The Critic and the Monster
I'm currently half way through writing my first undergraduate lecture, which I have given the hideously corny title of 'Seeing Double: Frankenstein, Doppelgangers and the Transatlantic'. Moreover, it contains pictures of Benedict Cumberbatch and Johnny Lee Miller, a clip from Buffy the Vampire Slayer and a reference to Twilight in order to be down with the kids.
I find writing the lecture kind of problematic, even though its a text I know very well, because I want to say interesting things about the text that haven't been said a million times before (hence the transatlantic angle), but its hard because the audience are first years, and they sort of have to know the basic a bit too. I think it would have been easier if I'd just said "Right, feminist reading of Frankenstein and the female Gothic- go!" - and done that. Dull, perhaps. Not the cutting edge of scholarship, for sure - but then at least they would have had a reading to agree or disagree with.
I feel like my lecture is - oh, I find this quite an interesting idea, so I'm going to vaguely talk about a few bits of the text and why they are important, and then throw in a couple of words like Romanticism, nature, repression that I don't really define and you probably won't understand - and then go, hey, the word Transatlantic is in the module title, so I should probably talk about that, but it's an ill-defined critical field, but look! there's three brief mentions of America so lets run with some close analysis and come up with a reading about civilization, noble savages and whether nature really is innately good, or can even truly exist outside of society at all in the novel. (The poor sentence structure reflects the meandering nature of the lecture.)
And at Oxford, we would have taken that - in some quarters, that was the norm - but I feel at Keele they expect a lecture to be about something and to teach them something; you don't just turn up to hear a tutor hold forth on a topic. I also know that, for the students, it is just one lecture - and we got shit lectures all the time, and just put up with it. And that its my first one, and a learning curve for me as well as them. It's not a publication or a paper - it doesn't have to be perfect. And half of them will be asleep anyway.
I really need to stop stressing and write the second half. Whatever I do, I mustn't spend tomorrow morning restructuring the whole thing, or rewriting the first half.
I find writing the lecture kind of problematic, even though its a text I know very well, because I want to say interesting things about the text that haven't been said a million times before (hence the transatlantic angle), but its hard because the audience are first years, and they sort of have to know the basic a bit too. I think it would have been easier if I'd just said "Right, feminist reading of Frankenstein and the female Gothic- go!" - and done that. Dull, perhaps. Not the cutting edge of scholarship, for sure - but then at least they would have had a reading to agree or disagree with.
I feel like my lecture is - oh, I find this quite an interesting idea, so I'm going to vaguely talk about a few bits of the text and why they are important, and then throw in a couple of words like Romanticism, nature, repression that I don't really define and you probably won't understand - and then go, hey, the word Transatlantic is in the module title, so I should probably talk about that, but it's an ill-defined critical field, but look! there's three brief mentions of America so lets run with some close analysis and come up with a reading about civilization, noble savages and whether nature really is innately good, or can even truly exist outside of society at all in the novel. (The poor sentence structure reflects the meandering nature of the lecture.)
And at Oxford, we would have taken that - in some quarters, that was the norm - but I feel at Keele they expect a lecture to be about something and to teach them something; you don't just turn up to hear a tutor hold forth on a topic. I also know that, for the students, it is just one lecture - and we got shit lectures all the time, and just put up with it. And that its my first one, and a learning curve for me as well as them. It's not a publication or a paper - it doesn't have to be perfect. And half of them will be asleep anyway.
I really need to stop stressing and write the second half. Whatever I do, I mustn't spend tomorrow morning restructuring the whole thing, or rewriting the first half.