Aleksandra the Great’s Exploits

Maybe I do live on the wrong side of Clifton Heights

Monday morning I was heading for the trolley and noticed that the back right window of kuruma-kun (Car) was broken. It looked as if someone had hit it with a bat or some such tool, shattering the glass and leaving a little hole. I naturally worried that I had caused it. As it turns out, however, 13 cars in the area had been shot at with a beebee gun. Apparently, some vandals were riding around Clifton destroying property. Hmmm.

And again!

It shouldn’t be too hard to recall my post-colonial lit. professor (since I wrote about him in the last post). We were reading Jean Rhys’ Wide Sargasso Sea, which is a companion novel to Jane Eyre that deals with the [spoiler warning] supposedly crazy woman in the attic. It’s a background, essentially. Anyway, she ends up burning down the guy’s mansion in JE, and there’s one critic who suggests that Jean Rhys is encouraging the metaphorical burning of all books like Jane Eyre (that exploit colonial stereotypes). So, my professor picks his copy of JE and sets fire to the edges.
Canon?

In the post-colonial lit. course we read three novels by women, and the rest were written by men. As an end-of-term activity, we all voted on the books we liked most and least, what we would eliminate if we had to, etc. The women writers were spread out, and Salmon Rushdie won the most-liked. Then the professor explained that the real canon is determined by how many articles are written about particular authors or works. So we voted on what authors we had written about or were planning to write about. As it turns out, the three woman authors were at the top of that list.

My professor said that he knew of only one study done between the critics and their opinions on a work. There was some conference in which a person presented a study on critics of Ulysses. Apparently (I haven’t read it), the woman in it has an affair. So the presenter researched the critics who thought the woman was a whore versus those who thought she was liberated and found an overwhelming correlation between critics who thought she was a whore who had also been involved in affairs and divorces. What does this mean for criticism?

And finally

Ten-to-twelve-page papers are significantly harder to write than five-to-seven-page papers. At least there’s only one more to write.