Monday, February 24, 2003

Woo! Back at school, post-reading week break and ready to sink my teeth into the last six weeks of my third year here at Nipissing. Or, conversely, be sunk by missing the better part of the two weeks prior to my break as a result of producing a play and catching 'the wrath of' virus.

So. yeah. Sixteen days until my 20th century essay is due, and I decided to change my topic today. This actually isn't that bad as I have not reallly even started to work on it yet, aside from some cursory forays into postmodernism, and I have to do a presentation on that anyway, so it's a total waste.

Except now I have to write about the commentary that the 'text within a text' makes on 'art' and 'the artist' in Woolf's "Between the Acts" and Stoppard's "Travesties". That should be fun.

Monday, February 17, 2003

Blogging from a Graphic Design computer lab at my boyfriend's college, where I am hanging out for the day and thinking about postmodernism. And Macintosh computers. And why I don't really like Macs.

So. Trying to ascertain where exactly postmodernism diverges from modernism is not exactly the most simple task, but there is a certain amount of fun in the challenge. Professor Mary Klages has a pretty neat article here (snaps to Steve for that one). Unfortunately, thus far most of the articles I've accessed through Nipissing's online resources have been somewhat less than helpful, and I left my Abrams' Glossary of Literary Terms in North Bay. It's Reading Week, at long last.

Anyhow, I'm trying to put together both a presentation on post-modernism as well as a comparative research essay using Krapp's Last Tape and Tom Stoppard's Travesties to explain the break between modernism and postmodernism.

Does anyone else want to hyphenate 'postmodernism'? Perhaps that's a postmodernist tendency in and of itself.

Wednesday, February 05, 2003

We're doing Samuel Beckett in 20th Century literature; specifically "Krapp's Last Tape". While I didn't really care for it, even after watching a video taped performance of it, it did spawn an interesting discussion about memory, posterity and why we save things.

Why do we write? (Or tape record, or whatever). A sense of posterity, of immortality, perhaps? That certainly comes into play for me, I think. It's also useful as an organizational system; a way of tracking notes and thoughts and impressions. For some, like Tinka, it isn't about what is written, but about the physical act of writing. I think it helps me to contextualize my life; to place things in perspective: looking back, it is interesting to see what I once considered important and to evaluate if it still is.

More later, and a new poem of the month.