There is an End in Sight!

It's been a really long time since we've posted anything on the blog. That is due to it being my last semester of graduate school. In order to make sure this is in fact my last semester of graduate school, I'm having to take three classes and also prepare for the comprehensive exams (which is basically the equivalent of an additional class). I'm taking a class on British Fiction from 1900-1945 (Joseph Conrad, E.M.Forster, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf), 18th Century British Women Writers (some poetry, some plays, and some Jane Austen - yea!), and a class called Principles of Literary Research that is basically a library science/bibliography type class.

It's a lot of work and I'm struggling just to stay caught up, but I finally feel like there is an end in sight! Tomorrow is the comprehensive exam. Once I get through that, I just have to finish up my classes and I will be done. The comprehensive exam is based on a reading list that covers three time periods in literature: British Literature before 1800, British Literature after 1800, and American Literature. For the first category, the works are: Parliament of Fowls by Chaucer, King Lear by Shakespeare, and The Battle of the Books by Jonathan Swift. The second category is Mary Shelley's Frankenstein, Man and Superman (play) by George Bernard Shaw, and Crow (super crappy poetry) by Ted Hughes. The American lit. works are The Confidence-Man by Herman Melville (horrible book), The Golden Apples by Eudora Welty (also terrible), and The House on Mango Street by Sandra Cisneros.

After months of reading the primary works and stacks of literary criticism about the works, I will be taking the exam from 9-12 tomorrow at the Citadel. Cy has planned a celebration for afterward that includes purchasing pumpkins, hitting up Joe Pasta and the used bookstore, and hopefully a pumpkin cupcake. :)

Then with Comps out of the way, I just have to write 4 more papers (one of them being a 30+ page bibliography with 100-150 sources), give a couple of presentations, and take 2 finals in December and I will be done with school forever! Hooray!!!