An (Actual) Academic Update

February just marches along, doesn't it?

I spent the weekend in Oxford again, doing schoolwork, although I got to meet up with a deaf British woman from Manchester on Saturday -- she's worked in high-level jobs before in the British foreign service (which is how I met her, through a foreign embassy official I met in DC before coming to Oxford), and is now dedicating most of her energy to working toward greater access and equality for people with disabilities in the UK, particularly in the workforce. We chatted about access, equality, and the existing barriers to those two things in the US and the UK and worldwide, and I got to learn more about lipspeaking (a method of access that she uses, based on lipreading and different from sign language interpreting) with her lipspeaker who came along to Oxford. Fascinating stuff, and combined with several brunch/coffee/dinner dates with friends it made for an enjoyable but busy weekend.

Another view from another day in another library

Now the week has brought its usual flurry of working on reading and schoolwork while catching up with friends and taking care of miscellaneous other commitments. I'm feeling just about back to normal after the accident, or close enough, and have been easing back into the gym and into some yoga and more, yes, speedwalking about town -- how glorious it feels to have my body back again! I've been reminded not to take these things for granted, which is a good perspective to have, and even things that can get tiring -- such as spending all day in the library, for instance -- I need to treat as a gift. Fortunately, however, I'm working on some academic projects at the moment that really excite me, and since several readers of this blog have told me that I don't write nearly often enough about school (supposedly my primary reason for being here in Oxford), here are a few tidbits of that:

My major project of the week has been wading my way through David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest, a true behemoth of a novel that lives up to all the hype about it -- both good and bad. It's mind-blowing and staggering in its genius (yes, I would call it genius, as one of the works that helped define a generation and a time in American literature, as overwritten as it is at times), but also mind-blowingly and staggeringly dense and excessive. I've nearly made it halfway through, with a week left to read the rest, and am already planning on writing about the character Mario Incandenza and the whole concept of the crippled/physically limited artistic muse and the wide range of linguistic registers that Wallace uses to describe those things. Along with Wallace's essay collection Consider the Lobster, my mind is a bit full of footnotes and explosive sentences and quirky specialized-cum-slang vocabulary and other Wallace-isms these days. I'm learning to enjoy the guy more and more, I admit, and as much time as I'm spending on Infinite Jest I also admit that it's a thoroughly worthwhile experience.

Infinite Jest isn't all, however. I've also been looking at e-books and digital editions of texts for a material methodology course, focusing specifically on a 2011 iPad app version of T.S. Eliot's "The Waste Land" by Touch Press and Faber & Faber. The app raises questions about the performativity of texts and modernist poetry (or modernist writing in general), the intended audience for multimedia apps like this one, and the ways in which the reading experience changes when one encounters such a seminal work as "The Waste Land" in digital form versus in a more traditional book. As much of a hard-copy book purist as I am, I've had some fun flipping through the app during the last week and thinking of all the questions I could ask about it. I find it incredible to think about all the ways in which digital publishing could change the reading landscape, and I've never taken the opportunity to write about it (in such a case-study mode) before.

There's also been time for other things -- for instance, another Rhodes House meet and mingle on Friday night

Finally, there's my dissertation. More of it will follow after I've finished the term and these two major papers on Wallace and digital publishing, but in short I'm looking at Faulkner's The Sound and the Fury and McCullers's The Heart is a Lonely Hunter to try to determine the role that disabled characters play in the novels' narrative, as well as their placement in the Southern gothic (slash grotesque) tradition in general. Disability seems to me here to be a problem of linguistic representation or linguistic access, and also a problem of oversimplification (in which one character becomes more remarkable for his/her metaphorical significance for the narrative, by virtue of his/her disability and what that represents, than he/she does for other character traits or three-dimensionality). There's been a lot of theorizing about the Southern gothic and grotesque traditions (and oftentimes a lot of overlap between those two terms), and I think understanding this exact representation of disability through language can help add another layer to determining the exact function of the grotesque. Does it need to be physical, can it be linguistic, what is its overall aesthetic, et cetera. This is all very rough, but it means that I get to continue reading more works of fiction and more critical theory on the subject, which I'm looking forward to. After classes are done this term, I'll have all of Trinity term (i.e., until the end of June) to work on this dissertation project. Prepare for more days in the library…

And, now, back to my work in the library instead of procrastinating by giving updates on what I ought to be working on. (But, not to worry, my immediate future isn't only in libraries! I'll be in Oxford until the end of the term, just to continue taking care of myself, but then after that I'll be heading off to Turkey, Albania, and Greece at various points of the spring break! Excited, and more on that soon.)

To close: a very wet, very colorful Oxford sunset