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| Tommy Boy |
I have a love-hate relationship with my reading for school. I'm not really sure when the edging of hatred came into the picture, but there's no mistaking the fact that sometimes I just loathe the reading I do for my weekly seminars. Sanne, of YouTube fame as booksandquills, recently posted a video about Reading and Guilt that is also linked to this love-hate feeling I have been experiencing.
As you can tell from these Reading Week! posts, I love to read and have been a serious bookworm ever since I was a little kid. It wasn't until university, however, that I started to fall in love with critical reading and literary analysis. I was an English major, but my undergraduate career was a bit schizophrenic (dabbling in journalism, public relations, & public policy as well as the usual liberal arts curriculum that forced me to take math and science courses when I would rather have been filling up my schedule with English classes). After two years of the unfocused jumble of liberal arts, I took a year abroad at Oxford where I focused entirely on English and history, specifically the early modern period. Then, I graduated and started my Masters this fall. So my university life has been a bit weird. And it's only recently that I've really come to experience this strange guilt and love-hate feeling attached to my academic reading.
As a Masters student, I only have 4 hours a week of classroom time. Apparently I am supposed to spending the other 36 hours of the work week reading and studying independently. Yeah...that doesn't happen. On a good day, I can usually get a solid 3-4 hours of reading done for school but those good days are few and far between. I'm always astounded by people who can put in full 8 hour days because I am just not at the level of motivation or intense focus. Recently my good days have been made even more rare because of this complicated love-hate, anxiety-ridden experience that has somehow become attached to my academic reading. Today I went to the library and checked out 6 books for some early reading for my dissertation, which I won't start writing in earnest until April after this semester's modules. I'm looking at the books right now and I'm filled with my favourite feeling - excitement for reading, specifically exciting for learning and for new ideas on a topic I love. What I want to know is how this feeling can turn so sour?
When I was writing the final essays for my courses last semester, I experienced this disintegration of excitement into anxiety, then bitterness and eventually overwhelming guilt and fear. It was the worst experience of my academic career. Literary analysis, whether at the undergraduate or post-graduate level, is hard. It's not like math or science when there are quantifiable facts that lead to indubitable answers. In literature courses, we are asked to come up with ideas to contribute to a discussion. Part of the problem is that I'm always intimidated by the fact that I'm not as well read as many of my classmates. And then I spend half my week reading secondary materials from experts in the field, which just makes me even more convinced that any of my ideas are not nearly intelligent enough. This is especially heightened at the post-graduate level - we are supposed to be the people that have excelled thus far, we've chosen to devote our lives (or at least a portion of it) to academia so we're expected to be quite intelligent from the word go. So here I suppose my problem is, as ever, my feelings of inadequacy. But I think there are other reasons for this problem among students - once we learn how easy it is to get by on just skimming the reading, we'll then slack off knowing we can eke our way through the course with the least amount of effort (more time for Netflix). Of course then, this leads to guilt for abandoning our passion for learning and to the deterioration of confidence in our academic abilities.
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| Look how excited this kid is about reading! |
I'm not really sure what I'm saying of worth here. I suppose what I mean to say is that I wish I could keep my excitement about reading from the pollution of my anxieties. Of course all of this is tied up with all of my other anxieties about life in general (here again I can reference Sanne and also Rosianna of missxrojas, who made a video together about their life crises after graduating with English degrees and not knowing what to do). I'm just fighting against this stem of anxiety at the moment and searching for some inspiration.
In case you're curious my dissertation will be looking at chastity, sexual desire, and female self agency in Jacobean drama (and how it is performed on stage). And these books I checked out of the library today:
The Family, Sex and Marriage in England 1500-1800 by Lawrence Stone
Domestic Dangers: women, words, and sex in early modern London by Laura Gowing
The Body Embarrassed: drama and the disciplines of shame in early modern England by Gail Kern Paster
Desire and Dramatic Form in Early Modern England by Judith Haber
Hymeneutics: interpreting virginity on the early modern stage by Marie H. Loughlin
Domestic Life and Domestic Tragedy in Early Modern England: the material life of the household by Catherine Richardson
Just wanted to say, thanks for writing this post, Pip- I sympathize with it on so many levels. I was wondering if it would be alright if I emailed you sometime... I’m a Canadian studying English literature and am considering studying for a Master’s in the UK. Would love to get your thoughts on some things.
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