No time for blogging

I haven't blogged lately because I've been spending my time reading! Since my last blog, I've read Dracula and Wuthering Heights, along with several secondary sources on each, particularly as I prepared for my presentation on Dracula. I've learned a lot about female editors in the 19th century, and a larger project is starting to take shape. Liz Polcha has even convinced me that perhaps Turn of the Screw belongs in my project with its genderless narrator and female transcriber. Anyway, I'll have to think more about that.

I've loved, btw, reading these two Gothic novels. The discussions in class have been great--I especially like when people wonder why I like Wuthering Heights so much. It gives me a chance to express passion for literature that I don't often get to express in stuffy academic writing. I can't wait to finish the trifecta by reading Frankenstein.

Anyway, I start Blake this weekend and plan to read both America and Milton. Blake is so underrated and misunderstood, but in many ways he is the father of modern poetry, especially postmodern, psychedelic writing. Allen Ginsberg said he begin writing poetry because William Blake visited him in a vision. How much more inspirational can you be than that??

Skipping

By the way, I fell behind so skipped Bunting's Brigflatts and MacDiarmid's Drunk Man. I have read both before, and since nobody else is reading them, I don't see the point. I've moved on to Dracula, which seems to be much more popular as does Wuthering Heights. Most of the class is reading both.

I must admit that I feel bad not having covered any true "high Modernist" work like or Drunk Man or Dubliners or Virginia Woolf or whatever. But I do encourage all of you to read in this time period and/or take a class at TU on Modernism. It's one of the strengths of our English department.

Waiting for Dracula

I haven't posted in a while--mainly because I've been getting ready for the art opening--but I have been reading. I finished Waiting for Godot and have started Dracula. Beckett is one of my favorite writers, but I hadn't read this play until now, believe it or not. And I'm so glad I put it on my list. Now I know why it's so popular and influential. So many issues and themes are at stake simultaneously in the play that it could be fertile ground not just for several essays/projects for this class but for an entire scholarly career!