Feeling Peculiar. Peculiar!?

First, I would like to echo others’ sentiments of weariness from writing finals. For me, this post comes in-between finishing a 20 page essay for History of the English Language and restarting my final essay. So, if this post isn’t very eloquent or insightful, I apologize.

I was considering posting Mr. Harding’s therapy session from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest as front material for this post, but the video is somewhat offensive, and I thought, unproductive in this setting. Nevertheless, if you’d like to laugh along with me while your reading, feel free to Google.

It was interesting to read some posts, which found this space to be more perfunctory than productive. My “approach” to this writing space has been to wait to post until I felt as if I had to write something (not in the sense that I waited until the deadline to post, although that might have happened on once occasion, but rather I felt that if I my writing and thinking would be better if I waited until I couldn’t not write). For me, then, at least, I felt like my writing in this space was engaging for me as a writer. Of course, I don’t assume that it as was engaging for any readers.

Like many of you, I think that a “required” move, when using a blog space in a classroom setting is critiquing the blog, yes, in terms of its affordances, but also in terms of what it expects from us as writers. If we don’t do this, inevitably, the space becomes a remediation of that kind of writing we all hate doing, something akin to the weekly reading reflection, which exists more for accountability purposes than it does to encourage engagement with the reading (or, at least, this has been my experience). So, I think that this final blog posting is, potentially, the most useful to me personally, because it gives us space to reflect upon the material constraints of the space, and the way such a space has acted upon us, has generated certain outcomes and responses.

In another way, because this writing comes at such a difficult (physically, mentally, emotionally) time in the year, the writing seems to be influenced and predominated by those factors, so that this writing (any writing) feels almost hollow.

What I most enjoy(ed) about the blog space—getting a sense for all of your writing, and seeing how our online discussions are influencing each other’s thought processes, areas of interest, scholarship. Even if we weren’t all as engaged with the space as I found myself being, I enjoyed getting a feel for others’ writing, and this is something that we almost never get to do in a graduate seminar. For example, I found myself increasingly drawn to Matt Vetter’s posts because his approaches always seem well thought out, interesting, and vetted (hehehe) in theory. Similarly, Ashley’s engaged posts almost always seemed to take a different approach to the material than I typically would, so it was interesting to get a layered reading of our canon of texts. 

In any case, I found that this experience was challenging and fulfilling, but I don’t expect everyone to feel the same way. I enjoyed learning from everyone in this space and throughout this quarter, and I hope that my utilization of this space has, likewise, been at least somewhat beneficial as well.