I Have a Blog?!

Well, hello there blogosphere! It's been over two months since I've written and I apologize to all of my imaginary readers (the readers of the three? four? posts I've written). I wish I could say that I was rescuing 850 Chechnyan orphans while partaking in intense hand-to-hand combat with Russian soldiers, but I was really just laying around, going to class, and writing essays.

So some brief up-dates to catch you up:

My last class was on April 28. It was a sad day--there's nothing I love more than being in a good class and this now means that I'm done with classes for the foreseeable future. Keep your fingers crossed that next fall I'll be back in class at some yet-to-be determined PhD program. As almost everyone knows, I'm taking the year off to take entrance exams and apply for PhD programs. Oh, and to get a real big-kid job. I wish I could lie and say that I'm really looking forward to leaving academia and entering the real world, but I have some major reservations about this. My ideal year off would be to bum around Oklahoma, bonding with the hippies in the Paeso, and reading Hemingway and Whitman. Alas, student loan payments loom overhead and I do have a dog to feed. Reality bites.

I'm done with all of my coursework. The total count is thousands of pages read, six essays, and one lame research methods assignment. Academically this has been one of the most challenging year. It even beats the first semester of my senior year of undergrad, in which I took three lit courses, an advanced French class, and wrote my undergraduate thesis. I never felt overwhelmed with the reading or the essay-writing. The main challenge for me was theory. See, in my undergrad English courses we never really touched on theory. My second year I took a Critical Reading and Writing class where we skimmed the surface of Feminist, Marxist, Post colonialist, and New Historicist theory. I also learned to fear Derrida. It was just a basic introduction. It's in the postgrad courses that they really get into theory. So I had never even heard of Kristeva or Lacan when I got here. There's always been a frustrated philosophy major inside me. I took several philosophy courses, but I don't really have the mind for it. I did, however, end up writing two very theory heavy essays this semester. My last essay was about ethics and the other, meaning I got to know Levinas very well. And did you know that there's a whole theory of transvestites and drag performance? This brings me to my next update--

My dissertation. In April I wrote an essay using Marjorie Garber's theory of transvestites, or the figure of the “third, that which questions binary thinking and introduces crisis." Basically the introduction of a transvestite in a work of literature destabilizes comfortable binaries and projects this discomfort onto a marginalized figure, which is usually that of the transvestite. I'm going to take this theory, explore it, and then apply it to several works of Gothic literature, namely The Monk, The Beetle, and Nightwood. I'll also be looking at Judith Butler's theory of drag performance and parody. I'm going to try to work in some fashion theory as well, using the idea of costuming Gothic bodies in correlation to cross-dressing. My dissertation has to be 15,000 words, so I'm going to try to pack as much into it as possible. I'm really excited about it, as this will be the entire focus of my summer.

Last but not least, the weather. I just thought that I should note that it doesn't get fully dark here until midnight. And it starts to get light around 3:30 in the morning. This has wrecked havoc on my eating and sleeping patterns, but it's getting better. Also, it has been gorgeous here over the past week. I've been told, and weather.com seems to confirm this, it won't get about 70 degrees here this summer. It will be a nice relief from the sweltering Oklahoma summers I'm used to. I realized yesterday that this means I can spend my days outside, instead of huddled around the air conditioner with the blinds closed, dreading the outdoors. That is, if it doesn't rain all summer. Please don't let it rain all summer.

Oh, I've also become a vegetarian. But that's another post for another time.