Well, it's coming towards the end of my first year on the degree course. I'm on assessment period and classes finished what seems like eons ago. I must admit I miss the classes. As for the assessments, it's been stressful, but I feel like I'm learning new things so that's pretty good. I feel like I've got a lot out of the year. I've learned lots, made new friends and generally feel like I've grown as a person. I think what I've liked most about the course is the literature side of it. I don't mind the language part, but to be honest I find it a bit uninspiring at times, although it did have its highlights. I really liked the part in our final Representation and Variation assessment where we had to compare dramatic speech with real speech. I don't know if I wrote a load of old rubbish or not, but I enjoyed it anyway. I like the way it made me think about how different the two were. I'll be glad when I've handed everything in though and I can have a bit of a rest. I've decided to go for a curry in Sheffield with my girlfriend to celebrate the end of the year and completing my assessments.
I'm really looking forward to next year. From what I've heard we're studying some literature that I'm already very familiar with and that I really like, so that should be really good. I also like the sound of the colonial stuff we'll be doing. I'm really looking forward to reading some new literature. I think that is what has been so good about the course, the new stuff that I've been exposed to; and my friends of course. If I'm to be honest this has been one of the best things that I've ever done. I feel like I've started a new life.

The Sheffiled Gig!

Me and my band, Hail to the Eskimo, played a gig in Sheffield last week at the Sherwood. It was a really good gig. Things are really starting to look up for the band now we have our new singer, Sally. She's amazing. She really suits the band and has made the part her own and brought a new maturity to the fold. I really feel like we're a proper unit now and that we have no weak links. Sally's as good a singer as Dave is a drummer, Rob is a bass player and Matt and I are guitar players. It's like a new start. The new material is awesome too. I've never been happier in a band as I am in Hail to the Eskimo right now. We've got quite a few gigs coming up over the next few weeks. I can hardly wait.

Having finished my Educating Rita essay I had a think about what I had learned from the essay with a apple, a cup of mint tea and U2's classic 1983 album, War, playing in the back ground. I think as a mature student that the play, Educating Rita, has much resonance with my own life at the moment. Having chosen question one I found my motives were different to Rita's, but I find that there are certain things that we both have in common. I've recently been asking myself about social class. Am I working class? Am I middle class? What is class? Why is it important? I think that my view of Educating Rita has answered this. Rita was desperate to escape her working class roots and become something else. She did do this, but what she became was not what she originally aspired to be. She became something better than her aspiration. By realising that her perceptions of people like Frank and Trish's lives were wrong she managed to become an improved version of herself. Ultimately Rita, who was once Susan, gained wider experiences and different life expectations; she transcended the shackles of social class and became Susan again, only with her own expectations and her own goals. This is all I want for myself, to esperience new and exciting things that broaden my horizons. If I was to be honest I wasn't really looking forward to this essay but I ended up really enjoying it and actually getting something for my own personal well being out of it.

The last few weeks have been the our first assessment period of the degree course. We've had class tests and we've had essays. I particularly enjoyed the New Criticism essay I did for Readers and Texts. I think I gained quite an insight into literary criticism and the potential advantages and short comings of applying the principles of New Criticism to practical analysis of poetry, in this case Wilfred Owen's Dulce et Decorum Est. As a discipline in it's self I found that New Criticism was a bit on the stuffy side. I couldn't come to terms with ideas like the “affective fallacy” and the “intentional fallacy”. How could you possibly separate the intention of the poet and the effect the poem has on the reader from a critical analysis of a poem, especially when a poem like Dulce et Decorum Est is concerned? Surely the whole point of poetry is for the poet to create a relationship between themselves and the reader, New Critic or just the casual reader. I do think that some of the principle in New Criticism are invaluable but, to my mind, they have to be accompanied by principles from other theories like Reader Response, for example.
If I had to do anything differently I would have started my preparation as soon as the assignment was issued, but I still fell I did finished with plenty of time to spare. All in all I really enjoyed doing the essay and I feel like I have learned a lot from it.

I've been on my degree course now for six weeks (including reading week). I feel that I have have been exposed to many interesting pieces of literature and ideas. One particular thing stands out for me at the moment; the novel, Sexing the Cherry by Jeanette Winterson.
When I first received my copy of the novel I was quite daunted by the reports I had heard from some of my fellow students. One of my friends claimed that Winterson must have been under the influence of LSD when she wrote it. I decided to see for myself. Expecting nothing but confusion I was pleasantly surprised by what I saw as an adult fantasy that played with many "conventional" concepts such as time, morality and even sexuality.
I found one of the protagonists, Dog Woman, particularly interesting. Gigantically proportioned she reminds me of a cross between Rubeus Hagrid from the Harry Potter stories and a female bear. She could be brutal at times, thinking nothing of killing men using nothing but her bare hands, but her relationship with her addopted son, Jordan, could at times be extremely touching.
I feel that because of its unconventional characters and events Sexing the Cherry helped reinforce my belief that people's differences make the world a much more colourful place.
I've almost finished Sexing the Cherry now, which if I'm to be honest is making me feel a little sad as I am really enjoying it. I think I'd probably want to read some more of Jeanette Winterson's work in the future as I have found this particular novel quite refreshing. I'm going to read Virginia Woolf's To the Lighthouse next. I only hope I get as much out of that as I have Sexing the Cherry.

I've been reflecting on my course this morning. There's a lot of reading. I really don't mind this at all as I enjoy what I'm learning, but I do find certain things suffer because of the time I have to use. Perhaps suffer is the wrong word. I tend not to do things around the house as much. The hedge in the back garden is in desperate need of cutting but I continually put it off so I can read instead. This is a great excuse. I hate gardening. I have to admit that, sometimes, I find it therapeutic, but at the moment I find I can't be bothered anyway. I've also heard that birds benefit from overgrown foliage so I can perfectly justify my hedge's neglect in more than one way.
Back to the course. I really enjoy the lectures and seminars, even the taxing ones like Form and Meaning. It's a funny subject, Form and Meaning. It makes perfect sense by the end of the session, and in many cases I don't find it particularly hard, but I tend to think the answers to some of the questions we are asked are going to be more tricky than they actually are. This makes for a taxing Tuesday morning, although enjoyable. I particularly liked the week two's theme on genre. I think as the weeks progress I'll get into the swing of this subject a little more.

Starting a Reflective Blog for My Uni Course

Blogging never really appealed to me in the past. This is partly to do with the fact that the character, Viv Hope, from the soap, Emmerdale, did one during some pointless story line or other so I sort of associated blogging with her. I'm now doing a degree in English at High Melton College and one of the module's from the program requires me to do a blog, so that's why I'm doing this now. All the students on my course have to reflect, using the gift of blog, on the work that we do on the course, so I suppose I'll be doing this for the next three years. I have absolutely no idea what to expect from blogging, I've never really known what it's supposed to be for, but I'm pretty sure I'll find out. Who knows, maybe I'll become addicted to it and end up a fully blown blogger.