I don’t really have anything particularly interesting to blog about this week, but I have been thinking about my personal academic essay, and how I’m going to write it. I was thinking about playing with the structure of the essay, having things move forward while some move backwards, intermixing dialogue and song lyrics with research. I know it sounds like it’ll be all over the place, but I’m actually excited about writing an essay for once because of this.
Maybe it’ll be stream of consciousness. From reading Pagnucci this week, I see that our narratives, if they are truly to be about us living the narrative life, have to have everything in there. Song lyrics? That’s part of me. Random thoughts? That’ll go in there too. Research about topics I’m interested in? That’ll be in there too. If anything, I was struck by one of the quotes I read in Pagnucci’s “Storied Wisdom” section by Douglas Coupland. “He said our curse as humans is that we are trapped in time-our curse is that we are forced to interpret life as a sequence of events-a story-and that when we can’t figure out what our particular story is we feel lost somehow” (105).
Isn’t this the truth. We oftentimes take our cues from music, books, and movies, and when our life isn’t reflecting any of those easy plots or storylines, we suddenly wonder what’s wrong with us. I think this will fit nicely with my “refusal to grow up” theme from last week’s blog. Nobody really writes the specific story, or handbook, or song, about how you’re supposed to grow up, or how your experience of growing up was. But, as Pagnucci would say, that’s for us to do, where “in a world without heirlooms, we make our own” (95). It’s up to us to preserve that piece of experience, and if I’m going to be honest with myself, and my topic, the paper will have all of these seemingly disparate elements that make me who I am at this point in my life. The problem is making the contents of my feverish brain interesting for the audience.
Of course, being a comic book nerd, I also like Pagnucci’s section on his love for comic books and how that always seemed to relegate him to the fringes of academia. But as I’ve said, and always wanted to write more about, comic books can be powerful sources for literary analysis. You just have to know where to look. One of the things so strong with comic books, at least the non-crappy ones, is that they have an overarching mythology to them. Batman, Superman, Spider-Man…these are our modern Greek gods, believe it or not. If Edith Hamilton were still alive (is she?) she would be writing not about Zeus, but about these characters and the effect they have on our culture, and how they often mirror that culture.
A few years ago, Marvel comics had an all-out, year-long event called “Civil War,” which featured nearly all the characters from the Marvel universe taking sides for and against a new type of legislation that forcefully mandated superheroes to now register with the government and relinquish their vigilante status. Nerdy stuff, I know, but it had many echoes of the War on terrorism, the recent paranoia on issues of privacy vs. security, and racial divisions. It was massively popular, perhaps validating, if just an inkling, that comic books were more than just pop fluff and could speak on weightier topics. Also, Captain America, perhaps the definitive “give ‘em hell” American in all of comics, was assassinated. The issue garnered all types of media coverage, including the front page of the New York Times. He’s not real, but the implications of his death were still resounding.
Saturday, October 25, 2008
Sunday, October 19, 2008
Growin' Up
For this week’s blog, I’ve been mulling over in my mind what my personal academic essay might be about. I have a few ideas, but one of them has to do with being an academic, and maintaining mental health. No joke, it’s what I’ve been thinking about. I especially became interested in themes of identity when reading “Living the Narrative Life.” What does it mean to be in college and maintain some sort of identity, when, as Pagnucci writes, professors “take pride in opening students’ minds, working to help them consider their biases, their blind spots, their fears.” (25). But what happens if we take too much apart, too much “of the students’ original selves” to where the student can “never go back home” (25)? Pagnucci summarizes it perfectly, as it relates to telling narratives, when he writes “as we develop a critical mind, how much does that chip away at our emotional being?”(26).
I’m not saying college makes emotionless robots of us all, and I don’t think Pagnucci is either, but where do you draw the line? How much of your critical ability to question and analyze texts can creep into your own life? But maybe this isn’t the issue. In regards to Freshman composition classes, and because I’ve been thinking about this lately, shouldn’t we let them tell their own narratives? It’s a matter of letting them maintain some sort of identity. College is about testing previously held assumptions, but it isn’t about losing them altogether. Sometimes, in the case of myself, I feel like I question everything. Maybe this is a matter of me letting my work spill into my life, but for once, I’d like to not overanalyze something to death. This may be partly where I go with my personal essay, but if I do, I would pose it in the context of the 1301 classroom. How do we get those students to learn the perfunctory standards of college, while maintaining their identity? Pagnucci is right that education is an “imposition of one set of values over another, a secular ideology over a religious one,” but I believe the students have a choice on what they want to keep and what they want to leave behind (27).
Then I catch myself. This is a boring topic. Maybe it’s important to the field of study, but how can I remotely make it interesting if I’m just not feeling it? What I really want to write about, and what all of this boils down to, is my inability to take on responsibility and grow up. Its not that I don’t want to, or that I haven’t started doing it, it’s that I’m scared to death of it. How the hell do you do it? How do you get to that point? What’s the secret, as a crazed Willy Loman would ask? Of course I want to write about identity and college because I still don’t feel ready for the real world. Ironically, this crisis of responsibility makes me feel closer to my Freshman students, who just recently had to leave their homes, their comforts, and some of their beliefs, behind them. How you make this academic, I’m not sure, but there has to be a topic in there somewhere, some wild, unruly paper waiting to be written. It might still be boring, but at least it will mean more to me.
I’m not saying college makes emotionless robots of us all, and I don’t think Pagnucci is either, but where do you draw the line? How much of your critical ability to question and analyze texts can creep into your own life? But maybe this isn’t the issue. In regards to Freshman composition classes, and because I’ve been thinking about this lately, shouldn’t we let them tell their own narratives? It’s a matter of letting them maintain some sort of identity. College is about testing previously held assumptions, but it isn’t about losing them altogether. Sometimes, in the case of myself, I feel like I question everything. Maybe this is a matter of me letting my work spill into my life, but for once, I’d like to not overanalyze something to death. This may be partly where I go with my personal essay, but if I do, I would pose it in the context of the 1301 classroom. How do we get those students to learn the perfunctory standards of college, while maintaining their identity? Pagnucci is right that education is an “imposition of one set of values over another, a secular ideology over a religious one,” but I believe the students have a choice on what they want to keep and what they want to leave behind (27).
Then I catch myself. This is a boring topic. Maybe it’s important to the field of study, but how can I remotely make it interesting if I’m just not feeling it? What I really want to write about, and what all of this boils down to, is my inability to take on responsibility and grow up. Its not that I don’t want to, or that I haven’t started doing it, it’s that I’m scared to death of it. How the hell do you do it? How do you get to that point? What’s the secret, as a crazed Willy Loman would ask? Of course I want to write about identity and college because I still don’t feel ready for the real world. Ironically, this crisis of responsibility makes me feel closer to my Freshman students, who just recently had to leave their homes, their comforts, and some of their beliefs, behind them. How you make this academic, I’m not sure, but there has to be a topic in there somewhere, some wild, unruly paper waiting to be written. It might still be boring, but at least it will mean more to me.
Saturday, October 11, 2008
Creative Nonblogtion
For my second blog, I thought I’d talk a little bit about how the first project is going. The truth? It isn’t. I’m having a harder time then I thought I would writing about myself and the process it took to finish my paper for my senior capstone class. How does one get back to that mindset? What was the process? Should I even write about that stuff? Maybe I’m becoming too focused on the works of the personal essayists we’ve been reading, and like Lynn Bloom says, I’m having trouble silencing the nay-sayers in my head that tell me I’m not as good or clever as them.
I know several things about my capstone paper that I want to communicate: one, that it was personally meaningful for me to write it, and two, that it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to write, not just because of the subject matter, father and son relationships, but because the enormous amount of research I had to sift through. It was the first time when writing a paper that I thought, “I’m going to have to pick and choose what I want to include, even though I want everything to go in here.” The paper, and topic, spurred so many ideas in my mind that I wanted to include every last one of them.
I suppose I could take the more autobiographical route, and discuss how the research had me thinking back to my relationship with my own father. Then something Bloom said, that “every writer of creative nonfiction is an Ishmael who alone has lived to tell the tale-the true story that only he or she can tell,” stuck out in my mind (72). Why not talk about how writing the paper helped me deal with a “lifetime of questions” about my father, as Norman Maclean eloquently put it in A River Runs Through It, while also talking about the process? Bloom seems to interweave both the personal and the academic effectively when talking about the process of writing creative nonfiction, along with the realization of her having a twin that her parent’s attempted to cover up. The transition between the two topics was seamless. This gives me hope for my paper.
I know several things about my capstone paper that I want to communicate: one, that it was personally meaningful for me to write it, and two, that it was the most difficult thing I’ve ever had to write, not just because of the subject matter, father and son relationships, but because the enormous amount of research I had to sift through. It was the first time when writing a paper that I thought, “I’m going to have to pick and choose what I want to include, even though I want everything to go in here.” The paper, and topic, spurred so many ideas in my mind that I wanted to include every last one of them.
I suppose I could take the more autobiographical route, and discuss how the research had me thinking back to my relationship with my own father. Then something Bloom said, that “every writer of creative nonfiction is an Ishmael who alone has lived to tell the tale-the true story that only he or she can tell,” stuck out in my mind (72). Why not talk about how writing the paper helped me deal with a “lifetime of questions” about my father, as Norman Maclean eloquently put it in A River Runs Through It, while also talking about the process? Bloom seems to interweave both the personal and the academic effectively when talking about the process of writing creative nonfiction, along with the realization of her having a twin that her parent’s attempted to cover up. The transition between the two topics was seamless. This gives me hope for my paper.
Thursday, October 2, 2008
Well, this is to be the discovery blog, eh? I don't know what to write in particular, but I could just start with the idea of the personal essay. I guess since I always wrote songs, I never really wrote journal entries. When I conferenced with Dr. Kirklighter, I told her that my personal outlet was always my songs: like a journal entry, they always stand for how I felt or thought at a particular time. I'd like to think they are a little digressive like Montaigne, too.
But what is the personal? Even in the personal essays we've read, as telling as they've been, they often have a distance to them that doesn't quite the author. Another good example is The Squid and the Whale. Though Baumbach based the characters on his family, they were still fictionalized portraits. I tried to think about whether or not I did this with my songs, and I guess I do. Usually those songs arise from a particularly intense or meaningful situation for me, and I always have the impetus to write about them, but as banana stated, I sometimes don't have a purpose. Therefore, it takes a long while until I actually get around to writing them. By then, they've become barnacle encrusted with whatever other life experience I've had since the initial inspiration, and the meaning isn't the same. So instead of putting myself into that song, which would be difficult as it seems we never can remember how the most important times in our lives actually felt, I create a character. This now seems totally pretentious, but go with me here. The character is like any narrator/mask you put on. He/she serves as an avatar for you, or for feelings that you've had, or is symbolic of something in your past. The list goes on forever.
After that, though, you still need a purpose, a theme to direct the song towards (which was hard to explain to my Composition classes when they were doing their first project. I told them "It's like writing a song about nothing. You can't do it, unless you're R.E.M." I got blank stares). If you don't have this, the song falls apart. I suppose its the same with the personal essay. Even if they do digress, as Montaigne's certainly do, there has to be some overarching theme. But of course, there are those songs that come immediately as a raw, emotional response from your soul, which pretty much negates everything I just wrote.
But what is the personal? Even in the personal essays we've read, as telling as they've been, they often have a distance to them that doesn't quite the author. Another good example is The Squid and the Whale. Though Baumbach based the characters on his family, they were still fictionalized portraits. I tried to think about whether or not I did this with my songs, and I guess I do. Usually those songs arise from a particularly intense or meaningful situation for me, and I always have the impetus to write about them, but as banana stated, I sometimes don't have a purpose. Therefore, it takes a long while until I actually get around to writing them. By then, they've become barnacle encrusted with whatever other life experience I've had since the initial inspiration, and the meaning isn't the same. So instead of putting myself into that song, which would be difficult as it seems we never can remember how the most important times in our lives actually felt, I create a character. This now seems totally pretentious, but go with me here. The character is like any narrator/mask you put on. He/she serves as an avatar for you, or for feelings that you've had, or is symbolic of something in your past. The list goes on forever.
After that, though, you still need a purpose, a theme to direct the song towards (which was hard to explain to my Composition classes when they were doing their first project. I told them "It's like writing a song about nothing. You can't do it, unless you're R.E.M." I got blank stares). If you don't have this, the song falls apart. I suppose its the same with the personal essay. Even if they do digress, as Montaigne's certainly do, there has to be some overarching theme. But of course, there are those songs that come immediately as a raw, emotional response from your soul, which pretty much negates everything I just wrote.
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