Tag: grad school

Library Haul 1/22

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Library Haul 1-22 (1)

I had to pick up some books for my thesis and I wound up digging deep into my library’s film and literary criticism section despite the fact that I only needed ONE book from that section.

Here are the books I took out today, maybe you’ll find something you like!

  1. J-Horror: The Definitive Guide to The Ring, The Grudge, and Beyond by David Kalat
  2. Monsters in the Closet: Homosexuality and the Horror Film by Harry M. Benshoff
  3. Boys Love Manga and Beyond: History, Culture, and Community in Japan edited by Mark McLelland, Kazumi Nagaike, Katsuhiko Suganuma, and James Welker
  4. Supervillains and Philosophy edited by Ben Dyer
  5. Good Girls & Wicked Witches: Women in Disney’s Feature Animation by Amy M. Davis
  6. Vader, Voldemort, and Other Villains: Essays on Evil in Popular Media edited by Jamey Heit
  7. The Thrill of Repulsion: Excursions into Horror Culture by William Burns
  8. Batman Death of the Family by Greg Capullo and Scott Snyder
  9. Batman: The Dark Knight Returns by Frank Miller, Klaus Janson, and Lynn Varley
  10. Batman: Harley Quinn by Paul Dini, Yvel Guichet, Aaron Sowd, Don Kramer, Wayne Faucher, Joe Quinones, and Neil Googe
  11. Batman: The Long Halloween by Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale
  12. Judge Dredd: The Complete Case Files 02 by John Wagner, Pat Mills, and Brian Bolland
  13. The Killing Joke by Alan Moore and Brian Bolland

Stitch’s Stuff: December 7th

Stitch

It’s almost midnight so… This will be short.

My roommates in the dorm are super sweet young women who have been nothing but generous and kind since we all moved in back in August.

They are awesome and without roommates as amazing as they are, I doubt my dorm life would be anywhere near as amazing as it has been! 

Stitch’s Stuff – December 1

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Stitch's Stuff

Clearly, I haven’t been stressed enough so I’ve decided that I’m going to challenge myself to write about one thing I read, did, wrote, bought, saw, etc in 2017 every day for the rest of December.

For December 1st, I’d like to talk about…

My thesis.

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I hate the Joker.

I think it’s practically a part of my identity this point like I’m known for my intense Joker dislike back in meatspace (and like… obnoxious conversations about cannibalism but like… whatever).

To me, the Joker represents some of the worst things about superhero (villain??) narratives and his fanbase is generally super annoying to me because they claim to like him “as a villain” but then jump through hoops to talk about why he’s “just misunderstood” or “totally a badass”.

So why am I writing my thesis about him?Read More »

I do not “agree to disagree”

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There’s a guy in my Monday night class.

He was in my Monday night class last semester.

And his big thing, his huge thing, is looking at the other side and agreeing to disagree when people get angry with what he’s saying or point out that he’s just… being a dick in the interest of exploring whatever it is that he thinks he’s exploring. He did it all of last semester in our class on “the everyday”, in the hallway when my friends and I were talking about literally anything, and on facebook when someone has an opinion and he feels like playing the Devil’s advocate pro bono.

And he did it yesterday during our first class of the semester when we were talking about the status of Confederate statues/monuments around the US and I swear, I nearly stroked out from anger.Read More »

[Video] PCAACA 2017 Wrap-Up

Video Stitch

So I got back from PCA this morning at the butt crack of dawn and between being sick all day and my usual anxiety, it took me a while to get this up. (This is still way faster than I’ve done anything else this semester so… I’m taking this as a win.) This wrap-up and […]

[Book Review] The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture by Glen Weldon

Stitch

the-caped-crusade-glen-weldonTitle: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture
Author: Glen Weldon (Twitter)
Rating: Highly Recommended
Genre/Category: Nonfiction, Batman, Comic Book
Release Date: March 22, 2016
Publisher: Simon & Schuster
Order Here: AMAZON  (PAPERBACK)| AMAZON (KINDLE) 

Note: This review was originally written for a graduate level course I took last semester where we had to write a review for a scholarly book that was related to our thesis. As this book actually inspired my current thesis project (about queer readings of a queer-coded Joker and the role that homophobia plays in these readings), I couldn’t pass up on the chance to review this book.

A regular panelist on NPR’s Pop Culture Happy Hour podcast, Glen Weldon is probably the best author that could have ever been drafted to write a book about how Batman’s creation shaped the development of nerd culture and fandom as it exists right now.

His book The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture seeks to put Batman into a certain cultural context, looking at the way that the character’s history has shaped generations of fans, comic and film creators, and the fans that would grow up to become these creators. Weldon looks at how, over the course of the past seventy-seven years, Batman and nerd culture have participated in certain cycles that alternated between “camp and cheery” and “grim-dark and gritty”.

In The Caped Crusade, Weldon approaches the heterocentric canon of Batman’s various texts through a perspective that only a gay man can bring to the table. In his close queer reading of Batman’s history, canon text throughout the decades, and the fan community (or fandom) that sprawled up around him, Weldon looks at how queerphobia shaped Batman’s trajectory and inspired hundreds of thousands of fans to eschew the very idea of a queer Batman while queer fans clung to the potential opened up for them by the subtext embedded within the character.Read More »

Let’s Talk About “Alice”: The Fragility of White Womanhood in Grad School Spaces

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AKA “There’s a fragile white woman in my class who doesn’t seem to handle criticism very well and we’re probably going to fight by the end of the semester… or next week”.

There’s this woman in my Wednesday night grad school course who is going to hate me by the end of the semester if she doesn’t already.

Let’s call her Alice.

Alice has had some bad opinions over the past two weeks of our classes. Near the end of our first class after I’d already given this passionate defense of audiobooks as another valid way of reading, Alice looked me dead in the face and said “No offense, but… I still don’t think audiobooks count as reading.”

I let it slide because it was the first class of the semester and her first literature class. I told myself that Alice would be better the next class.

Alice was not better the next class.Read More »

The Author In Their Times (Unless That Author Wrote A Comic Book)

Stitch

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One of the three graduate courses I’m taking is a class called “The Author in their Time/s”. It’s a class that looks at authors writing fiction about a period in history as they lived in said period. This specific class, taught by a professor that reminds me a bit of Heathcliffe (the cat, not the Wuthering Heights dude), is about the Cold War.

A huge issue that I’ve been having with academia – even before the Literature degree in-progress – is that a lot of the people who teach my classes or who are in said classes have no idea that comic books could even remotely fall underneath the banner of respectable literature. We learn about the same white guys and gals and the same types of Literature on end until it’s all but beaten into us that academia only cares about certain types of narratives.Read More »

bib·li·o·file: Recent Work in Literary Studies

Stitch

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Here’s everything we’re reading in my Monday night class from now until the end of the semester. Sadly, none of these books are available for free so all I can offer are (affiliate) links to the kindle version on Amazon which is what I’m using for class.

Our Aesthetic Categories: Zany, Cute, Interesting  by Sianne Ngai

Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World (Posthumanities) by Timothy Morton

Forms: Whole, Rhythm, Hierarchy, Network by Caroline Levine

Slavery and the Culture of Taste by Simon Gikandi

The Limits of Critique by Rita Felski

Loving Literature: A Cultural History by Deidre Shauna Lynch

A bonus is the book I’m using for my second assignment and one that I never pass up the chance to make obnoxious noises about: Glen Weldon’s The Caped Crusade: Batman and the Rise of Nerd Culture.

Once I get my syllabi and books for my other two classes, I’ll put up posts for them. Right now though, I’m just really pleased with the reading list for this class!

bib·li·o·file: 02/08/2016

Stitch

Getting your hands on good academic texts can be difficult.

That’s why I’ll be sharing my reading list for my classes (along with digital copies of some of the books) in the literature department. You don’t have to read everything (I know I certainly won’t), but it’s a good start if you’re curious about what literature majors do all day when they’re not wailing about being a literature major.

Read More »

My First Day of Grad School

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It was amazing!

Straight up.

Our class talked for like 2hrs about race, gender, and what it really means to be an American (spoiler: we talked about the colonialist/imperialist legacy of the United States and how people became American  — aka conforming to social ideals that were not their own — and addressed ideas of “historyless” country and how people swore that people with no supposed history couldn’t have culture).

It was amazing.

I even made two new nerd friends. I’m going to cherish them!Read More »