F&M has a high a-quotient.

[occultatio]

So, my classes? This semester? Are freaking awesome.

I'm in my sophomore tutorial, with Prof. Mitchell, which is my first ever purely F&M seminar with more than two people in it, so that's awesome (as is Mitchell himself). That goes well.

I'm taking another semester of Irish, and it seems that making flashcards and diligently using them might actually allow me to get a good grade this time around, so that goes well too.

But the real gems are my other two courses. My seminar on "Performing Texts," for instance, has the most awesome syllabus of anything ever. Week 1, we watched Groundhog Day. Week 2, we read and watched Pygmalion and My Fair Lady. This week, we're watching Singing In The Rain. Later on, we get to Woody Allen movies.

The awesomeness extends beyond movies, however. One of our textbooks contains an excerpt from Geertz's "Deep Play." And an excerpt from another article we read for this past class contained the following segment, which is probably the most wonderful thing I've ever read in a serious, academic article:

In daring you to perform some foolhardy act (or else expose yourself as, shall we say, a wuss), "I" (hypothetically singular) necessarily invoke a consensus of the eyes of others. It is these eyes through which you risk being seen as a wuss; by the same token, it is as people who share with me a contempt for wussiness that these others are interpellated, with or without their consent, by the act I have performed in daring you.

Now, these people, supposing them real and present, may or may not in fact have any interest in sanctioning against wussiness. They might, indeed, themselves be wussy and proud of it. They may wish actively to oppose a social order based on contempt for wusses. Alternatively they may be skeptical of my own standing in the ongoing war on wussiness -- they may be unwilling to leave the work of its arbitration to me; may wonder if I harbor wussish tendencies myself, perhaps revealed in my unresting need to test the w-quotient of others. For that matter, you yourself, the person dared, may share with them any of these skeptical attitudes on the subject; and may additionally doubt, or be uninterested in, their authority to classify you as wuss or better.

- from Performativity and Performance, by Andrew Parker and Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick

So yeah. That was beautiful. But the gem is really my junior tutorial, a 1-on-1 class, where today I brought in, as an illustrative example to Harold Scheub's Story, Orson Scott Card's Maps in a Mirror, and ended up leaving with the assignment to read my favorite story from that collection in terms of the theoretical narratology in Scheub's work.

I am, in other words, to write a short essay on why Orson Scott Card is an amazing storyteller.

I love my concentration, so very much.

Comments

[dr_whom]

Why are you in both a sophomore tutorial and a junior tutorial?

[occultatio.livejournal.com]

Because I'm the only junior in the concentration, and Prof. Foster didn't want me taking 97b on my own. So I'm taking it this year with the actual sophomores.