Woo I'm twenty-two...

...and it was Guy Fawkes day here in the north of England, which made it rather more fun than usual. The first half of yesterday was all work, however--I finished my first essay for my Bronte seminar, which was a flurry of research. Speaking of which, I love JSTOR. Finding journal articles and reviews online has never been so easy. I've also been told to check out Google Scholar, so I'll have to do that sometime soon. Anyway, the actual content after finding sources was good fun, because I was analyzing Charlotte Bronte's Villette, which was her second attempt at writing the story of an English narrator who goes to teach in a foreign land. The first attempt was The Professor, which she didn't expect to publish, and thus was only released after her death. It was interesting on an intellectual level for the ideas she wanted to present on the dynamics of student-teacher relationships, on foreignness, and on her narrator's strategic reticence, but it wasn't very smoothly written, and the narrator was not very likeable at all.

Villette vastly improves on its first iteration, but still carries over the main themes that Charlotte wanted to address, so I looked at how the narrator's reticence actually facilitates her study of foreignness. The narrator, Lucy Snowe, presents as almost a nonentity to begin with, but she slowly inhabits herself as an actual personality by defining what she isn't--namely, French and Catholic. The reader constructs who she is by drawing around her all of her observations of foreignness, thereby finding her through her negative image, so to speak. I was able to address the idea on a number of different levels, all of which need some fleshing out still, but seeing as this was an unassessed essay and therefore a sort of rough draft for the real one at the end of the semester (plus it was limited to 2000 words), I think I hit my main points enough for now, but will go into them more deeply in the future.

So yes, all of this was done Wednesday night, but then I had to finish up some reading the morning before seminar, so all in all, until the afternoon I was all productivity. After that, though, not so much! I went over to Erin and Marta's in the evening, and we went to the bonfire at the park, which had to be at least fifty feet high, and laced with firework sparklers. There were tons of people milling around, along with concession stands, and some guy from the city council gave a introduction. A half hour in, they started a real firework show, which was quite elaborate and well planned. So all in all, quite fun. The fireworks continued all around the city until midnight, so I got to see some distant sparks (along with hear various explosions) from my window after getting home. Definitely a most bombastic birthday!

And now, I'll be resting up this weekend and then plunging into reading week, which is meant for undergrads because they have exams or something coming up, but means that I don't have class all of next week, so I'll be using the time to talk to professors about my dissertation topic, and trying to get a head start on some massive readings I have for my seminars. I'll be reading Daniel Deronda for one, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall for another, and lots and lots of essays, both for classes and for my annotated bibliography, due at the end of the month. The bibliography is meant for my dissertation, which is great as a way of finding tons of sources early on in the process, but it is due for my Research Methods lecture in a formal capacity, which is a bit less exciting. So yeah, lots of work coming up. We'll see how it goes!