The joys of academe
I am genuinely finding a great deal of joy in my studies right now. On Wednesday I was with the seven-year-olds again. It was dry and occasionally sunny, so we took them on an "expedition" around the school grounds - or, rather, out of the Stinky Swamp, through the Wondrous Wood (where we fought off werewolves and hid from an Evil Bagpipe Monster who was actually leading a "wedding procession" of the entire infant school in their bestest outfits.) Then we crossed the Pebbly Path, beat off trolls at the Bridge, then trudged across the desert 9rescuing me from a cave that looked suspiciously like a football net en route), along the rugged path and up the volcano, from which they described to me all the things they could see. This included a lair of giant scorpions, so we had to find sticks/wands that turned into swords so we could destroy the scorpions (pause to explain to Ella what one of those is) and then a heroic charge back to the safety of the Great Hall. At which point my team of intrepid writers settled down to spend over half an hour writing about the adventure, even Isaac, who is very reluctant to use a pencil at all (he's bright, has lots of ideas, and I wonder if he may turn out to be dyslexic.) They all wrote a fair bit, and Daniel covered two sides, which he was immensely proud of. I was proud of them all. And knackered.
Then back to the uni campus for a meeting to finish checking the hard-copy proofs of our Anthology. (Yes, I'm going to be published. Or, at least, two chapters are. The rest is not actually written as such yet, though I have Plans.)
On Thursday two YA authors who had been at Warwick came to talk to Writing students (because the Writing MA people are pitying about the English MA and the English MA staff are snooty about the Writing course. We students just love the opportunity to do some courses from each.)
The PG Symposium is a rather posh name for an opportunity for PG students to read papers on their current research. This year for the first time they let MA students do papers.
No, I didn't do a paper. At the time of the call for papers I had only done one course which could produce material of the sort that would be accepted, and you may recall my whinings about the Feminist Literary Theory. Next year I almost certainly will do something.
However, lots of the younger MA students who have been so gracious as to accept me into their midst were giving papers, so I went along in solidarity. There was a fascinating trio on Victorian material culture - Florence Marryat, daughter of the Captain, wrote a book called The Blood of the Vampire. Sadly for her it was published in the same year as a rather more notorious and aristocratic superstar vamp made his debut - and her vampire was female, not really one at all, and more of a victim, really. There was a close analysis of the use of touch in a Hardy short story and a fascinating account of the role of collecting in Victorian life by someone who was basing her research on a London family's collection - which caught fire earlier this year.
On Friday I went in for a whole day of talks. Some were less than exciting - it's hard to be really interested in Freudian analysis of a book one has never heard of, let alone read, but there was a lot of really interesting stuff. One young man talked about "paratext" - that's apparently all the stuff that gets printed in a book that's not actually the text itself - frontispieces, dedications and so on. He's working on Thomas More's Utopia and, amongst other things, shared with is this amazing image used in the original Latin first edition:
Note the skull? It is thus a Memento Mori - which can be translated as "A reminder of More". Clever, eh?
There was one session which was mostly theory and went whoosh over my head, but to compensate, another with a discussion of Gothic imagery in The Waste Land followed immediately by one ostensibly about the usefulness of anthropological concepts to literary analysis. It was that, but it was also a fascinating meta on Iron Man 3, covering issues of internal and external, purity and pollution, and the importance of names. SRSLY.
The final session was about early modern female poets, three equally fascinating talks. One of the students, currently completing her MA but about to start a fully-funded PhD next term, has actually discovered a manuscript of work by a Restoration poet, including poems never before collected. That's pretty cutting edge.
The department fed us throughout the proceedings, and gave us wine at the end of each day, so I was somewhat late home two days running. It was enormous fun, and really gave me a buzz and a sense of being in an academic community. This has been fairly rare this year, really - it's been fairly clear that we Taught MA students are barely a notch above the despised undergrads and mainly there to fund Real Work. At the end of the final session we were told that we, the Taught MA students who spoke or turned up as audience, were pretty much the self-selected group who were serious about study. And that Warwick is the best place for postgrad study in the known universe. Trufax. Well, it's touching that she believes that.
It's a bank holiday weekend here, and I did my bit for society this morning by standing out (in actual sunshine!) collecting for Amnesty International. Apart from that I've done a lot of not a lot. Pity there's no Dr Who to settle down to now.
Then back to the uni campus for a meeting to finish checking the hard-copy proofs of our Anthology. (Yes, I'm going to be published. Or, at least, two chapters are. The rest is not actually written as such yet, though I have Plans.)
On Thursday two YA authors who had been at Warwick came to talk to Writing students (because the Writing MA people are pitying about the English MA and the English MA staff are snooty about the Writing course. We students just love the opportunity to do some courses from each.)
The PG Symposium is a rather posh name for an opportunity for PG students to read papers on their current research. This year for the first time they let MA students do papers.
No, I didn't do a paper. At the time of the call for papers I had only done one course which could produce material of the sort that would be accepted, and you may recall my whinings about the Feminist Literary Theory. Next year I almost certainly will do something.
However, lots of the younger MA students who have been so gracious as to accept me into their midst were giving papers, so I went along in solidarity. There was a fascinating trio on Victorian material culture - Florence Marryat, daughter of the Captain, wrote a book called The Blood of the Vampire. Sadly for her it was published in the same year as a rather more notorious and aristocratic superstar vamp made his debut - and her vampire was female, not really one at all, and more of a victim, really. There was a close analysis of the use of touch in a Hardy short story and a fascinating account of the role of collecting in Victorian life by someone who was basing her research on a London family's collection - which caught fire earlier this year.
On Friday I went in for a whole day of talks. Some were less than exciting - it's hard to be really interested in Freudian analysis of a book one has never heard of, let alone read, but there was a lot of really interesting stuff. One young man talked about "paratext" - that's apparently all the stuff that gets printed in a book that's not actually the text itself - frontispieces, dedications and so on. He's working on Thomas More's Utopia and, amongst other things, shared with is this amazing image used in the original Latin first edition:
Note the skull? It is thus a Memento Mori - which can be translated as "A reminder of More". Clever, eh?
There was one session which was mostly theory and went whoosh over my head, but to compensate, another with a discussion of Gothic imagery in The Waste Land followed immediately by one ostensibly about the usefulness of anthropological concepts to literary analysis. It was that, but it was also a fascinating meta on Iron Man 3, covering issues of internal and external, purity and pollution, and the importance of names. SRSLY.
The final session was about early modern female poets, three equally fascinating talks. One of the students, currently completing her MA but about to start a fully-funded PhD next term, has actually discovered a manuscript of work by a Restoration poet, including poems never before collected. That's pretty cutting edge.
The department fed us throughout the proceedings, and gave us wine at the end of each day, so I was somewhat late home two days running. It was enormous fun, and really gave me a buzz and a sense of being in an academic community. This has been fairly rare this year, really - it's been fairly clear that we Taught MA students are barely a notch above the despised undergrads and mainly there to fund Real Work. At the end of the final session we were told that we, the Taught MA students who spoke or turned up as audience, were pretty much the self-selected group who were serious about study. And that Warwick is the best place for postgrad study in the known universe. Trufax. Well, it's touching that she believes that.
It's a bank holiday weekend here, and I did my bit for society this morning by standing out (in actual sunshine!) collecting for Amnesty International. Apart from that I've done a lot of not a lot. Pity there's no Dr Who to settle down to now.