Academy, academy, you bastard, I'm through
But often, in writing this thesis, I have felt like Maureen watching the skin form on the back of a spoon at the end of “Open Secrets:” as if I am looking into an idea “not startling until [I] think of trying to tell it” (160). What is startling about “trying to tell it” is the same thing that was startling for Maureen: an encounter with an absence of language. I was taught to write about literature using a masculine, authoritative voice, to wield an objective vocabulary that served to erase all traces of myself and my experience from my analysis. I was taught to break down text to fit the confines of an argument, no matter what damage done to the text or how narrow the confines of that argument. What I was not taught, until just recently, when I made the decision to teach myself, were the strategies and language that would make the inter-subjective, emotional, human part of my reading experience-the important part, the reason I was studying in literature -“critically real” (Edwards ctd. above).