One more nod to using pictures to explain concepts...

I really enjoyed reading all of your posts, today and throughout the term!!!!!

Writing with George Elliot

As I attempted to draft posts about Silas Marner this quarter, I routinely struggled with finding a way, not necessarily to make an argument relating the novel and the critical texts—but to make an argument I actually believed in or thought I could find enough evidence for that I could persuade others to believe in it.  I stated at the beginning of the quarter that I picked Silas Marner as my primary text in part because it is unusually simpler than the rest of Elliot’s work, and I found that intriguing.  Well, I also found it immensely frustrating.

By the end of November, I had become somewhat used to not really knowing what to write and wishing I had picked another book (One I had actually studied before!  Or even one I loved, despite all warnings against such a choice!)  I was thus pleasantly surprised to discover I had a lot to say about Silas Marnerand toxicity—enough that I could imagine making a basic lesson plan focused on it.  Toxicity, to my knowledge, is not something people generally see in Silas Marner.  Everyone is so busy talking about how dream-like the story is, how it has a warm and fuzzy ending, not it is just so nice.  The idea that toxicity is lurking just beneath the surface, never the main point of the novel or even of a scene where it appears, but still present, is intriguing to me and something I might like to explore further in the future.

The fact that it took me so long, several weeks and lots of thought, to get just the spark of an idea for something I might like to explore more is probably not atypical of the way I work, however.  I go through a lot of ideas that I eventually discard whenever I think about what I would like to say about a text.  This class was particularly useful for my style of work because the blog posts were challenging, but informal enough I didn’t feel as if were somehow failing to fulfill the expectations of the assignment if I did not have “the world’s most brilliant idea” every week.  I appreciate that I was able to put some ideas out without feeling overwhelming pressure and get useful feedback on them.  I think that this is a model I would like to incorporate into classes I teach in the future, perhaps through a blog like this or a discussion forum.

Writing, and sharing, things I am not necessarily happy with has also made me more open to the idea of sharing concepts and works that are still in progress.  Normally, I like to keep my work close to me and not let anyone see it until it is “finished.”  Clearly, that is not a great approach if one would like help refining or adding nuance to ideas.  It is much more useful to have someone say, “Have you thought of X thing?” early in the process of drafting, than to have them say it after a paper is finished.  So, even if I have not had major revelations about Silas Marner (yet!), I did learn a lot about my writing process!

Dear readers,

After reading what everyone else has said this week, I was a little speechless. I don't know why it all had the tenor to me of a sort of whirlwindy high-school-yearbook-on-graduation-day, but it did. I felt that same maudlin sense of "but what can I write to encompass for posterity how important all of this was?!?!?!"

How can ENL 200 really be ending? I feel like we've just gotten some kind of rhythm going, and if we did this for one more semester we'd emerge as some sort of superhero team. Once we were all trained up, each of our special powers would contribute to our collective ability to save the planet.

EARTH! WATER! WIND! FIRE! ... HEART!

Deep breath. Ok, I'm going to have to pull out of this nostalgic (and slightly premature) nose-dive for now; just know you all are loved. Here is what I learned from re-reading my posts.

(1) I was doing better than I thought I was.

As a recovering perfectionist, I definitely recall a troubling sense of fraudulence each time I pressed the 'submit' button. So I was surprised to re-read my own posts and discover that, on the whole, they weren't as bad as I remembered. Certainly there were "areas for growth," but at the same time (and at risk of looking down, cartoon-like, to see that I've been scurrying along across what I've only just realized is impossibly empty space) I was doing it! We were all doing it, and by 'it' I mean writing things that for the most part read like passable scholarship in this field. Well, with the exception of Rebecca's brilliant emoji post (and the other new media experiments enacted in this blog), but I think that's a promising direction for a new academic frontier.

While a little back-patting is always pleasant, that's not exactly what I learned here. I think the more important part of this realization is that it is possible to do experiments in writing even before you think you have something reasonable to say. You never know what will happen when you decide to mash together this article and this short story until you try, or at least that was my experience. Some of the most tenuous, questionable, and problematic transitions I made (along the lines of "but I’d like to end by using my primary text, chock full of 'thought experiments,' to try to literalize some parts of Flusser’s more abstract reasoning") actually sounded more or less ok in retrospect. Which makes me think I've been devoting way too much mental energy to worrying that some referee might step in and yellow card me for "insufficient self-evidence of connection between ideas." If you can articulate it, there's a good chance you can write it down without penalty.

(2) The best experiments were with other people.

I really liked working through ideas with you all. I especially noticed this in doing the collaborative posts, but also in class and with the online comments. At least for me, the experience of writing something with Cassie and Sophia felt organic, totally engaging, and sort of magical: 1 + 1 suddenly equaled three, and I loved seeing where our thinking ended up from where it started. I hope I'll figure out a way to do more collaborative or semi-collaborative work with my peers, despite co-authoring things apparently not being a great idea.

(3) Okay, I know I'm supposed to mention specific post(s). Come to think of it, I did notice as I was re-reading that a lot of my posts had this kind of an argument:

"This person uses science or some kind of epistemological truth-holder to say x. They are misusing the truth-holding (sciencey, mappy, structuralist, enlightenmenty) discourse as a blunt weapon when really it's a fine instrument, as we can illuminate by putting all this in conversation with my primary text." 

Given that, I was surprised that one of my favorite posts was about how to read Chen's Toxic Animacies and/as science fiction. This post was about sharing through pedagogy, and NOT about poking holes in people's use of science. I'd like to expand my repertoire of generous readings like this one, and not always be grouchily stalking around like a science-security-guard. That said, and in complete contradiction to it, the post that stood out to me most was my first one. Rusty prose aside, my Chakrabarty takedown was actually kind of awesome, and I'll have to find an opportunity to recycle it one day.

In which I realize how queer Queer Theory actually is

When analyzing early modern drama, my MO is to be as cynical as humanly possible. This is why I enjoy studying and writing about tragedies more than comedies. Both comedies and tragedies expose serious problems with society, culture, and other systems, but while tragic endings acknowledge these problems and their "un-solve-ability" through death and the decay of society, comedies pretend to solve these problems with happy endings full of marriage celebrations and jigs. You're not fooling anybody, Shakespeare.

Of course, my binary between comedies and tragedies is oversimplified. But I reference it to explain why I assumed my readings of Gallathea would end up pointing towards one general direction, and why I'm so surprised that they haven't. When I began analyzing Gallathea, I knew immediately that I wanted to focus on the relationship between Gallathea and Phillida, because their relationship is what has drawn so many queer theorists to the play. I figured it would be easy to debunk the popular interpretation of Gallathea as a seminal queer text for many reasons: Foucault's argument in The History of Sexuality that our current ideas of sexuality are modern constructs; New Historicism's claim that literature ought to be read within the culture it was produced in and that history ought not to be read backwards; and, of course, my previous assumption that comedies, as a genre, affirm and enforce problematic social practices through their "happy" endings. My reading of Armstrong's "Gender Must Be Defended" appeared to prove this point, using her interpretation of Foucault's concept of biopower to read the marriage arrangement and promised sex/gender transformation of Gallthea and Phillida as simply another method of  assimilating the two virgins into the larger culture of sexuality and power in Gallathea.

When Jess and I wrote about Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets: Renaissance Authority and Its Subversion," I at first assumed that Greenblatt would only affirm my argument that Gallathea was a sexually reactionary text. As the father of New Historicism, I thought that Greenblatt would present ideas that proved how the sexuality presented in Gallathea was not at all radical. On the contrary, reading Greenblatt's "Invisible Bullets" helped me understand how truly subversive and radical my text actually was. The following quote from Greenblatt elucidated why such a play could discuss such subversive concepts and still remain a comedy: “Thus the subversiveness which is genuine and radical—sufficiently disturbing so that to be suspected of such beliefs could lead to imprisonment and torture—is at the same time contained by the power it would appear to threaten.” My ideas that the relationship between Gallathea and Phillida was sexually reactionary, and that they couldn't be seen as queer characters because "queer" is a modern construct, were wrong. Although the play's comic ending may be reactionary, it is only because it is containing the "genuine and radical" subversion of this female/female relationship. My initial assumption about the text were incorrect because they dismissed the radical subversion in Gallathea.

Studying Gallathea this quarter has helped me realize why students of queer theory are drawn to this play. My discoveries about different ways of reading the play have motivated me to study Gallathea further, to better understand its subversive elements and how they function in the play. 

Change is Good

My dear officemates (Jess, Jessica, and Kate Jylkka) will confirm that I have experienced a variety of emotions during the weeks of this course in preparation for blog writing.  I once described my writing process as follows:

“Read, read, read; think, think, think; panic, panic, panic; PICTURES.”

After laughing about this for some time, I then decided to look back at my posts and realized that I not only did not always use pictures, I actually wrote a few things that will be useful to future-me.  Especially now that I am in the throes of *writing* (read: somewhere between the think/panic stage described above) my term paper on The People in the Trees for Mark’s class on Race, I believe that thinking through this book in ways that were not always comfortable was a very useful practice.  I have also experienced, in no particular order, the following other mental meanderings:

1. Writing every week

    ...is a scary and unfamiliar practice for me.  I knew this would be good for me to do because of the scariness business I mentioned above, but it is not something I have had to in a very long time.  I tend to be one who ruminates on something for a long time--days, weeks, months--makes lists in the meantime, and then in a flurry of somewhere between 12-48 hours, writes the whole damn thing.  I wrote about 70 pages of my master’s thesis in two weeks, and had previously prided myself on my 15 hours-15 pages schedule.  Now, in this new ballgame of professional rumination, dialogue, and critique, I find myself making adjustments to what had heretofore worked for me.  To extend the metaphor with another metaphor, let’s just say this game’s been a nail biter.  

2. Change to the routine can be a good thing.

    I am no longer a high school teacher, and realize now how much I had become one.  I spent the last 6 or 7 years thinking about how to explain very complicated ideas to teenagers.  Teenagers are exactly like what you think they’re like, including but not limited to, having very short attention spans, very ego-centric, highly emotional, starved for attention, and absolutely hilarious.  As many teachers (hopefully) do, I realized that not all students learn the way I learned.  There are all kinds--auditory, kinesthetic, those who can do rote memorization, those who want nothing more than to know all the answers and all the right ways, and those who could give approximately zero f*cks.  After many of my long think-think-thinks, but not quite panics, I found pictures.  Pictures became my way to explain all kinds of things, especially what those who said they were not “English people”...whatever that means (and not British citizens, nor Anglophiles).  I taught essays with geometric proofs and geography with dice and the American Dream with triangles.  Of course we did close reading and discussion too, but the larger, and in my mind, more exciting learning happened when we had to think differently than we thought we were supposed to.  Now that those around me give more than many f*cks, I am reorienting myself to thinking about the words, then using the words to talk about them, and writing words about the words.  Strangely, as one who considers herself a words person, it has been a challenge, but a welcome one at that.  

3. This is fun.

    I honestly didn’t think I would laugh this much in graduate school.  Perhaps I spent too much time on the East Coast with old boys in brick buildings with marble floors, but I never expected the camaraderie that I feel around this community of scholars.  I love hearing from my professors that they go to each other for help, or that the graduate students schedule work sessions just to make sure we’re doing the thing we came here to do.  And should we feel compelled to make a joke about this week’s readings, everyone gets it.  Did I always enjoy doing all the readings? No, but they forced me to get out of my weird island world that I spend the rest of my time in my head in, and they aided my process of making meaningful adjustments to work that I truly care about.

All Stitched Up: The Final Frankenpost

In reflecting upon the work we’ve done in this course, I thought about the process I followed for each blog post and how I approached the task of bringing Frankenstein and the secondary texts into dialogue with each other. The first and most surprising observation here was that I had spent very little time in my primary text. I suppose that is the genius of the “choose a text that you are very comfortable with” directive: because I know the text so well, I didn’t really need to consult it very often in order to effectively position it in those dialogues. Still, what surprised me about this is the extent to which it violated my usual mode—which is to say, forcing myself to investigate the reasons for my surprise resulted in the revelation that I had what could be considered a “usual mode.” In retrospect, I have realized that my default approach to primary texts has been strongly centered around very close readings and attention to the smallest, word-level details; in my work, secondary texts have most often served as a way to expand upon and contextualize my readings of those moments. The assignments for this class encouraged a reversal of that mode: thinking about Frankenstein through the critical lenses we explored in the secondary readings required a broader, stepped-back approach that was novel for me but happily not uncomfortable. In that sense, I not only identified an area of weakness but also gained quite a bit of confidence in my ability to overcome it with practice.

Another area of growth for me during this course came about through the collaborative work. As obvious as this seems, the task served as a timely reminder that “obvious” is a very subjective term. In my writing I am often anxious about appearing to over-explain or give too much tedious detail in explicating something that is “obvious” to me. The experience of working with bright, articulate people whose initial readings, interpretations, and ‘aha’ moments differed wildly from my own underscored how unlikely it is for any two people to read something and find the exact same takeaways to be “obvious” and unnecessary to unpack. This is such an easy thing to forget, and failing to account for those differences can be disastrous for literary scholarship, so I appreciated the illustrative reminder.

As to the question of how my views on Frankenstein have changed over the course of the quarter, I think that the “stepping back” approach forced by the arbitrary pairing of critical and theoretical material with this particular text made the novel feel significantly less fixed as an object of study. Especially given the number of articles we read that sought to un-fix various taxonomic boundaries of literature, the juxtaposition of all of these texts highlighted the idea that Frankenstein is not essentially a Romantic novel, a British novel, a Gothic novel, fiction, speculative fiction, etc.; rather, the ways in which it functions in those modes within those historical contexts can inform our understanding of those modes and historical contexts as well as the text itself. More than anything, I think this has implications for my ability to teach literature effectively—and I mean “literature” both in the sense of individual works and as a powerfully constitutive, interpretive, and quintessentially human endeavor.

Sally's Two Cents about ENL 200 and Life ...

This is what I’ve learned this quarter:

1.     The people who surround you make or break any experience in life. Making the decision to begin a PhD program at this point in my life—and to come to UCD for this endeavor—was not difficult. It was the realization of a personal dream that has become a passion. Many of my friends have not lived long enough to discover, let alone pursue, their passions. Always, I remember those friends with love. And I am grateful every day to be living my passion. I am also grateful to have been welcomed into this cohort and into this university by people who understand and support passion—such people are a gift that I appreciate more now than ever. I shall always remember what Cassie said early on, that UCD was the only graduate program she explored where the graduate students “looked happy.”  I think she is right.

2.     You can go home.  I started my academic career at UCD so long ago that the ‘new’ dorm complex that I called home has since grown old and is now being replaced with new housing. I was not a happy camper during the two years I spent here and eagerly anticipated transferring to UCLA to complete my education. However, Life deemed it necessary that I consider UCD once again if I hoped to complete a PhD. Life was right. There could not be a better place for me than this campus and this program at this point in my life. UCD has changed and I have changed. Time has a way of making that happen. I am very happy here.

3.     Serendipity, synchronicity, and coincidence in all things. These might be the new buzz words for the new millennium but I embrace them and hold on to them for dear life because they got me here and I’m sure they’ll get me to wherever I need to be in the future.

4.     I don’t understand the hype about the literary quality of Pale Horse, Pale Rider any more now than I did when I first read the text. But that’s probably more about me than about the work. It’s a fine novella (or short novel, as Porter would admonish me to call it), and it certainly gives us the only first-person glimpse into the devastating neurological assault the 1918 flu virus visited on its victims. For me, however, it still lacks a story cohesive enough to draw a casual reader into the text—but perhaps that’s how it was deliberately designed, again to show the brain-scrambling left in the wake of that influenza. No matter. I took up the book because of my interest in all things pandemic, it served as the basis for a fine presentation for a Science and Lit class (if I do say so myself,) and I devised my (obviously successful) writing sample for grad school apps on the information Porter provided. So I’ll always keep this ‘short novel’ and think warm thoughts about it whenever I spy it on my bookshelf.

5.     I’m still trying to understand why some (most?) academic writers convolute and contrive the wording they use to describe their research.  I understand that academics are writing for an academic audience when they publish but I regret that so much wonderful knowledge will never filter down to even a highly educated group of readers because the works are so heavily laden with institutional and departmental jargon that discourages all but the most devoted (or masochistic) scholar from exploring such articles. When I helped a student in my current TA class revise a thesis statement so that it made sense, she exclaimed with horror “but that doesn’t look like college writing!” Well, yes it did. But the revision no longer contained any extraneous words that confused what she was trying to say. I guess our students learn from the academic sources that we assign that writing should difficult, even to the point of nonsensical. We must be careful what we teach…and what we write.

6.     Nevertheless, pouring over the articles for ENL 200 introduced me to many foundational works that have shown up already in other readings and classes and have enriched my understanding of our discipline.  More than that, they’ve given me historical focus in a direction that I hadn’t formally entertained before this course. Only two articles really excited me to the point of reading ahead: Smyth’s (not to be confused with Smith) “Shreds of holinesse”: George Herbert, Little Gidding, and Cutting Up Texts in Early Modern England” and Justice’s “Did the Middle Ages Believe in Their Miracles?” I’ve decided I must be a medievalist at heart. Who knew? Fortunately there is plenty of trauma, disease, and pandemic in Medieval Studies to feed my medically-oriented brain. But more than that, there is an otherworldliness of spirituality and mysticism that calls my soul. I probably lived there in former life (and died of plague) and I think I would like to live there again at least for the rest of graduate school.

7.     So, that’s all folks. It’s been a fun ride. I’ll really miss having a cohort class with all of you next quarter. My thanks to Desiree for allowing us to laugh and share and grow together as a group. As a cohort builder, this class--along with the great grad school-focused articles Desiree introduced us to early on--could not have been better designed; it was a wonderful way to begin graduate school.