I feel like, if anyone at all has been paying close attention to my blog entries, it is fairly obvious that I made a big shift when it comes to my literary interests. Not that they wildly changed, because I mostly still like the same things than I did seven months ago, back in September, when I was just starting this MA program. But I simply never thought I would have found such an interest in what I do now: contemporary literature, apparently? From Irish authors? And from American authors? And how they deal with trauma? And climate change? What is going on?
Nothing is going on, actually. I assume that is what happens when you further your academic career: your interests simply grow. And that is great.
Now, for anyone that has not been closely looking at my blog entries for the past couple of months, I will be recapping my journey, and how you can clearly see that shift in what I wanted to do with my research along the way. I must admit, I did go through a brief, very dramatic and not at all that serious existential crisis when the moment came that we had to choose a topic for our MA thesis topic, but do not fear. I got there in the end.
Here we go, then.
My first blog post was up and running on November 22, 2022, and I must admit I love the way the date looks, but that is just not important at all. I just thought it was cute. Even cuter is the content! Titled “homoerotic victorians”, I wrote it after attending Michael G. Cronin’s seminar, Hopeful and Homoerotic Spaces in Irish Writing, which dealt with how “homoerotic desire can be a vector for utopian longing”. Another admission (or confession this time, because I feel quite embarrassed about it) is that I do not really remember how it went down, and almost nothing about the seminar is on my mind, but I do remember quite enjoying it at the time. I’m glad I have the blog entry to remind myself about it. It is quite like a diary; I just do not share my secrets in it.
Anyway.
In my first blog post, I talk about how during my studies back in Spain, my lecturers taught plenty of authors with (sometimes glaring, sometimes subtle) homoerotic subtext or explicitly queer authors, such as the Spanish Lorca or Wilde, and novels (Carmila, Mrs. Dalloway, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit). Reading it all back now, I do remember thinking—mid seminar, and when I was writing the post days later—that it was interesting to see how, nevertheless, queerness and homoerotic themes were more discussed when they were not explicitly stated, rather than when they were.
The main point of the seminar, however, was this distinction between coming out stories and queer joy stories in general. I thought about what type of queer stories I was more drawn to. It wasn’t, for whatever reason, coming out stories. Historical stories, much like during my lectures, appear to be what I’m attracted to when consuming queer works.
My second blog post still has that Victorian essence to it, since I link the general topic to works from that time, but any reader can see that I pay much more attention to the other part of the entry: the contemporary movie that I chose to go see that day, courtesy of the Cork Film Festival. Rodeo, a 2022 French film that was good enough to score a showing in Cannes, was described by the Irish Film Festival website as a “fast-paced debut (that) follows teenage Julia … an atypical heroine in search of herself and looking for her own tribe”. The movie threw me straight into a clandestine motorcycle club from the Paris suburbs where illegal tradings of motorcycles take the center stage, along with the main character. Despite the erratic pacing and themes it dealt with, the director found space for scenes of gentleness that allowed the audience to see Julia as more than a tough nut to crack; as more than her circumstances.
And that is what I loved about it.
And then I did not love it anymore, because the ending sucked. Julia goes through hell and back in that motorcycle of hers. But then, things start looking up for her. But then. Tragic death, and with that, all the progress erased and the character arc discarded.
I actually do not know if readers can tell that I was struggling really really bad to connect that particular point—my hating tragic endings for characters that have been through a lot—to anything remotely related with Victorian fiction and literature, but I was. Again, I do not remember most things about last semester (the Covid pandemic really did something with my brain, my attention span and my memory, so I will let it take the blame for this one), but the fact that I was anxious about coming up with something to write related to Victorian era books is still so clear in my mind. I was unconsciously shoving myself into a box, not knowing that I could freely express my opinions about whatever.
I just come from a heavily Medieval/Victorian/Edwardian undergrad, where contemporary books are hardly touched upon, and quite briefly when they are, so the concept of… actually doing research on contemporary work was unthinkable. So there I was, linking a 2022 French Indie film with Wuthering Heights, Little Women, Atonement, Hard Times and such, for the things that I hated about them. Beth’s death in Little Women is heartbreaking; I still cannot think of Atonement without frowning. Stephen’s death in Hard Times probably bothered me more than it should have. But as I said in that post, I’m a romantic. Or just hopeful. Jane Eyre, Pride & Prejudice, hell, all the Austen catalogue (even the unfinished Sanditon): those I’ll gladly reread. But going through all that suffering and getting no reward is just… sad. Anticlimactic. Cheap. Like the ending of Rodeo. (That was the film title. I do not think I have mentioned it in this big post yet)
The next post I decided to write was, to no one’s surprise, about the Academy Award Nominated Film (and Academy Award Loser) The Banshees of Inisherin. At this point I think I was starting to gain some self-awareness, recognising to no one but my subconsciousness that I quite liked modern works (even if this particular movie is set in the last century). So, as could not be otherwise, the entire post was me gushing about the movie. I myself am still shocked at how delighted I was from beginning to end—and I do admit the accents and scenery had something to do with it. I missed Ireland, since I was home for Christmas break for two long weeks, and the movie came out the gate swinging, making my soul ache to go back to the Emerald Isle.
It was not so much the setting as the themes it dealt with (and how it dealt with them) that made me adore it so much. Do I owe people friendship? Do I owe them anything? At what point do I stop gifting people my kindness? When it does not serve me anymore? Is that cruel, or is that just the way it should be? Is it “me before anyone else”, or “think about the hurt you inflict in others”? That kind of thing, I guess.
The performances were stellar, as well as the directing and writing. Director Martin McDonagh masterfully balances comedy and drama while delivering a brutal message about friendship, and falling out with our peers, and how bitterness and cynicism and spite are corrosive beings that leave no space for kindness. I did not know who he was before watching the movie, but then I Googled him and found out he is married to THEE Phoebe Waller-Bridge and I said “ah, that makes a lot of sense”.
Not sure how I have not written anything about Fleabag. I love Fleabag. There is so much to unpack there.
But back to what I was saying. I ended up rewatching it three times, that one. Only for them not to win any of the many nominations they had. Such a shame. It is still an Academy Award Winner in my heart. (We will get them next time, Colin Farrell).
You could tell I was going through some life questioning epoch during the time I wrote the next post, “✿❀ kindred spirits ❀✿”. As I have mentioned before, I went home for Christmas for two weeks, which meant going back to the only life I had known prior to moving to Ireland, and also meant that I was away from my roommate and best friend Gabrielle. Lots of anxiety came from being home, even though it was supposed to be a happy time. I posted the entry on January 29th, a whole month after being back in Ireland again, but I was still thinking about how miserable I had been without Gabbi back in Spain.
And so I wrote a really nice, really embarrassing and vulnerable post about how important female friendships are to me. I used a picture of one of my favourite shows ever, Anne with an E, to highlight this fact: it is a show full of female joy and female friendships in general, where these bonds are put before many other things. Not that I did not know before coming to Ireland all the way from Spain, but I really do think female friends are a sort of lifeline in every woman’s life.
Female writers have known that for ages, though. The way novelists like Charlotte Brontë, or Gaskell, or Woolf represent such strong female bonds has always stunned me (and I will allow myself to sneak Wilkie Collins in because, though not a woman, Laura and Marian’s relationship was the highlight of The Woman in White), and has always stuck with me. When it comes to Jane Eyre, I believe Jane needed someone like Helen Burns to enter her life at that point in her journey, even if to make her first stretch at Lowood School slightly better. Gaskell shows us this type of female unity in more than one of her books, pieces where she “depicts women united by choice and by circumstance, and celebrates their talent for friendship, whether in the form of the quiet self-sufficiency of the inhabitants of Cranford or the ‘great power of loving’ that leads Molly Gibson to such courage and loyalty toward Cynthia Kirkpatrick in Wives and Daughters” (Nestor 45). Mary Taylor, coincidentally one of Brontë’s friends, expresses these same feelings in her own novel Miss Miles: “No one understood them as they understood each other. Their joint affairs were to themselves the most interesting things in the world, and their comments on them could have been uttered to no one else” (47).
I did write in that very same post that it would be my 2023 New Years resolution to find every book with female friendships so profound—and I did not complete it yet. But rereading Sally Rooney’s Beautiful World Where Are You made me realise how integral female bonds are in her books (and Sally herself will be much more important in a few paragraphs), so maybe that counts. Right? Yeah.
I would prefer not to dwell too much on the next post on my blog, “grief, love, the impermanence of life and other things that scare me”, just because thinking about grief, love and the impermanence of life are things that truly do scare me and I was not in the right headspace when I wrote that, but I do think it fitting that I used Wuthering Heights as a comparative text for that particular topic. If there is a book out there that deals with devastating grief, painful love and how impermanent life is, it is that one.
Then, finally, the fun stuff came.
I had never edited a Wikipedia page, though I had thought about it before—I simply did not know how, or even if I could do it. What does a random person from Spain has to say, or edit, about anything? Quite a few things, it turns out!
I chose a topic I really enjoy talking about: the Byronic Hero, which I explored during my undergrad for my Bachelor’s dissertation. While I initially was looking forward to editing Edward Cullen’s (yes, the vampire) page, so as to give it a bit more depth when it comes to his characterisation and the archetypal theory that helped the author build his character, the page was semi-protected. Meaning I could not touch it without permission. Whatever.
I expanded the ‘origins of the Byronic Hero’ section a bit, noting how fiction and reality blended for some readers, and backed it up with the necessary citations. I also decided it would be a good idea to add more mainstream/film/pop culture characters to the “influences” section, as I feel the archetype is a big part of the media we consume and people do not always make that connection. It was a part I thoroughly enjoyed researching for my undergrad thesis, and something I thought casual readers would like to encounter if they were to randomly stumble upon the Byronic Hero page.
As I said in the original post, I hope I enriched it with useful information and a theoretical background.
Following the Wiki-Edit event, I spoke at a conference! I had never done that before, and it turned out to be really insightful. The Textualities Conference is a yearly mini-conference organised by the English Masters students at UCC, from both the Medieval and the Modernities courses. The great range of topics, then, makes for a really interesting evening in the presence of other scholars.
My topic was on Wuthering Heights, and on the character of Joseph from that very same novel. I assume it surprised people that I chose that particular character to do a study on, but I am also happy with the reception! And the questions I got, as well as the feedback. Being such an overlooked character, I was worried it was not going to be a good enough presentation based on the lack of research done around him. Looking at it from the outside, I believe it was fairly solid for a 10 minute presentation. The following discussion was very much insightful and academically enlightening as well, which I guess is what the Textualities Conference was created for: enriching our academic minds, furthering our research goals.
When it comes to the other presentations that I had the honour of attending today, I only have to say that I absolutely adored hearing my classmates talk about topics they were passionate about. From Jane Austen, to Holmes, to Medieval ghosts and post-apocalyptic futures, it was a delight from start to finish.
Great variety of topics, of visual presentations, of questions, of tea and coffee (I’m kidding) (I’m not. I had like 3 cups of tea and ate 4 croissants).
The topic I chose for my Textualities presentation is not the one I’m going to continue researching for my Masters thesis, as interesting as it does sound.
Instead, I am going to be focusing on Weather by Jenny Offill, Beautiful World Where Are You by Sally Rooney and Gun Island by Amitav Ghosh, and the question about how they represent different literary responses to the threat of climate change.
Weather came to me during my Postmodernism class, and I was definitely not expecting liking it as much as I did. When it comes to Rooney’s book, I happened to be rereading it at the same time I was picking up Weather. And for Gun Island, it was a suggestion made in class that I implemented because I thought it interesting to include a non-western perspective.
The thought of the world ending in extremely painful and unbearable conditions for humans is fairly anxiety inducing. It is understandable that people would not really know how to act, even if we know we have to. This idea is greatly shown in Weather, which I think is a masterful retelling about what it means to be a normal person plagued by the worry of an impending climate disaster. This literary response, then, is marked by the trauma of expecting. I obviously go into much more depth on my dissertation.
Rooney offers readers an intimate story about two female friends navigating their mid to late twenties in a world that is continuously going downhill. I would say it is as domestic as Offill’s novel, but the approaches and the narrative form make all the difference. While Offill’s tale is a fatalist one, Rooney’s book is, surprisingly (considering Normal People or Conversations with Friends) full of hope.
Gun Island is much more traditional, I’d say, when it comes to its narrative style. No striking fragmentation or lack of punctuation stop the reader in their tracks, but there is something special about it too and its treatment of climate change. It differs from the other two texts in a number of things: it is written by a male author and told by a male perspective, but it is also the only text out of the three that offers a non-white perspective, which is of particular interest when we are talking about environmental issues. With a twinge of magic realism to its pages and dealing with the topic of climate refugees among others, it is a great and rich addition to the work.
I am excited to start working on it, even if it sounds scary from where I am standing right now (0 words. I do have the literature review though, which is up on the blog as well).
That has been my journey so far. I expect things to change, both academically and personally, because that is just how life is.
I had another short existential crisis, which can be seen in the post ‘space, place and non-place‘, about the possibility me leaving Ireland and the difficulties I am finding in trying to stay here, but things are good at the moment. Or at least I hope so.
Things will work out in the end. And if they are not working out, then it is not the end yet.
References
| Nestor, Pauline. “Female friendships in mid-Victorian England: new patterns and possibilities.” Literature & History 17.1 (2008): 36-47. Taylor, Mary. Miss Miles: or, A Tale of Yorkshire Life 60 Years Ago. Oxford University Press, 1991. |