Writings

I have been busy with deadlines recently. First was the final assignment for ELT376. It was complicated, but even then I think I severely underestimated just how complex the essay would be. I cannot comment much yet until the results are released, so I will have to hold off on putting that essay on the blog.

I had to choose 2-3 authors and respond to Woolf’s idea that women lacked the freedom and adequate tools with which to write themselves. BUT! I needed to incorporate écriture féminine. BUT! I also needed to talk about how they are the *most* successful in interrogating the material and immaterial conditions undergirding patriarchy. BUT! Somewhere in there was also a tension between écriture féminine and intersectionality.

Now Cixous claims there’s “no general woman” but the way she writes *does* assume one, and this essentialist critique is pointed out by Toril Moi (thank you for making Cixous easier to understand). So here there’s obviously a tension between EF and intersectionality that needs to be addressed. Also, you’d obviously expect that at the very least, I would have to say what I mean by écriture féminine, except Cixous tells us it “cannot be strictly defined, enclosed, or coded”.

Ma’am, what do you want from me?

Even Jesus had it easier; he just had to get beaten up really badly and get nailed and stop asking so many questions. (This biased take comes from my having watch Jesus Christ Superstar the musical. 11/10 recommend. I keep listening to Gethsemane and Judas’ Death)

In short, I agonised a lot over the writing and decided I should start simple, so start simple I did. Halfway through the ideas became more and more abstract and while I did finish the essay, I feel like I lost control of it midway. It’s been bothering me a lot since and I feel I want to break it down once it comes back.

Right after that I had to write a near-4000 word essay for Malaysian Chinese Literature. In Chinese. On a confidence scale of 1 to 10 if analysing texts in English was a 4, my confidence in analysing modern Chinese Literature would be a 1. The lecturer doesn’t award my symbolism readings and I’m stuck finding things to talk about. In the end, against a tight deadline I just went ahead with some symbolic reading anyway because I couldn’t do any better. I really should have majored in English.

Anyway, that’s what I have been up to, that explains the lack of updates. My kids have just told me they’re doing Lord of the Flies next year. Guess I might be writing some LotF things here as well. But not that soon. I have one final exam to sit for in mid-November, on Classical Chinese literature. Gotta survive that before anything.

One last thing I’m toying with – perhaps during the break I might write about teaching literature and poetry to students, and a new series called GRWM (Get Reading With Me). I’ll pick a story (I already have The Veldt in mind) and I’ll take sections of it and write my thoughts and analysis on it, in real time. In the final instalment, we put everything together, and tackle one lit essay based on it. So many lit influencers out there talking about books or selling their courses and making close reading look so easy.

GRWM is here to tell you it’s not. You will see me suffer. Whole sentences will go unanalysed. We will curse at words that don’t make sense, like that unicorn in Dylan Thomas’ And Death Shall Have No Dominion. No seriously, somebody tell me what this “unicorn evils” is all about.