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pipistrellafelixI realize this is like choosing between chocolate cake & Elliott's grand marinier fudge, but humor me...I need some outside opinions, I've been poring over these for too long.
So I have to choose classes when I apply to Royal Holloway (& then hope like hell I get the ones I want). I've chosen my first history class--Social & Domestic Life in Baroque city-states in Italy, squee. I have to choose another history class (between two--essentially I have to decide if Archeology is going to be too boring as a lecture, or not). My main problem is picking two English classes. Anyone wanna help me out? I have to pick two (possibly three) of these:
* Shakespeare from Page to Stage --the literary text, & in performance. Fairly straightforward, but fun, & can I really go wrong delving into these texts at all?
*Romantic Poetry: Blake, Wordsworth & Coleridge-- the poems, plus a little of their literary criticism. I could get a different perspective than Taylor's (though I do think he rocks my world), & Coleridge makes my literary pulse flutter, so...
*British Drama 1956-1996 -- I feel like it would be good to get outside the Renaissance a little, exploring the "avant-garde..within the context of political change." Ooo.
* Dark Reform: Scandal & Satire in American Culture -- American lit, from a Brit perspective, looking at the darkness below the American myth, often in grotesque, scatalogical, sexualized and carnivalesque imagery. Possibly disgusting. Certainly interesting.
* Poetic Practice - a course one level up from the others--reading comtemporary poetry, but also writing our own, the portfolio being nearly half our grade. Oh, it would kill me--& I might actually get something written for once in my life.
* Drama & Witchcraft 1576-1642-- also upper-level. The description is filled with phrases like "unmediated text" (no glosses to save me), "morally inadequate to the inherently distressing subject the texts handle" and "the challenge of assesing plays in which the moral authority of the dramatist is in itself debateable"--which I underlined thrice & wrote "yay." (Dork.)
* Odysseus' Scar: Time in Modern Literature & Film-- it would be like that amazing two-hour discussion last year on time in "Orlando"--but for a whole semester. Mmm.
...& clearly I cannot take all of these even though I really want to. So. Chocolate cake, Elliott's fudge? Shakespeare or Wolfe or morally ambiguous writers? Thoughts?
In other news, I love Paradise Lost, it is effing cold here, I want a new coat (that fits & actually keeps me warm), dear god alive I have too much reading to do & not enough time organizational skills, I am worried about someone whom I cannot in any way help, I am definiteivly not off-book for Act five, we open way too soon, I am still slightly afraid when people talk to me about Three Sisters (Wes of the Nine-Fingers, my old theology teacher, in the library, today), the library really ought to lend books for longer than three weeks (especially books so obscure that no one else is seriously going to want them ever), I bought a plane ticket, my roommates are lovely people, my room is finally clean, & I love chai tea. ...I think that's about it.
