Final Papers, Woo!
I have one more week until I have to shift into end-of-semester mode and start cranking out my final papers, and right now it's looking like it's going to take that entire week to figure out what the hell I'm going to be writing for my Modern British Drama class, because right now it's a complete jumble.
I mean, thank God my due dates are conveniently staggered, and thank God that none of the papers are going to take more than one solid weekend's work (each) to draft (I max out at 12 pages on a Saturday and 8 on a Sunday, so if the paper's over 20 pages, like the ones I had to do last semester, I need to set aside two weekends to do them), and that the timing works out so that I'm actually doing each one a week ahead of the week they're due, so I have time to revise and time before the last week to study for my poetry exam. Really, I'm in good shape, timewise, and that's awesome.
Plus, the other two are going to be cake. For my Modern American Poetry class, I'm writing 10-12 pages on how Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry" predicts an Althusserian conception of subjectivity--simple theory stuff, and my research is done, and the actual close-reading should go smoothly because I annotated the fuck out of that poem when I read it. Meanwhile, for my Ethnic American Literature class, I'll be writing 15 pages about Esmeralda Santiago's América's Dream, and how the protagonist's journey toward independence lays parallel her abusive relationship and the relationship of exploitation between the U.S. and Puerto Rico--pretty much all orginal close-reading with no need to consult sources, which is good because there's only one piece that's ever been published on the novel and it's not relevant to my topic.
But the 15-20 pager I'm writing on Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, which I have to do next weekend, is just...I don't even know. I had two main thoughts on the play, one involving the relationship between neoconservatism and neoliberalism, and one involving the eroticism of violence and power imbalances by and between men, and I am committed to an idea that kind of weds the two, but it's nowhere near coherent yet. My purpose is basically to argue that within the play, the reason why neoconservatism has erotic appeal while neoliberalism does not, just as with political rhetoric within the U.S., is that, one, neoconservatism is about the deployment of state power while neoliberalism is about either the obfuscation or the subversion of that power by and for corporations, and, two, that state power, especially in the neoconservative form, is essentially both gendered (as masculine) and eroticized (for masculine consumption) in relationship to dynamics of domination and of violence. So, basically, neoconservatism is somehow inherently homoerotic. I just...I have no idea if I know what I'm talking about, or if I'll be able to pull this off, and, also, having that many moving parts to your argument before you even get into how that's all operating within the text is asking for trouble. Eek. I really need to get this shit sorted out.
I mean, thank God my due dates are conveniently staggered, and thank God that none of the papers are going to take more than one solid weekend's work (each) to draft (I max out at 12 pages on a Saturday and 8 on a Sunday, so if the paper's over 20 pages, like the ones I had to do last semester, I need to set aside two weekends to do them), and that the timing works out so that I'm actually doing each one a week ahead of the week they're due, so I have time to revise and time before the last week to study for my poetry exam. Really, I'm in good shape, timewise, and that's awesome.
Plus, the other two are going to be cake. For my Modern American Poetry class, I'm writing 10-12 pages on how Gertrude Stein's "Patriarchal Poetry" predicts an Althusserian conception of subjectivity--simple theory stuff, and my research is done, and the actual close-reading should go smoothly because I annotated the fuck out of that poem when I read it. Meanwhile, for my Ethnic American Literature class, I'll be writing 15 pages about Esmeralda Santiago's América's Dream, and how the protagonist's journey toward independence lays parallel her abusive relationship and the relationship of exploitation between the U.S. and Puerto Rico--pretty much all orginal close-reading with no need to consult sources, which is good because there's only one piece that's ever been published on the novel and it's not relevant to my topic.
But the 15-20 pager I'm writing on Caryl Churchill's Drunk Enough to Say I Love You?, which I have to do next weekend, is just...I don't even know. I had two main thoughts on the play, one involving the relationship between neoconservatism and neoliberalism, and one involving the eroticism of violence and power imbalances by and between men, and I am committed to an idea that kind of weds the two, but it's nowhere near coherent yet. My purpose is basically to argue that within the play, the reason why neoconservatism has erotic appeal while neoliberalism does not, just as with political rhetoric within the U.S., is that, one, neoconservatism is about the deployment of state power while neoliberalism is about either the obfuscation or the subversion of that power by and for corporations, and, two, that state power, especially in the neoconservative form, is essentially both gendered (as masculine) and eroticized (for masculine consumption) in relationship to dynamics of domination and of violence. So, basically, neoconservatism is somehow inherently homoerotic. I just...I have no idea if I know what I'm talking about, or if I'll be able to pull this off, and, also, having that many moving parts to your argument before you even get into how that's all operating within the text is asking for trouble. Eek. I really need to get this shit sorted out.