In Praise Of Virginia Woolf

A lot of the reason I have become the person I am today is due to the writing of Virginia Woolf. Whether my favorite novel, Mrs. Dalloway, or her political essays like Three Guineas I have been greatly shaped by her writing.

I mention Woolf today because I came across an EBook of Three Guineas. If you've never read Woolf before, this is a great place to begin engaging with her. The shaping of many of my ideas about war, gender, and other things have come through this book.

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MA Thesis

After nearly two years of hard work, frustration, anger, thrills, and multitudes of new learning paths gained I present my MA Thesis:

A Threat To The Known: The Unknown Descendants Of Print Culture

My primary focus, I hope, is on the role of reader agency and how it is affected by hypertext fiction.  I used These Waves Of Girls and The Unknown as my primary examples and Dracula as a canonical touchstone.

I’ll have a longer post next week documenting my thoughts about my work, the MA Thesis process, and other issues that crossed my path.

 

Weekly Reader

  • The New Yorker on Dracula and other Vampire related media.
  • Kathleen Fitzpatrick’s very moving tribute to her colleague David Foster Wallace.
  • Performing Subjectivities: Multi-Mimesis in These Waves of Girls
  • Jeanette Winterson reviews the new edition of Cosmicomics.
  • The Guardian interviews Feministing’s Jessica Valenti.

    • Weekly Reader

  • Joseph Tabbi on locating the literary in New Media.
  • Naomi Klein on demanding more from President Obama.
  • The Quarterly Conversation has all of the details for the new UK edition of Cosmicomics which includes seven previously unseen, but seemingly slowly trickling out in a number of periodicals, stories.
  • Forty seven new letters from Benjamin Franklin’s time in London have been found by an academic.
  • Henry Jenkins is interviewing Nick Montfort (who also has a new weblog) and Ian Bogost about their work on Platform Studies.

    • Spring Symposium

    On Tuesday we had our program symposium at Monmouth.  I spoke on a panel discussion about academic publishing alongside a few professors and other students from my program.  We had a good discussion from both the perspective of students and faculty members.  The conversation was greatly enhanced by excellent questions from the audience of faculty and students.

    Among the topics which came up included networking on the Internet and at conferences, following submission guidelines properly, joining listservs, and the differences between manuscript and article publishing.  I got to discuss publishing in Online journals at length and also defended the academic discourse that goes on in my Twitter feed.

    Here is a PDF of my brief opening statement.  I don’t think anyone else had prepared statements, but I will check and encourage them to upload if they do.

     

    Thesis Defense

    I am happy to announce that I defended my MA thesis on Monday morning.   Overall, it went well with some lively discussion about my work.  I am happy to be done: the writing process has been difficult and very trying at times.  There are some things about the process, and the constraints of an English program, which I did not forsee.  Graduate school ended up involving a lot of things I did not want it to when I began back in January of 2007. 

    It’s become quite clear that I will not be heading towards a PhD, but in some other direction yet to be determined. 

    I need to thank again my advisors, Dr. David Tietge and Dr. Liora Brosh for all their help and guidance.  This week I will be doing one last set of revisions and then handing in my work for a final grade.  No matter the outcome or grade I am glad I went through this process, which has given me a number of research paths to undertake in the future. 

    Here is a PDF of what I read on Monday.  It is very hard to summarize my ideas in fifteen to twenty minutes, but the general idea is there.