Hello everybody!
After a short hiatus, the MSt weblog is now again with updates from the brand new course staff: Clare, Amal, Kate, Mary Jean and Barney. We’re kicking off with an entry from Mary Jean, our new Departmental Lecturer in Poetry. Here’s what they’ve been studying and researching currently:
What I’m Studying Now
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wooden
It is a mesmerizing novel which meditates on how we would reply to our world’s a number of crises (ecological or in any other case) – can we flee from them because the protagonist within the novel makes an attempt to do by deciding to stay in a convent, and is it in actual fact attainable to maintain ourselves secure from the uncomfortable truths we’d reasonably not look within the eye? The novel asks troublesome questions on forgiveness, guilt and the way one may stay ethically. I beloved Wooden’s writing model; she has the precision of a poet and attracts the reader in with sensual, atmospheric scenes.
James by Percival Everett
I discovered Everett’s retelling of the traditional story of Huckleberry Finn deeply transferring and eye-opening. Language is foregrounded on this novel: it turns into a instrument for camouflage for slaves who want to look as if they’ll’t learn or communicate eloquently to fulfill the twisted egos and expectations of their white slave homeowners. I additionally discovered the advanced friendship between James and Huck to be sincere and honest, and it’s in the end their relationship which constitutes the beating coronary heart of this novel. It is a e book which can stick with me for a really very long time.
Present Initiatives / Analysis
I’m researching what ‘queer studying’ means in preparation for the 2025 LGBT+ Historical past Month lecture which I will likely be giving subsequent yr at Oxford. I’ve been excited a couple of forthcoming e book titled The Edinburgh Companion to Queer Studying (2024) and have been returning to the writings of Sara Ahmed for inspiration, significantly Queer Phenomenology: Orientations, Objects, Others (2006). I’m additionally engaged on an essay for a sequence in Poetry Journal known as ‘Laborious Emotions’, having chosen ‘anger’ as the sensation I’d prefer to deal with. That is proving to be a tough essay to put in writing certainly, nevertheless it has additionally been a pleasant excuse for me to return to fascinating work by D.W. Winnicott, Alison Bechdel and Darian Chief that are enabling me to assume by way of acquainted ideas in a special mild.
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