Entries in the Category "grad student whininess"
MA exam starts tomorrow
Preparations taken for the MA exam tomorrow:
- 2 weeks' worth of laundry done
- kitchen clean (dishwasher currently running)
- ample leftovers in fridge (chicken casserole from last night; lasagna from tonight) (also cookies)
- stocked up on groceries / necessities
- all bills paid through end of month
- DVR cleared of movies (for once!) and favorite shows set to record (also: TV remotes hidden to discourage unnecessary viewing)
- backup blog entries pre-written and ready to post sometime through the week, so that you don't all think I've died
Basically, I have attempted to pre-arrange anything and everything that is not my academic work and which could possibly take time away from me over the next week. We will see how this works.
Within the next eight days, this nightmare era of The Faerie Queene will be over. I first started working on this reading list in May 2009, people. (Pssst: and it never did get done.) I really can't say how much of a weight off me it will be when it's done.
But first: the eight days.
Note to that girl in my class
Hey, you know what's a really effective method for bugging me? To take a novel that's literally built around the concept of ambiguity (how our perceptions of events differ from others' perceptions of those same events) and, when talking about it, keep saying, "It's clear that the author meant..."
For the record, in literary interpretation, it's rarely "clear" that anything does anything. But especially not in that book.
Note to my prof: When you said pointedly, "I think we should take the word 'clear' out of the discussion entirely," you became my personal hero.
Every semester, like clockwork
For me, the academic semester is a continual cycle of motivation and energy, and despairing burnout. The problem seems to be nothing more than that 16 weeks is a long time to sustain the workload (to say nothing of the engagement required to sustain the workload) of grad school. (Or, I have some kind of severe mood disorder. Also quite possible.)
The most severe stage of burnout usually happens between weeks 10 and 12. This is not unrelated to the fact that most grad classes assign 2-3 major assignments (large-scale research projects, papers) over the course of the semester and midterm is usually when the first major project is due. When these projects are turned in, I rebound. My life becomes manageable again. Just a couple weeks ago, I was flying high. I created schedules meant to streamline the production of my final papers. Preparations were being made for summer—a change of houses, a summer job—and, a few snowy days notwithstanding, it’s been feeling like spring outside. The weeks of school were waning.
Yet, as of this weekend, I have reached the second wave of my despondency. Basically, I have no procrastination time left; my final papers must be begun. But they’re big projects; they involve tons of research and writing and idea-making. They’re hard. And the majority of the work is on the other side, the “not done yet” side.
In this mood, in the past, I’ve frequently blown off my academic work in favor of a TV marathon, or even a novel unrelated to my studies. In fact, I can reproduce the titles of a number of those Distraction Novels. Sophomore year, spring semester, there was The Age of Innocence during final exam week. Senior year, spring semester, I read The Nanny Diaries the same week I defended my senior thesis. Fall semester of last year, I put off final projects for a whole day to read The Catcher in the Rye. (That one…does not take very long to read.) This novel reading is a sort of deflection. I want to avoid thinking about the work I have left to do, and yet, I feel the need to accomplish something, like finishing a book.
The potential for distraction expands beyond my completion of necessary tasks. I’m also having trouble lately committing to (even the idea of) a field of study. It’s been a year since I’ve been allowed to study American lit (not counting some brief encounters with Faulkner last semester) and I keep having these basically laughable impulses to drastically change course and study weird things. I’ve been putting ridiculous suggestions on my summer to-be-read list all month, like Balzac, and “something about the Wars of the Roses.”
It’s times like this when I begin to question why I’m in school, and if I wouldn’t be better off just learning at my own pace, under my own direction. This is a legitimate question, and one it doesn’t hurt me to ask myself every now and then.
My usual answer to myself is this: “You had four years off from school. What did you accomplish then?” Point taken.
Literary theory, or I have a report due and I hate it
I had a conversation with my friend Andra once, about theory. She had been an anthropology and religion major (and I’m in English, of course). I said that I had trouble reading theory—that I never really understood an abstract concept until I could put a scenario to it. Apply a narrative, basically. She said that it was strange—she didn’t much enjoy reading novels, because she was always more interested in the ideas than the seemingly trivial details of what happened next.
At least I have Flannery O’Connor on my side. I quoted her in an earlier entry saying, “Some people have the notion that you read the story and then climb out of it into the meaning, but for the fiction writer himself the whole story is the meaning, because it is an experience, not an abstraction.” That’s from “The Nature and Aim of Fiction” and if you want to know what she means, it’s simply this: her stories are not reducible to themes of good versus evil or the impact of righteousness on a bruised soul or the petty racisms of a person who thinks they’re doing right (although she’s written about all those things). Her stories are about people getting gored by bulls, and getting their wooden legs stolen by traveling Bible salesmen, and getting murdered by one’s own grandfather. She put a lot of thought (perverse thought, clearly) into creating those scenarios and “what happens” is every bit as important as what she’s saying through what happens. You can’t have one without the other.
So, theory is trying to have one without the other. The study of theory is meant to help me, as a student of literature, discover and develop methods for interpreting literature. Unfortunately, when it’s explained to me, it sounds like this:
The complexity of a culture is to be found not only in its variable processes and their social definitions—traditions, institutions, and formations—but also in the dynamic interrelations, at every point in the process, of historically varied and variable elements. In what I have called ‘epochal’ analysis, a cultural process is seized as a cultural system, with determinate dominant features: feudal culture or bourgeois culture or a transition from one to the other. This emphasis on dominant and definitive lineaments and features is important and often, in practice, effective. But it then often happens that its methodology is preserved for the very different function of historical analysis, in which a sense of movement within what is ordinarily abstracted as a system is crucially necessary, especially if it is to connect with the future as well as with the past.
I could go on. I’ve read about a thousand pages of that this week—it’s Raymond Williams, Marxism and Literature, and I have to deliver a report on it in two days. The main obstacle to this is that I barely understand a word of it. If I can keep my eyes on it—which is only sometimes, because (and this I have discovered) the narrative, or the story, is the rope that I cling to as I navigate the darkness of any configuration of words—then I still don’t understand what’s happening, because these ideas are presented with no analogy or application that will help me to understand it. All these problems make attempting to read this stuff really frustrating and tiresome. I’m used to mostly understanding what I have to study. But these complex ideas, communicated at the apex of their complexity with no little diagrams to put it in terms that I recognize, skate over my consciousness like stones skipping across the water. My mind reads—all the words get picked up—but nothing penetrates.
I ask questions in class—clarifying things, for example: “So this view of semiology is particularly distinguishing itself from an etymological view of language?” That’s really what I thought was going on, but here’s what the professor gave me: blankness, and “…No…” Like it’s not just that I’m missing the point, I’m so far off they don’t even get where I’m coming from. I am a bad student in this class. I’m doing the reading, like I said; I’m not absorbing or understanding it.
Six weeks left of this class. If I survive it, I will consider myself lucky. If I never have to deal with theory in my entire career again, I will consider myself blessed.