Tag: literature

Fic-as-Lit

Stitch6 Comments

Note: This essay contains critical references to and some descriptions content in fanworks that is/seen as objectionable including underage characters and sexualized/eroticized racism.

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I spent a lot of my time in graduate school arguing that “literature” as a word could encompass entire worlds of media that were consistently dismissed as not being sacred or classical enough.

I found the potential for literature in pretty much everything that had text in it and made a point of challenging the expectations that my classmates had about lit on a regular basis.

So I get that urge to be like “fan fiction should be as valued and as valid as literature” and I even embrace it – up to a point.

And that point comes when you look at the differences between how literature and fanfiction are critiqued. Or rather – how we’re allowed to engage critically with them.Read More »

Today In “Things I Knew I Never Needed”: HP Lovecraft in an Anime

Stitch

I was minding my business, looking at Funimation’s website to find out what upcoming anime series I can watch a single episode of and then never finish when I clicked on their link for folks to “Meet The New Faces Of Bungo Stray Dogs, Season 2” and saw none other than …

Howard Philips “So Racist I Named My Cat A Racial Slur and So Bad At Writing That I Only Achieved Serious Fame Posthumously and Had To Eat Beans” Lovecraft.

He — or a character representing him in some wildly inaccurate capacity in the context of this weird show I only watched two episodes of — is a new face in Bungo Stray Dogs’ second season and I am AMUSED.

Homeboy’s out here looking like a rather cadaverous bishonen.

I hate Lovecraft like I’ve hated few others (and one day will travel back in time to beat his pasty ass) but… I almost want to watch this series to see how ridiculous this is going to be.

If you want to see Lovecraft as a zombie bishonen (basically). check under the cut!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 – 2/16/2016

Stitch

This week we’re working on a ton of different stuff.

In my Hemispheric 1850s class, we’re looking at Nancy Prince and thinking about the creation of her own Archive as her narrative withholds more than it exposes.

Nancy Prince – A Narrative of the life and travels of Mrs. Nancy Prince

Carla Peterson – “Colored Tourists”: Nancy Prince, Mary Ann Shadd Cary, Ethnographic Writing, and the Question of Home

Sandra Gunning – Nancy Prince and the Politics of Mobility, Home, and Diasporic (Mis) Identification

In Transgressions, we’re technically done with the Marquis De Sade. We’re currently focused on theorists, many of whom talked about de Sade. This week we’re reading Georges Bataille and his thoughts on de Sade, eroticism, and boundaries. We’re also reading a little bit of Nick Mansfield’s Subjectivity and I’ve provided a bonus text in Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess because you can’t think about transgression without excess.

Bataille – The Use Value of de Sade

Bataille – Erotism: Death and Sensuality (We’re reading: – introduction, chapter 5, chapter 10, chapter 11, chapter two in part two)

Nick Mansfield – Subjectivity

Linda Williams – Film Bodies: Gender, Genre, and Excess

Lastly in Critical Literary Theory, we’re studying Deconstruction!

Jacques Derrida – Dissemination (Barbara Johnson’s 31 page introduction)

Derrida – Of Grammatology (we’re reading “That Dangerous Supplement”which is on page 141 of the book)

Terry Eagleton – Literary Theory: An Introduction (The chapter on Deconstruction.)

 

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.

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