Just like a trained poodle, I can jump through hoops!

[beanworks]

So I had my "pre-orals" meeting today, which is basically the hoop you jump through into a phase where you pretend you know where you're going with your bad academic self. And let me tell you, my academic self has got direction now. I have my future-job-market self heading in the job market direction, the dissertation self headed in the

Comments

[beanworks]

The condensed version is that I want to work on interactions of gender and form in 50's poetry...while still getting a job. To that end, my "major" field is American 20th-century, and one of my two minor fields will be a mostly theoretical exploration of what a gendered poetics is/could be. Basically, "gendered poetics" is a term that can very easily be thrown around, and it's often used to write off (pardon the pun) poets who don't fit into traditional concepts of what they're "supposed" to write; this applies to the women Beat poets, but also to a lot of other things. I'm hoping to think about how conceptions of gender can help open up the discussion of these women poets. I'd also like to do a minor field on culture and form in poetry, but that's still up in the air.

This fits in with my politics because I don't believe that all the "discovery of women writers" has been effective; look at who's in or out of print, look at undergrad syllabi, look at anthologies. Yes, there are women writers, and some of them are studied to death, but there's way too much "she's exploring her femininity" and not enough "let's think about what's going on in these poems and the factors that influenced them."

As for your questions about food identity, there are a lot of programs which encourage that type of interdisciplinarity; sociology and women's studies come immediately to mind, but there are other cultural studies programs which would have a space for that, too.

And if you graduate from the Folklore program, do you get a shot at the folklorist job on MythBusters?