I used to be smart. What happened?

[wordinista]

I got a wild hair this morning, and went looking in my various backup folders for old essays I'd written during my grad school years.  I found a good bunch of them (and I'm sure I'd find more if I keep looking), and something rather disturbing has occurred to me:

I used to be smart.

I'm reading through these essays, and I seriously do not recognize the person who wrote them.  One of the documents is a copy of my M.A. comprehensive exam -- which is basically a 6-8 hour essay test with questions that will make your brain turn inside out.  The test is in January, and for mine I began studying in November, reading just about every noteworthy book in the British canon (I began with Beowulf and worked straight up to Trainspotting).  And after a brief search through my files, I found the actual exam.  They gave us eight questions to choose from, and we had to write four answers.  My answers printed out at twenty pages.



The questions I was able to answer, a mere three years ago:

1.)  Sylvia Tomasch has recently argued that a foundational moment for the creation of a shared sense of Englishness occurred in 1290, when the Jewish community was expelled from the island.  Rather than "go missing," however, the Jew became in the wake of the Expulsion a point of fascination in literature, obsessively returned to for centuries thereafter -- perhaps most famously in Marlowe's Jew of Malta, Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice, Scott's Ivanhoe, and Eliot's Daniel Deronda. Reflecting on this example or any other appropriate one, compose an essay on absent or distant "racialized" figures who nonetheless haunt the canon of British literature.

3.)  Because blood is so intimately connected to the materiality and vitality of the human body, as well as (in its more symbolic registers) genealogy and race/ethnicity, it has long preoccupied texts as both potent metaphor and unconscious displacement of varied anxieties.  In an essay which examines two cultural moments widely separated in time, examine the changing signification of blood in English literature.

6.)  Contemporary cultural criticism has taught us to attend to the quotidian, the marginal, and the frequently unvoiced aspects of culture as represented in literature.  What about the cataclysmic, the dominant and much-heralded events of history?  Are they now less important as topics of debate and analysis?  Looking at three major historical events/figures as they are represented in literary texts, discuss the intersection between "big" and "little" history.  For example, you might consider Shakespeare's history plays, Dryden on the Stuart succession crisis, Thackeray on Waterloo, Ford on World War I.

7.)  In the introduction to Torrid Zones, Felicity Nussbaum writes that the discourse of empire "enabled the consolidation of the cult of domesticity in England and, at the same time, the association of the sexualized woman at home with the exotic, or 'savage,' non-European woman."  How is this dichotomy problematized by texts in the Romantic period?  --eg in the triad of Jane, Blanche, and Bertha in Jane Eyre or Julia vs. Haidee in Don Juan?

I studied for two months straight.  I read everything I could get my hands on -- literature and criticism -- because we were expected to be able to reference critics who had written on the literature as well.  Passing this exam ranks high on my list of "Things Kara Has Done That She's Proud Of," but... it's all starting to feel very... distant.  Like my halcyon days of academia are forever gone, never to be recaptured.  I'm remembering the days I'd brew a pot of tea and sprawl out on my bed/couch/floor and read the entire day, like I did while preparing for this exam.

I'm, of course, overlooking the fact that I developed an ulcer that same year.  I'm also overlooking the fact that I had, by the time I graduated, a patch of grey hair on the right side of my head (at the hairline above my right eyebrow) that would grow into a streak of grey if I let it.  I did not have it BEFORE I went to grad school, and have thus nicknamed it "The GW Streak."  Perversely, that patch of silver is something of a badge of honor (that I assault with dye monthly).  I'm also overlooking the three days I spent crying after receiving a scathing batch of comments regarding one of my earliest thesis drafts.  THREE DAYS.  CRYING.  I couldn't look at the document without tearing up. 

And yet, for some reason, I miss it.  Never once, during all of that, did I ever say, "I wish I'd never gone to grad school."  (There were times when I felt overwhelmed and seriously out of my league, but I felt better after finding out that a lot of my classmates felt the same way.)

Sadly, my brain doesn't feel as sharp as it used to, and I wonder if maybe I might start re-reading some of my old texts.  It's been forever and a day since I picked up The Lais of Marie de France or Villette.  It's been ages since I looked at one of my (many) books on Romanticism.  There was a time when one of my favorite books was Horror Fiction in the Protestant Tradition. 

I've been teaching remedial stuff for too long.  I need to get excited about it again. 

Of course, there are a few books you couldn't pay me to read over again.  The Mysteries of Udolpho, for example, or The Book of Margery Kempe.  And I'd rather rip out my own tongue than read Vanity Fair again.  ... Or anything we covered in my Sir Walter Scott-obsessed professor's class on 19th Century Brit Lit.  (Thackeray and Scott make me grimace in distaste to this very day.)

I want to read PB Shelley's essays again.  I want to read Edmund Burke and Henry James and Matthew Lewis and...  okay, I don't want to read Tobias Smollett -- he's right up there with Thackeray and Scott.  I want to read Wieland again, and then follow it up with a viewing of Frailty, because they both work together JUST THAT WELL. 

I don't really want to read Heidegger, Gramsci, or Deleuze & Guattari, because they're a pain in the ass, but some... twisted, masochistic urge is making me want to pick them up and read them anyway.

Thank goodness it's summer.

Comments

[ouatic-7.livejournal.com]

Heck, I could barely understand the questions (engineer) but I know what you mean. There are boatloads of information from school that I never used and have allowed to leak away. I console myself that if I need it again it will come back easily. And of course, being a software engineer lots of that stuff is now obsolete.

[w0rdinista.livejournal.com]

Exactly! The good thing is that I at least still have all of my books, so if I ever want to brush up on this stuff (which I sort of do), the materials are all at arm's reach. At least, after going through all of the trouble to learn it ONCE, refreshing my memory shouldn't be too terribly difficult.