Poetry. Ugh. But somehow I’ve got to get good enough at this poetry stuff that I don’t hate it so much. Or something. And Victorian poetry is more palatable than some other forms. I mean, Browning and Barrett Browning and Tennyson, and stuff, right? I like them all right. Of course, I probably wouldn’t after having to analyze their stuff for a semester.

Nineteenth-Century American Literature – Focus of Transcendentalism. That’s like, Emerson, right? Meh.

Contemporary American Literature – Okay, this one I’m almost certainly going to try to take. Contemporary American lit doesn’t bother me as much as earlier American lit. Plus, I’ve heard good things about the professor.

And…that’s it. No 20th century British lit, nothing medieval, nothing on novels. I would love a class on the Gothic Novel or on 19th century novels, or on postmodern literature, or on pulp fiction, or even on theory. I’d love to take something on narratology, for instance. But no. I’m disappointed by the lack of variety. Variety is the very spice of life (a phrase which comes from William Cowper, incidentally…I never knew that). The undergrads get more variety than we do (they had a class last semester on Detective Stories, which would’ve been so much fun–Doyle, Poe, Christie, Chandler, Hammett–I’m assuming). What’s up with that?

Perhaps it comes back to grad school being about preparation for teaching–if I were going to teach, then yes, Milton would be important to know. But having pretty much decided against teaching, I’m now in this only for the content, and only for the content that interests me enough to want to study it intensely for a semester. Which is not poetry and not American lit prior to the 20th century. Which cuts out a lot that’s offered here. And I’m frustrated. And that’s all I really wanted to say.

Dude, twenty pages is a lot. How do people ever write books? And this is the adaptation paper, too. I bet I’ve written more than twenty pages all together about adaptation, between entries here and in my notebook. Yet when I try to make it coherent and support a thesis, rather then, “hey, that’s a really awesome idea!” it doesn’t work. Grr. Also, the paper used to be about Bride and Prejudice, and now it’s more about adaptation, which is fine–but it feels like two papers instead of one. I dunno. I’m at sixteen pages, and I don’t think I can write any more tonight. I know I’ve got another paragraph or so for sure to go in the adaptation part, but the B&P part feels very…random and unclear, mostly because since I moved the focus to adaptation, it doesn’t seem to fit anymore. It’s not necessarily the best example of what I’m trying to convey, but I don’t have time to go find a better example and analyze it. And they want me to publish this thing. Yeah, right. I’ll be glad just to get it turned in.

I decided I’m not a fan of this needing-to-have-a-point-when-I-write thing.