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I'm less focused on 101 today, much more focused on grad studies - in this case, 17th century British poetry - since I've got an essay due by Saturday at 5 PM that I haven't written a single word for. That isn't to say that I haven't been working on it, but there's no formatting yet. So, in the typical way, this is me reporting back to you but, in another way, this is journal entry is reflective of a thought process I'm constantly working through. I write about what I'm doing, and what I'm doing becomes clearer to me.
Let me say that 17th century Brit. poetry is not my standard jam, okay? I am usually in other academic places, during different times, working on different ideas. But, one class of pre-17th century literature is a grad requirement where I'm at and I really like the professor, so I'm enthusiastic for those reasons, plus, even though I'm not interested by default, I don't think there's a good reason not to try to find something to get interested in. In this class in particular, we're encouraged to find some way of linking our work here with what we hope to be working on for our thesis and mine, an examination of the simultanious global cultural diversification/flattening as it's understood through the lens of William Gibson's post-cyberpunk Blue Ant trilogy (compared to the cyberpunk vision of his Sprawl trilogy) is a pretty big leap away from pastoral country house poems from the 15/1600's.
Tricky.
The class covers a fair amount of conceptual ground. Initially, I was thinking about the themes of toxic masculinity that run throughout Macbeth, but I figured that it's a bit too close to a lot of stuff that's been done before. I know that a lot of the focus is on Lady Macbeth, there, and I haven't heard 'toxic masculinity' a lot, so I feel that's something of a different tack, but it's not really that interesting; it seems a little too easy. It's also not related at all to my thesis. So I decide on a different direction.
I've come back to the country house poems. Now, I don't like these poems. Fuck talking about a bunch of rich people's houses. But I consider that my dislike actually is telling me that I do have an interest here, it's just inverted - negative. I figure that there might be a Marxist reading, here, but there's no actual capitalism yet and, I think that I remember that this is the case, but Marx actually has a weird romantic chubby for pre-capitalist socio-economic formations. Why this guy who's telling the proletariat that they've got nothing to lose but their chains is carrying a torch for feudal landowners is kind of a mystery to me, but whatever.
But it occurs to me that the British are actually in a period of transition furing the English Renaissance and I can't help but wonder if the lack of material currency which forced a kind of credit system didn't work at least in a slightly similar way to money lending constructions that facilitated the Italian Renaissance. I've got at least one or two country house poems that reflect back on romanticized sentiment on the just-passed feudal era during the transition to proto-capitalism. On the other side of the coin of nostalgia is anxiety about the future, making a number of the poems I'm reading part of the literature of anxiety (as I'm coming to think of it). It is, at least tangentially linked to similar themes in my own proposed thesis writing - which puts me in a slightly better place than I was before, at least.
Let me say that 17th century Brit. poetry is not my standard jam, okay? I am usually in other academic places, during different times, working on different ideas. But, one class of pre-17th century literature is a grad requirement where I'm at and I really like the professor, so I'm enthusiastic for those reasons, plus, even though I'm not interested by default, I don't think there's a good reason not to try to find something to get interested in. In this class in particular, we're encouraged to find some way of linking our work here with what we hope to be working on for our thesis and mine, an examination of the simultanious global cultural diversification/flattening as it's understood through the lens of William Gibson's post-cyberpunk Blue Ant trilogy (compared to the cyberpunk vision of his Sprawl trilogy) is a pretty big leap away from pastoral country house poems from the 15/1600's.
Tricky.
The class covers a fair amount of conceptual ground. Initially, I was thinking about the themes of toxic masculinity that run throughout Macbeth, but I figured that it's a bit too close to a lot of stuff that's been done before. I know that a lot of the focus is on Lady Macbeth, there, and I haven't heard 'toxic masculinity' a lot, so I feel that's something of a different tack, but it's not really that interesting; it seems a little too easy. It's also not related at all to my thesis. So I decide on a different direction.
I've come back to the country house poems. Now, I don't like these poems. Fuck talking about a bunch of rich people's houses. But I consider that my dislike actually is telling me that I do have an interest here, it's just inverted - negative. I figure that there might be a Marxist reading, here, but there's no actual capitalism yet and, I think that I remember that this is the case, but Marx actually has a weird romantic chubby for pre-capitalist socio-economic formations. Why this guy who's telling the proletariat that they've got nothing to lose but their chains is carrying a torch for feudal landowners is kind of a mystery to me, but whatever.
But it occurs to me that the British are actually in a period of transition furing the English Renaissance and I can't help but wonder if the lack of material currency which forced a kind of credit system didn't work at least in a slightly similar way to money lending constructions that facilitated the Italian Renaissance. I've got at least one or two country house poems that reflect back on romanticized sentiment on the just-passed feudal era during the transition to proto-capitalism. On the other side of the coin of nostalgia is anxiety about the future, making a number of the poems I'm reading part of the literature of anxiety (as I'm coming to think of it). It is, at least tangentially linked to similar themes in my own proposed thesis writing - which puts me in a slightly better place than I was before, at least.