Practical Tips for Approaching Comps

So I've gone around and gotten tips from everyone re: studying for comps.

First of all, pull out that piece of paper that says "READ ME WHEN YOU PANIC"

1. What do I already know about this topic?
2. What else do I need to know?
3. Break the assignment into pieces: what are the elements?
4. How much time do I have to do this? With Plan A in place? Plan B?
5. Who do I need to ask for help with this?
6. What do I want to accomplish with this exercise?

I find that having a Plan A and B is especially important, since my Plan A seems to always turn out to be overly ambitious and wildly unrealistic. I feel this is common among lots of obsessive perfectionists who find themselves in grad school.

After you've talked with profs and colleagues and have devised your plans, get a study carrel. I got one at our library, and pimped it out "brain style". That means I've applied every trick for calming, focus, memory and mental stimulation I can come up with: posters with calming colors, posters of blue sky, rosemary essential oil, a lucky stuffed animal, lights, snake oil, you name it...
I think of my carrel as a study nest where I incubate my intellect.

Once you actually start getting your ass to the carrel on a regular basis, (hopefully during your peak concentration time, for me it's the a.m.) study like this: Set up your goals for the day in order of difficulty. Study for 30 min. intervals with 5-10 minute breaks in between. During your breaks stand up walk around, do something clerical like look for a book you need, go to the water fountain, go to the bathroom, look out a window and re-focus your eyes. Your brain and body will take a break from keeping up the same literal and figurative posture, which will give you energy to keep going for longer without burning out.

In terms of reading, you may reach a point when you realize you're going to have to do a hell of a lot more skimming and scanning. If you are like me, you tend to lapse into careful reading by force of habit. When you catch yourself doing a close reading that you don't have time for, maybe set a timer that will remind you that in 10 minutes it's time to MOVE ON!

Rip it!

La sombra del caudillo

Ya terminé La sombra del caudillo de Martín Luís Guzmán y lo que más me llamó la atención fue lo siguiente:

Lo homoerótico. No fui la única que notó ciertos versos como por ejemplo este:

“Aguirre iba evocando más y más, conforme la velocidad crecía, la mirada que acababa de fijar en él Axkaná. Evocó sus últimas palabras, su sonrisa, y casi sin sentirlo, de esa evocación se deslizó a la de Rosario. Mejor dicho: ambas evocaciones fueron una sola, una donde se entretejieron inseparables los dos motivos. Los sentía Aguirre moverse uno dentro del otro; y dejándose agitar por ellos simultáneamente, se iba hundiendo en un estado de imaginación extraña y de voliciones confusas” (6).

Axkaná es su mejor amigo y Rosario es su amante.

El discurso que justifica la corrupción. Está escrito a la perfección. ¿Cuántas veces alguien en Asunción escuchaba yo como me respondían de la manera exacta?

“…La calificación de los actos humanos no es sólo punto de moral, sino también de geografía política. Y siendo así, hay que considerar que México disfruta por ahora de una ética distinta de las que rigen en otras latitudes. ¿Se premia entre nosotros, o se respeta siquiera al funcionario honrado y recto, quiero decir al funcionario a quien se tendría por honrado y recto en otros países? No; se le ataca, se le desprecia, de le fusila. ¿Y qué pasa aquí, en cambio, con el funcionario falso, prevaricador y ladrón, me refiero a aquel a quien se calificaría de tal en las naciones donde imperan los valores éticos comunes y corrientes? Que recibe entre nosotros honra y poder, y, si a mano viene, aun puede proclamársele, al otro día de muerto, benemérito de la patria. Creen muchos en México que los jueces no hacen justicia por falta de honradez. Tonterías. Lo que ocurre es que la protección de la vida y a los bienes la imparten aquí los más violentos, los más inmorales, y eso convierte en una especie de instinto de conservación la inclinación de casi todos a aliarse con la inmoralidad y la violencia…Fíjate en los abogados que defienden a nuestros reos: si alguna vez se atreven a cumplir con su deber, los poderes republicanos desenfundan la pistola y los acallan con amenazas de muerte, sin que haya entonces virtud capaz de protegerlos. Total: que hacer justicia, eso que en otras partes no supone sino virtudes modestas y consuetudinarias, exige en México vocación de héroe o mártir.” (130-131)

Why have there been so many dictatorships in Latin America?

This is a question that Gyurko posed to us in our political novel class.

Perhaps part of the answer lies in the values upon which the political structure of the viceroyalties were based:

"They stemmed from the fundamental Roman Catholic premise, most clearly articulated by Thomas Aquinas, that there were three kinds of law: divine law, that is, God's own heavenly will; natural law, a perfect reflection or embodiment of divine law in the world of nature; and human law, man's thoroughly imperfect attempt to approximate God's will within society...the ruler, once in power, was responsible to his or her own conscience and to God - not to the will of the people...Resuscitated in the postcolonial era, as it has often been, the code also furnished, as we shall see, a devastating critique of democratic theory."

Modern Latin America, Skidmore and Smith

Our Relationship with our Work

Our most important relationship on earth is the one we have with ourselves, and it manifests itself through the way we relate to our work. Our deepest fears, obsessions, neurosis and desires find their ways into our lives through our work. But dominating these demons need not be so mystic. After a conversation with a friend who faces many of the same issues as a journalist, we compiled a list of tips that have proven helpful in combating our "work gremlins".

1. Have faith in God and yourself. (See Miller's Book of Practical Faith.) As you work, trust your own capacities but also use worry as a signal that you are trusting only yourself when you need to trust a greater resource. Pray about it. Okay, maybe this is still sorta mystic, but more concrete advice follows...

2. Start early. Like 6:30 early. Sit down directly in front of the computer or books. Make this the first thing you do. Take on the hardest task of the day before any other.

3. Stick to a routine that favors your biorhythms. My brain, for example, turns off a bit after 3:00 pm. I can read fiction after that but not theory. And I can't write at all. Read this great little article called "Know Your Power Hours".

4. Incorporate exercise into your breaks. My favorites of late: yoga and swimming.

5. Stop procrastinating/avoidance. If you are a shitty perfectionist like me, you put things off because you want to do them "right" and then it's too late to do them at all. Perfectionism is a crippling disease that is too closely linked to depression. Keep it out of your life.

6. Know how and when to cut corners. Just say no. Only say yes to the work which your spirit truly years for. In my case, I sometimes I'm hungry for feminist theory but sometimes I crave economics. Pay attention to your appetites. (Read Beck's Find Your Own North Star for help on identifying your truest desires among the muck of societal/academic pressures.)

7. My personal favorite: use lists and schedules to divvy your work into small, bite-size goals you can accomplish on a daily basis. When I'm in a real crunch, I plan down to the last minute and for a control freak like me, it's a rush.

8. Be careful about working out of your home office. I like to write from home because my library is here but there are too many distractions when it comes to muddling through dense academic articles. For that I need to actually take a shower and have a change of venue.

Mimesis, Memetic Desire, and Memes

Mimesis

basic theoretical principle in the creation of art. The word is Greek and means “imitation” (though in the sense of “re-presentation” rather than of “copying”). Plato and Aristotle spoke of mimesis as the re-presentation of nature. According to Plato, all artistic creation is a form of imitation: that which really exists (in the “world of ideas”) is a type created by God; the concrete things man perceives in his existence are shadowy representations of this ideal type. Therefore, the painter, the tragedian, and the musician are imitators of an imitation, twice removed from the truth. Aristotle, speaking of tragedy, stressed the point that it was an “imitation of an action”—that of a man falling from a higher to a lower estate. Shakespeare, in Hamlet's speech to the actors, referred to the purpose of playing as being “ . . . to hold, as 'twere, the mirror up to nature.” Thus, an artist, by skillfully selecting and presenting his material, may purposefully seek to “imitate” the action of life.

"mimesis." Encyclopædia Britannica. 2007. Encyclopædia Britannica Online. 28 Aug. 2007 .

Mimetic Desire

Rene Girard's work goes along the lines that "The dominant opinion as well in the human sciences as for the common sense, is that we fixe our desire on an object in a completely autonomous way." He's talking about Freud, who argues, as Nicolas Wey-Gomez points out, that "hardly anything is harder than for a man to give up a pleasure that he has once experienced. Actually, we can never give anything up; we only exchange one thing for another."

Memes

Mihaly Csikzentmihalyi discusses memes in The Evolving Self:

The term "meme" was introduced about twenty years ago by the British biologist Richard Dawkins, who used it to describe a unit of cultural information comparable in its effects on society to those of the chemically coded instructions contained in the gene on the human organism. The name harks back to the greek word mimesis. (120)

Teoria Literaria - "Aura" de Carlos Fuentes

Estoy en el primer año del doctorado y nunca había leído ni estudiado "Aura" de Carlos Fuentes antes de este mismo momento.

Me recordó al Obsceno pájaro de la noche de Donoso y algunos cuentos de Cortázar. Usa también técnicas citadas por Borges para adentrarse a la irrealidad (i.e. sueños, tiempo circular, efecto caja china, desdoblamiento).

En mi opinión, lo que más se destaca es la voz narrativa y el efecto escalofriante que produce en el lector; “Lees y relees el aviso…parece dirigido a ti y nadie más.”

¿Cuáles teorías podrían ser útiles para analizar este texto? Esta pregunta la respondimos en clase de la siguiente manera:

Recepción

Semiótica: Soussiere

Desconstrucción

Autoreflexividad

Intertextualidad, metatextualidad

Arquetipos: La bruja, misa negra, mito fausto, mitología cristiana, azteca, griega (Narciso), el golem (como en “Las ruinas circulares” de Borges)

Psicoanálisis: Jung, Freud, Lacan

Posmodernismo: Si lo comparamos al Obsceno pájaro, podríamos formular paralelos con su actitud posmoderno destructiva frente a las oposiciones binarias de belleza/fealdad, amor/crueldad, vejez/juventud, lo vital/lo podrido, pasado/presente, lector/protagonista, historia/ficción, luz/oscuridad, presencia/ausencia (espacio), etc.

Formalismo

Teoría Feminista

Teoría Genérica

Bajtin: cronotipos, polifonía textual

Foucalt: autoridad, discurso, sexo, poder

Todorov: lo fantástico, terror psicológico

Hayen White: entramamiento, historia de Mexico, New historisism, metanarrativa histórica (Literature is as historical as history; history is as fictional as literature.)

Lo narratológico: Genette, focalización

Simbología tradicional (Cae bajo algún categoría? Es formalista?) el color verde/rojo, los gatos, la coneja, los cubiertos, la muñeca de trapo, los dientes, la sangre, el café frío, etc.

Me quedé con las siguientes dudas:

¿Qué significa?

Sinecdote

Metonimia

Shifters/embriagues, glissage (Lacan)


* * *

Creo q’ la función principal de los capítulos de Atkins (Contemporary Literary Theory) es simplemente lo siguiente: demostrarnos que la teoría literaria, tal como la literatura, es desarrollada dentro de una estructura de poder y por lo tanto es afectada por ella, tal como lo es la literatura. Algunas teorías vienen y van de moda dependiendo de su relevancia con su contexto…como las formas literarias. Nada puede ser divorciado de su contexto, incluyendo la literatura, la teoría (James A. Parr), el papel de la academia en si (Walter Mignolo) la metodología educativa (Jane Thompkins), la historia (Hayden White), etc.

Archetypal Criticism

Carl Jung

Richard F. Hardin, "Archetypal Criticism"

Clarissa Pinkola Estes, Women Who Run With the Wolves