Fall 2014 at Rice University (Why/How did they let me in?!)
Literary Theory with Professor Tim Morton
American Romanticism and Ecology with Cary Wolfe
Early Modern Epicureanism with Sarah Ellenzweig
RA with Rosemary Hennessy
Really an amazing semester ahead. At any moment, they (Heidegger's THEY?) are going to accost me in Herring Hall, demanding to know who let me attend this prestigious university: "How they hell did you get in here? There's been some mistake, young lady, you must leave this brick and ivy mind castle immediately! Why do you want a Phd anyway?" Well they can't send me back right now unless I really fuck up royally (don't want to increase the drop-out rate, do we?) which given that I have plenty of time to read, and every available resource has basically been handed to me, would be a, like, real shame.
So far starting with Heidegger's Being and Time, Lucretius's On the Nature of Things, and various of Emerson's essays accompanied by Stanley Cavell's work on the Sage. I would like this blog to--hopefully--allow me to digest all this material in a manageable way (right in front of me) and, really, to make connections between my classes. From Lucretius to the early modern period, and then up through American Transcendentalism covers roughly 2000 years, and it seems to me impossible that no interesting relationships might be found.
I've basically got three philosophies going on right now: Materialism, American Transcendentalism, and a kind of re-discovering of ontology (What is Being/Existence/being-in-your-brain-right-now?) which, gee, probably informs the other two in some really interesting ways. Since this theory class is led by Tim Morton, Object-Oriented Ontology (OOO ["ooohh!"]) will likely be floating over my head the entire semester, so cheers to the inevitable head-explosions/self-loathing/general feeling of ignorance and incompetence etc. etc. etc.
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