Jul 5, 2009

bitches ain't nothin but tricks and hoes

-must keep writing in this thing...ahhhh-

So in order to keep up with my promise to myself to write in this thing at least semi-regularly, I'm going to have to go over some school stuff.

1. I got my first "A" in university this past session. I'm considering asking my teacher in that course to be one of my academic references for the iSchool application...but she'd have to send it in in just under a year from now, herself, and she's only a graduate student. But there's no way I'm going to have a prof. that knows my work like she does, or for that matter even knows my name. Ahh, UofT. Although I must say this is the first and only time this school's size has been a bad thing for me.
2. Next round of summer classes starts tonight. Technically it should have started last week, but my professor was "misinformed" about the start date. Extra week off for me :)
3. I finally picked all of my classes for September, aka my fourth and final undergrad year. They include:
  • Critical Methods (this is about one school of thought (eg. New Criticism) or important person (eg. Plato) in the history of lit crit. Who/what we study changes each year depending on what the prof. wants to talk about. Should be a nice follow up from Contemporary Literary Theory with Prof. Mount last year)
  • Mass Media (so I discovered this whole series of St. Mike's College courses that are essentially about information studies, so I figured that will be a good place to start for grad school. This is the primer for those courses, where we study mass media in all of its forms, and it includes a bit about censorship)
  • Biography and Autobiography (English course, self-explanatory. I've been interested in learning more about this genre since I read Allison Bechdel's Fun Home. I hope we will have at least a discussion on this genre's status as non-fiction.)
  • International Art since 1940 (art history course...otherwise fairly obvious. My first and only 400 series course. I really hope it's not just one big essay :s)
  • Cubism (again, art history. I'm pissed that Minimalism isn't offered this year (along with 9 million other FAH courses...) as I feel like I've sort of "collected" all of the modern art courses over the years, and now I will have one missing from my collection )
  • Rembrandt and Rubens (ohhhhh yes. Fan-freaking-tastic. So, the furthest back in art history I've ever gone (and further than I cared to go) was around 1750. Needless to say, I have zero interest in taking this course, and will have to work 20 times harder to get the mark I need in it. I know nothing about this art period whatsoever. The only reason I'm taking it is because it was literally the only FAH course at or above the 300 level that I could actually take. I've taken all of the modern art ones offered already, and all of the other old art periods have prerequisites. I think the faculty knows it's screwing over students so they left one course open for all of us to take in lieu of courses we actually have an interest in. Gee, thanks guys.)
  • Readers and Readerships (another St. Mike's course, I also want to take Bibliography and Print Culture, but I don't have enough room...I'm thinking of possibly dropping Auto and Biography to take it, if possible)
  • Architecture after 1950 (Another course I'm not thrilled to take. At least this will be way more interesting than the architecture course I'm taking right now, which covers the entire modern period (in the very broad sense of the term "modern") from about 1750 onwards....I'm honestly not interested in anything until about 1870 rolls around. At that point, there seems to be a shift in art from what I think of as "exterior" concerns to "interior" concerns. In other words, art stops being about the art object, or some other object extraneous to art itself, and starts being about the inside of the artist's skull. Don't get me wrong, if anything it becomes more "materialistic" (art for art's sake), but it stops referring to the supersensible as its raison d'etre. And so you get this huge influx of theory, and everything suddenly becomes much more complex and has many more possible interpretations. Mucho better than a painting of cherubs or Venus (although statues and paintings of Psyche form an interesting bridge between the two...))
  • Critical Approach to Literature (this is another theoretical ENG course about criticism. This one is a 200 series course, and so it's more of an overview of English criticism compared to the more focused learning in the Critical Method's course. I just want to learn about Formalism/New Criticism etc. as I'm planning on bringing it back in at least one essay this year. The "thing to do" in art history and literature studies is to beat up on people like Clement Greenberg, Northrop Frye, and Harold Bloom. But, as usual, this is dependant on a pretty much rediculous mis-reading of these fellows. So I look forward to arguing against exactly what I've been taught to support for the last 4 years :) )
And that's it! All of that equals 5 credits, and then I've reached 20 and I can graduate! I can't believe I'm in my last year of my undergraduate degree and I'm trying so hard to get back IN to school after it. For three more years, too. If I get into graduate school and successfully complete it, I will have been in the system for 21 years. And I'll be something like 60 thousand dollars in debt to the government. And all of it is just so that I can actually do something I want to do. Well...if at the end I get to be a librarian, it will be worth it :D

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