About a week left ...

And still three papers to go.

I'm have been getting anxious about my papers. Brooks, you remember how I am. All that stuff I teach my students about not procastinating. But then again, it's not really procastination. It's been blocked up till a week before 40 pages of critical writing is due. Tis not all gloom though: I've started two papers. And have all the research done for the third.

Here's what I'm writing on:
Avant Garde paper - on how to read avant garde stuff. This become a politics of the avant garde because I am arguing that the ability to read avant garde literature does something like "enlarging" one's world, or demonstrates the exist of something like freedom.

Gogol and Psychoanalytical Theory paper - on Nabokov's Gogol biography. A Lacanian reading of it in which I address the question of Influence. I use Bloom's Anxiety of Influence as a foil, then do a Lacanian reading of the biography, which reveals that Nabokov's text is strong case for clinical perversion. And that Gogol is a maternal, rather than "poetic father," for Nabokov. (I have to sound serious when I talk about this!)

Victorian Literature paper - on Lord Goring's dandy character in An Ideal Husband. I'm using what Foucault and Baudelaire say about dandyism to describe Wilde's dandy. Yet critics point out that the critique of Victorian society purported by the dandy is curtailed. Gasp! What does one do? Things like the Wildean epigram, or the institution of marriage get in the way. I'm still stuck on this one. We'll see what way out of the impasse I can find.

So all this is getting done by next Thursday so that Katie and I can drive down to one of the local beaches before the semester-end festivities (parties, get togethers, etc.) and the N.C. backpack trip. Let the games begin!