Blog Assignment #2

Before I start, I reserve the right to brag.  The newest edition of Lake Oconee Living magazine has hit newsstands this week, and includes a short essay I wrote about the retirement of R.E.M.  Unfortunately, Professor Cofer has ruled this does not meet the final requirements of the course, so I will be continuing to dominate conversation with pedantic sidebars in class :)

One of my favorite papers I wrote during my undergraduate career was a bit of a fluke.  That's not really the right way to describe it, but I'm having trouble coming up with the right description.  There are two reasons why this paper should not exist.  The first reason has to do with the fact that I spent two consecutive summers in England.  The first summer I spent in England, I was a guest of my grandfather, who, upon semi-retiring from Georgia Tech, had decided to teach various study abroad courses, in different countries each term.  He spent several years teaching a summer term at Worcester (pronounced Wooster) College in Oxford, which was basically rented out to Georgia Tech every summer, as Oxford is a ghost town during that term anyway.  As a massive anglophile, I was immensely grateful to my grandfather for hosting me, and assumed that would be my official "study abroad in college" experience, despite not actually taking any courses.  Consider it a period of independent study.  The funny part happened when I returned to Oregon for fall semester; I began to notice the posters on the wall listing the various programs and courses being offered the next summer by my university.  And one particular course stood out:  C.S. Lewis and the Inklings.  I cannot even begin to express how this course seemed to be targeted directly at me.  It combined several of my obsessions, and haunted my peripheral vision every time I walked past a memo board on campus.  Now we come to the second reason this paper should not exist.  I was slated to graduate that Spring, yet the Inklings class was taking place over the summer. This was not such a big obstacle.  I went to my adviser, bounced around to a few other administrator types, queried financial aid to see if I had any money left (I didn't), picked up some scholarship applications, and charmed the heck out of the Study Abroad coordinator.  In the end, I pushed my graduation to the summer, and scraped together enough money to take two classes over the summer at King's College, London, with extensive travel around the UK.  As a side note, the second class I wanted to take was a history of the English Monarchy, which seemed appropriate since my sister's History undergrad was focused on the Tudor and Stuart dynasties, but they canceled that class, so I ended up taking one on Shakespeare, which was also quite lovely.

Exposition managed:

The essay I am 80% sure I am going to stick with is a dissection of Plato's shadow cave analogy from The Republic, and how C.S. Lewis used this analogy to illustrate his view of the Christian afterlife.  The most well-known example of this appears at the end of The Last Battle, when the children realize they have died and are now allowed to stay in Narnia forever.  Of course, being a Narnia book, even one as dark as TLB, this is a very simplistic idea, designed for a child to grasp, but you again see this theme in The Great Divorce, Lewis's homage to the book of Revelations.  In many ways, The Great Divorce is the adult version of The Last Battle.  My first task will be to go back to the points and inferences I already have in the paper, and substantiate them with research and better supporting arguments, because, like most of my undergrad papers, when forced to write, I waited until the last minute and b.s.'d a large portion of them.  I haven't decided whether I'm going to dig deeper into Lewis's own work; sermons and correspondence, or look for modern writers who have been highly influenced by this concept.  I recently finished a pair of books that were hugely and obviously inspired by the Narnia series, and once again, I found characters being offered a chance to leave their mundane real lives for a sparkling new "Narnia."

And that, for the one person who actually reads this all the way through, is my current plan for this course.

ENG 4500: First Post

in re:  http://jordancofer.blogspot.com/2012/01/welcome-to-engl-4500-writing-for.html

Ok.

My name is Sarah Gibbs.  As most of you figured out in class, or knew already, I am not actually a Rural Studies student, though I kind of wish I'd had this option back when I was getting my A.S. from ABAC in 2001.  I've always been an avid fan of liberal arts and humanities type classes, despite spending most of my college experience hopping around within the engineering and science tracks, before settling on a Math Education degree, and then altering that to a B.S. in Interdisciplinary Studies with an emphasis on Math and Natural Sciences and Social Sciences (phew) because I wanted to take a bunch of random Socialism, Anthropology and Literature courses for fun.  Yes, I fit in well with the Rural Studies crowd because I take classes for fun.  (Yay nerds!)

I haven't chosen my specific research area/track yet, but I am kicking around a few ideas.  During one of my study abroad terms, I took a class on C.S. Lewis, J.R.R. Tolkien and the rest of the Inklings and I wrote a short paper that I particularly enjoyed on Plato's shadow cave analogy, and how Lewis used it to illustrate his understanding of the afterlife.  It was very Christian-y, but I approach all things from a very Christian perspective, and I love the ideas of the adult fairy tale to illustrate our understanding of theology.  On the other hand, I occasionally write magazine articles about musical topics, and there is always the chance I could expand one of those articles into a breakdown of the whole "indie" identity within popular music and whether it can be manufactured (i.e. the Lana del Rey controversy) or how each generation identifies itself by creating a genre of music that represents individualism and rebellion against the parent generation's music, yet the music itself basically does not change, or at least, recycles heavily from the previous generations.

In other words, at this point, I'm just b.s.-ing a topic, and cheapening every one else's research plans, but hopefully, we'll all end up enjoying the semester anyway.