English Angst
Agh! My Theory and the Gothic essay still hasn't been marked. The class was designed for approx. 60-70 people and 120 enrolled. I don't know why, probably budgeting reasons, but they decided to stick with having only one tutor and decided that she could do all the marking. So, unsurpringly, it looks like 30-50% have been marked and we don't know when the rest will come in. It's worth 40% and it's my first Stage III essay, and I have to confess written kind of at the last minute, so I'm freaking out about the exam being next week and still not having any kind of feedback as to whether I'm holding my own or not. That and I have to get at least a B on the paper (it's for my major) to get into post-grad and I hear she marks really hard....so....angst.
On the bright side, I've started studying for the exam and decided on my topics. I'm doing Interview with a Vampire for the pre-announced section and then Invasions: so Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Night of the Living Dead (you can't help but feel there's going to be a comparison question there) and the Poe section. I loved Pit and the Pendulum with Vincent Price and he so reminds me of our lecturer Alex Calder in that film. It's like a mix of Poe's short story of that name, Poe's story The Fall of the House of Usher and another film that production company made in the 1960s called The House on Haunted Hill. It takes elements from all the stories to make a new plot that is fantastically gothic. It seems really strange in some ways that I'm doing the zombie section since I like horror/thriller films but I mostly avoid generic splatter/gore horror. It's all very well to tell yourself that really they're eating a leg of roast pork covered in chocolate sauce and wearing a shoe to get the right cannabilistic look in black and white but somehow it just doesn't help. Yet I walked home from the video store last night with an armful of Romero's work and silently cursing them for having sold off several of the old classics recently [those AV library chairs just aren't that comfy eh!]. The zombies are just really easy to write on though. I was originally going to avoid them because I used New Historicism as a theoretical approach in my essay and looked at slavery and racial attitudes within British imperial culture. I think I'll be alright in the exam though as American racial attitudes were present in the construction of a discourse on zombies up to the 1940s or so but Romero's work quite radically reinvented them and they became much more about modernity in general and the soullessness of capitalism etc...
On the bright side, I've started studying for the exam and decided on my topics. I'm doing Interview with a Vampire for the pre-announced section and then Invasions: so Invasion of the Body Snatchers and Night of the Living Dead (you can't help but feel there's going to be a comparison question there) and the Poe section. I loved Pit and the Pendulum with Vincent Price and he so reminds me of our lecturer Alex Calder in that film. It's like a mix of Poe's short story of that name, Poe's story The Fall of the House of Usher and another film that production company made in the 1960s called The House on Haunted Hill. It takes elements from all the stories to make a new plot that is fantastically gothic. It seems really strange in some ways that I'm doing the zombie section since I like horror/thriller films but I mostly avoid generic splatter/gore horror. It's all very well to tell yourself that really they're eating a leg of roast pork covered in chocolate sauce and wearing a shoe to get the right cannabilistic look in black and white but somehow it just doesn't help. Yet I walked home from the video store last night with an armful of Romero's work and silently cursing them for having sold off several of the old classics recently [those AV library chairs just aren't that comfy eh!]. The zombies are just really easy to write on though. I was originally going to avoid them because I used New Historicism as a theoretical approach in my essay and looked at slavery and racial attitudes within British imperial culture. I think I'll be alright in the exam though as American racial attitudes were present in the construction of a discourse on zombies up to the 1940s or so but Romero's work quite radically reinvented them and they became much more about modernity in general and the soullessness of capitalism etc...
posted by Nixie! at 2:57 pm
0 Comments:
Post a Comment
<< Home