April 7, 2011

Some of you *ahem* have mentioned to me that I don’t blog enough. I promise it isn’t because I’m lazy. (Actually, I’m lying – it’s a little bit because I’m lazy.) It’s mostly because I never know what to talk about.

So, in order to quench your thirst for my pointless ramblings, I’ve decided to use the lecture series from a certain Herr Prof. Dr. – which there’s a good chance you’re also attending – as inspiration for a series of blog posts.

In the event you’re not in this lecture, I’ll have you know Herr Prof. Dr. is discussing America (read: the United States) and its obsession with the notion of country in culture. In short.

We’ll see how this goes.

Why am I using a lecture about cultural representations of “country” in the United States as an inspiration about Canada, you ask?

Let me use this post as a way to explain…

At the most basic level, the lectures from Herr Prof. Dr. have been fascinating to me. You see, I’m not a literature person (no kidding). In my undergrad, I took a junior class on Literary Criticism. I was toying around with the idea of doing either a double major in History/Literature, or perhaps a minor in Literature.

HAHAHA, no, I’m not actually kidding.

Maybe it was just the professor then, but I found the class appallingly boring. We took a bunch of different criticism techniques and practiced applying them to different texts. It was dry, and frankly, at ten pages per week plus a term paper, way too much output for something I found so dull.

Anyhoo, had Herr Prof. Dr. been my professor in college, I probably would have continued with that major or minor. In the first semester of my MA, when I was first exposed to Herr Prof. Dr., I would spend my entire daily telephone conversation with my mom acting like one of those lame elementary kids who can’t wait to share what they’d learned at school that day.

Every week, the conversation would go like this:

Mom: “How was class today, honey?”

Me: “It blew my fucking mind!”

Followed by forty-five minutes of rambling, normally about Lacan.

But, yeah. So, if I’m being completely honest, I only signed up for this class on the basis that I need it to graduate and don’t want to end up taking an entire semester more, just to see if something more interesting will come along to fulfil my module requirements. (Given the course offerings the last three semesters, hope is a pointless thing at this point.)

Once I got into class, though, I realized that “country” isn’t just an American preoccupation. It’s a Canadian one, too. And, even after only one class, I’ve become a lot more aware of how the notion of country is ingrained into my psyche regarding what Canada actually is.

So, I’ll try to keep up with the lectures this semester to see if anything interesting comes along as food for thought.

I’ll post my thoughts on the first lecture shortly.