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I am cautiously optimistic about the weeks between now and the end of the semester. As long as I keep going at the same pace (taxing) I should be a-okay. I may even finish early-ish, which would be good considering we leave for vacation before the due date for my last paper.

I’m finishing The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse by Louise Erdrich today. I didn’t know how I was going to squeeze this 350 page book in, but it happened that after my heavy week I had some breathing room due to the fact that the other books for the course, Lone Ranger and Tonto and Wild Indians, were both relatively short and could be knocked out in a few days.

The reading for my paper on Raymond Roussel has been surprisingly slim. Roussel’s How I Wrote Certain of My Books and Raymond Roussel: A Critical Study are both pamphlet-length works, a total of 150 pages between them. Foucault’s book on Roussel, Death and the Labyrinth, is only 186 pages but is, well, Foucault. Roussel is fascinating but it’s extremely difficult to explain his method in brief. You can read about it in the third paragraph of the Wikipedia article if you’re interested.

And finally, I got some good concrete info on how to draw up my reading list for my preliminary exams, which it seems like I will be taking sometime in Fall 2009 regardless of whether I get funding this year or not (no word on that situation yet). Anyway, for this exam I need a major area (covering ≈50 texts) and two minor areas (≈25 texts each) and then about 20 books on criticism (roughly 10 for the major, 5 each for the minors). Most Creative Writers do 20th Century American Literature for their major and whatever (drama, ethnic lit, specific genre) for their minors.

I’m about 85% sure that my major is going to be Modern Literature (19th & 20th centuries) with a strong international flavor, along with Native American lit and New Wave Fabulist/New Weird as my two minors. By doing it this way, I can put authors like Jorge Luis Borges, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Franz Kafka, Haruki Murakami and Isabelle Alleyende in my major list rather than in my minor list under the too-broad heading “magic realism.” The Fabulist/Weird category can then be populated by folks like Jeff Ford, Kelly Link, Jeff VanderMeer, et al. It also works to my advantage as “fantasy” or “sci-fi” have a stigma whereas “New Wave Fabulist” sounds edgy and hip. The name changes and the content more or less stays the same. Marketing at its finest, no?

The best part is that putting together draft lists has actually been fun and I really look forward to digging in. The academic advice I’ve received over and over is that you need to focus on what you’re interested in rather than what you think you ought to be studying. That keeps you energized and motivated and therefore increases your chances for success. Sounds good to me.

Current Mood: Fine |
Currently Listening To – Elliott Smith – “From a Basement on the Hill”