My favorite part of my week right now is probably Monday mornings, from 7 to 8 a.m. At this time, I am usually at a coffee shop across the street from the middle school I am currently interning at, eating a garlic bagel with sundried tomato tofu pate and drinking a 16 oz. coffee and either reading or writing. Yes, I get up an hour early so that I can arrive in Eugene an hour early so that I can have this hour of relaxation. I cherish it.
This morning, I spent half my time there reading Authoring a Life: A Woman’s Survival In and Through Literary Studies by Brenda Daly. I had actually read this book once or twice before, but all this reading about voice and authority made me really want to re-read it.
And so I read and jotted notes in the margins and underlined and it struck me:
I think I know the general area I want to go for my thesis. I mean, I’ve started reading some things that for this 511 paper would widen the scope a bit, and perhaps make it impossible for a paper for a class (but maybe not; that’s another thought), but I’ve enjoyed the readings for this paper like none other (well, I enjoy most things I’ve read, but a lot of this stuff on voice is great), and I thought about the old three subjects I was considering for my thesis:
bibliotherapy
experimental/postmodern writing
the teaching of writing
and how it would be awesome to incorporate all three into one thesis, and some had suggested the combination of one or two, but I was never quite pleased with their suggestions. However, I think I could write a thesis based on authority, voice, style, pedagogy, etc. that really gets at my passions. This is still kind of vague, but I listed all my passions that I felt could be incorporated into this general thesis idea:
Voice
Authority/Authorship
Expressivist Pedagogy
Social-Epistemic Pedagogy
Feminist Theory
Marxist Theory
Emotions and the Personal in reading and writing (links to bibliotherapy and scriptotherapy)
The mixing and blurring of genres, voices, and styles (postmodern writing links to this)
Collaging and Citations (Lance Olsen and others)
I’m really excited by this right now.
