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Day classes have been (rightly) canceled for UWM; I expect evening classes (those that start after 3:00) to follow suit. My fiction workshop starts at 3:30 and I’m not looking forward to the drive in to town should it go forward. There’s still plenty of snow on the ground and it’s still coming down.
This is more curse than blessing as far as my courses go. This evening’s class in question is a fiction workshop, which means we had nothing to discuss Week 1, we canceled Week 2 because so many people went to the AWP conference, and Week 3 is snowbound? Not good. See, my experience thus far with graduate classes is that nothing gets dropped from the syllabus, ever; if you lose a day for whatever reason, the class “finds” time to make it up somewhere. Extended classes, extra classes, more online work, etc.
K-12, snow days meant an unexpected break. Now, it means a lot more work.
UPDATE: I no sooner posted this when I got an email from the professor saying that regardless of what the university does, we won’t be having class. This (dis)pleases me for all the reasons above.
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Three weeks in and my classes this semester are awesome. But a ton of work. Lots of reading and lots of assignments. I don’t know even where to begin describing the Visual Narrative class, but we’re moving on from Dada and Surrealism to Oulipo, and our class conversations have been open, thoughtful, and insightful. Looking down the road, I think the rest of the class is going to be just as interesting as this first section.
I think a number of students bailed from the Native American Novel class because it’s a ton of work. I’m also starting to appreciate that my scant background in Native American texts helps a great deal. Before grad school, I had read Silko’s Ceremony, Black Elk Speaks, and Dee Brown’s Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, and all with a fairly uncritical eye. As if these sufficiently explained the Native American experience.
After taking last spring’s seminar on Native American Humor and reading authors like Jim Northrup, Tom King, and Gerald Vizenor, I realized the scope of my ignorance. For instance, one big question is “What makes a work Native American?” Most people would probably say that it would be one that’s written by an Indian. A seemingly innocuous answer that spawns a billion questions. How do you define Indian? Does an author who has 1/16th Indian blood count? What if the author has always lived in a big city, never on a reservation? What if the author’s book is a spy thriller set in Europe and doesn’t have any Indian characters? What if the book has nothing to do with a sacred connection to the land or the importance of ceremony? And who decides whether such authors and such books “count” as authentically Native American? Can a white guy write a Native American book? Why or why not? There are no pat answers to any of these.
And of course literature stands at the center of a huge, unresolved cultural debates about how Native Americans are supposed to reconcile the past and strategize for the future. And then there’s the question about the appropriate role of the white academic, like me. And it’s one of those things where I can’t believe all the other students and faculty aren’t as rabidly interested in this subject as I am. Since I find myself seeking out secondary sources even though I don’t have time to read them, all signs point to Native American lit becoming one of my minor areas for my dissertation…
By the way, I’m reading Jim Welch’s Fools Crow for class next week, and it’s awesome. Maybe I’ll blab about that more as I get towards the end, but it’s just awesome.
Current Mood: Watching Snow Accumulate | 
5 Comments
all signs point to Native American lit becoming one of my minor areas for my dissertation…
Do you have to write a real full-fledged scholarly dissertation?
I thought you mentioned something about being able to write a novel or a collection of short stories. Or did I imagine that?
The dissertation is a creative work, either a novel or short stories. You still need to defend your academic work and have some expertise in different areas of literature too, though, and you still get grilled on your areas of interest. You’re also supposed to be able to connect your creative work to your interest area, but that’s not hard to do.
I’ve been told that most schools will be concerned about your publication history first and foremost, but the primary and two secondary areas of specialization help them see what kinds of literature classes you could teach for them.
Mine keep changing, but I think my “major” area will be Modern Fiction and my two minors will be “sci-fi/fantasy” and “Native American lit.” But I’m still really interested in Latin American lit, too, and how those fit into the wider category of Modern Fiction is something else that isn’t entirely clear, but will become so once I get closer to my preliminary exam.
Hmm, Borges, man. Borges. He ties the fantasy and Modern Fiction and Latin American Lit part together very well.
Why does that name sound familiar… My Latin American lit is virtually non-existent at this point, besides some Borges and One Hundred Years of Solitude. It would help to take a course on it. But none are being offered anytime soon at the grad level, at least not that I know of.
In contrast, I’ll have taken two Native American lit courses and I feel like I’m on much firmer ground with issues surrounding that specialization. “Modern Fiction” is obviously a huge designation, and I was told that I could roll Latin lit or Native lit or both into that if I wanted to have a different minor. Because I’m still really interested in the literature of war, too–most of which also falls under Modern Fiction, don’t you know!
From what I understand, my “major” and “minor” areas are designed to make me somewhat more marketable but also make up a good part of my written and oral exam for the Ph.D., so I do need to know what I’m talking about. Currently, I would have no idea how to answer questions about Latin American literature, where I think I could at least begin to answer questions about Native American literature with a fair degree of intelligence.
You should talk to Dylanfanatic (Larry) at the Other Fantasy section of Wotmania. He’s really into Latin American fiction. I know it’s not the same as taking a class, but he could at least guide you to the right books for self-study.
You can contact him here: ofblogofthefallen@gmail.com
Also, you could always throw in the terms “Latin American Fiction Bibliography” into Google and search through the bibliographies that come up to get books. I’m sure there are Cambridge. Oxford Companions and other Intro style books to a general Latin American Fiction survey that would solve the learning what it’s all about and getting context part.