School goes fine, but busy. The classes I teach are going fairly well as we steam into the last third of the semester, but at this stage most students seems to be running out of gas and then it gets tricky. It’s always a bit of a mystery to figure out what motivates students to begin with, so mixing things up in hopes of increasing motivation takes more work and isn’t always successful. Not to mention I have plenty of my own work to do just to keep up…

I’ve gotten 50% of the required paperwork filed for my preliminary exams, a number that should jump to 75% by Monday. The last form (four of four) is once I have everything completely nailed down, including my final reading list and the date of the actual exam. It’ll be April sometime, and after having several of my good friends going through the process this semester, I’m cautiously optimistic. By most accounts, it’s not too bad as long as you’re pretty thoroughly prepared, which I should be. In the next couple months I expect to be hammering the “academic” blog pretty hard as I take notes on the critical sources I need to read. No classes next semester, just independent reading to get prepped for the exam.

I’m love with a couple new podcasts, one ongoing the other completed:
* Football Weekly by the Guardian is absolutely hilarious, much better than the antiseptic lot over at the Soccern*t podcasts. Updated Mondays and Thursdays.

* Modes of Reading by Warwick University is an excellent lecture series available via iTunes. It’s a series of eight lectures, each about 40-50 minutes, on literature, criticism, and theory. I haven’t taken any literary theory courses per se but I’ve got a decent handle on what distinguishes different theories via exposure in my classes, having read various bits of Foucault, Derrida, Marx, etc. but it’s another thing entirely to put it all together succinctly and not in service to an outside text or extraneous topic. Since this is a recorded lecture, the audio fades in and out as the professor walks the room or turns his back, which can be maddening, but he’s an engaging speaker and it’s exactly the kind of high-level overview of these topics I currently need.

Speaking of which, I’ve also got a billion primary texts I want to read by Barthes, Bakhtin, Foucault, and others but those will have to be on hold until after prelims. I must admit that I found such theory pretty off-putting initially, probably because no one offered any contextual paths into theory, and also because a lot of academics (and burgeoning academics) like to use theory as a club—if you’re not in on the conversation, you are most definitely out of it.

Once these theories start to come together though, it’s pretty clear why English as a discipline has become so theory-based rather than “can’t we just talk about books we like.” The problem for anti-theory, “just literature” folks is that you can’t talk about how you experienced reading a book and what made it good without theory popping up. As soon as you are pressed to answer why you liked a certain book, you’ll have to give some abstract reason—the way it was written, the way it made you feel, the way it teaches you about the world—and by doing so you’re immediately thrust into realm of theory, like it or not.

Lots going on in the world of footie, too much to report at this moment.

Current Mood: Baby Break Just Ended |