First Impressions of the First Week of Class

Class, for me, started at 4 pm on Tuesday the 28th. With my schedule I have no Monday or Friday classes so it's four day weekends for me all the way (that includes next semester). The way my schedule is set up, I'm basically taking three classes. My core course is the general course for the M. Phil of Popular Literature. It includes discussion on two novels every week and all 20 of us in the program attend it. All of us also have an option course, having chosen from one of four over the summer. I chose a class called "The Victorian Child," which I'll talk about later... Finally, on Wednesday afternoons, all M. Phil students of the English Department (other programs are Irish Writing and Literature of the Americas I think) are required to attend and pass a research methods class. So the schedule goes like this: Tuesday, core course; Wednesday, Research course; Thursday, Victorian Child, long break, then core course. All classes are in the late afternoon except the Victorian one, which isn't until 10 in the morning. It's a wonderful schedule.

At the start of the first class we immediately jumped into the theory of the popular. Is it art if it produces enjoyment? Are we elitist for subscribing to views that one piece of literature is better than the other? What are our standards for governing the separation of literature, and who wrote those standards? In that class, I definitely got a sense of who were the talkers and who were the thinkers. I spoke my part about the book we were supposed to read, but didn't talk nearly as much as others, which is just as well--I wasn't a big fan of this author, who wrote in the first chapter that he hated the show Seinfeld... (well I like it so there)

Research methods is basically a class to instruct us on how to construct a thesis and make it look pretty. I wrote two just this past year so I'm not intimidated by the word count or the work that has to go into it--Thank you, Honors College--but I was curious to find out if the standards or the format was going to be different in Ireland and if I would be expected to conform to those standards. Turns out, they are, but I'm not. Our professor basically said, "If you've been doing MLA format your whole life, stick to that. Make it second nature. Really get a feel for it." What they use in Ireland looks completely different, but thankfully I don't have to fret about using a whole new system of citation and research documentation. He also addressed spelling. The British spelling of things like "theatre" when we write "theater" throws me off sometimes. I see posters with these words and I think "typo!" The professor acknowledged that Trinity does get a lot of American students and that the University doesn't specialize in reteaching people how to spell, so I'm off the hook on that one too.

The Victorian Child has been, so far, my most interesting and engaging class. Our reading list is very exciting, running through some of the most popular Victorian childrens' stories--Oliver Twist, Alice in Wonderland, The Wonderful Wizard of Oz, the Princess and the Goblin--so I'm really looking forward to this one anyway, and today's discussion just confirmed that it will be wonderful! We started off talking about what childhood is, anyway. Do you lose your childhood when a horrible experience happens to you, like abuse? Do you become an adult through an experience or set of experiences, or when you reach a certain age when you can be legally tried as one, or when you gain independence and freedoms like turning 16 and driving away in your car...? Our professor did mention at one point that, as he taught childrens' lit. mostly, he had a knack for taking someone's favorite childhood story and turning it on its head and "ruining it" for most people. He attempted to do this to me on the first day of class!

We went around the room introducing ourselves and saying what our favorite books to read as children were and why. It was a really insightful introduction to my five classmates, and I found myself thinking "hey I want to read that!" When it got to me I said that I loved Little House in the Big Woods and the rest of the series (except I didn't read Happy Golden Years, I think it was called, because that was all about her getting married and I didn't care about that when I was little). I said I loved them because they were about a little girl named Laura who had brown hair and who was in the middle of two other sisters, Mary and baby Carrie. When I was reading them, I could see myself as Laura because her family looked so much like my family: I have an older sister named Mary and a little sister (named Jackie, not Carrie, but oh well!). I would picture my family living in a cabin in the big woods or on the prairie or by a lake and where ever else they lived. Laura was mischievous, she always got in trouble, and she was always less well-behaved than Mary was. That was pretty much me as a child too. My professor then told me that those books probably weren't written by Laura Ingalls Wilder.

I was sad for a minute. But I've heard the same about Shakespeare, that it was really a conglomeration of people that wrote his plays, and that Harper Lee didn't really write To Kill a Mockingbird (mostly because everyone thinks that Scout is a boy in the beginning, it sounds so much like a male voice.) I still value those books and not any less now that Mrs. Wilder may not have been the only brain behind them... but it's kind of sad just the same! I used to picture little old Laura, all wrinkly and hunched over at a writing desk, scribbling out the long story of her life as she looks out the window and contemplates how much the world has changed since her childhood. It's much better to picture that as the author than a group of people saying, "oh yes, and then in the next chapter, Laura and Mary should make maple sugar candy on the snow! And then Pa will butcher the pig. And later, let's have him encounter a bear. We are in the 'Big Woods,' you know."

So now that I'm done with my first class on Thursday evening, what will I do with my long weekend? Hmmmm... the answer is homework! There is an incredible amount of reading to do for all these classes, and a quiz for research methods coming up already!

I'm so excited about school. I love school, I love class, I love literature!! This is going to be an excellent year.