Finals week for English majors is never really about exams. It's about papers. I have two ten pagers due next Wednesday and I'm aiming to finish them by the end of the weekend. The paper writing process can be excruciating, somewhat like pulling teeth or so I imagine, as I've never had a tooth pulled. While this semester as been mundane, horrible, terrible, disgusting, whatever, I am actually super excited to write both of this final papers because my paper topics are so interesting to me.
I'm writing a paper on whether or not Sarah Silverman is essayistic at all by looking at her film Jesus is Magic
and her book The Bedwetter: Stories of Courage, Redemption, and Pee
. I just started reading The Bedwetter yesterday and I must say I am so glad I can consider that homework. I haven't read any books for class this semester! Only essays. I really miss reading whole books for class. And The Bedwetter is hilarious so far, I'm a little over a 1/3 of the way through it. This paper is relaxing and stimulating. It's reminding me that paper writing can be fun.
Everyone at Iowa has to take a rhetoric class their freshman or sophomore year. I took my mine first semester my freshman year since I'm an English major and while I didn't really enjoy the class, I did write an awesome paper for it. I wrote about German rap music and how it relates to ethnicity. I listened to a ton of German rap music as music. I got an A on that paper and writing it was a trip.
Currently, I'm also writing a paper about book catalogs in the Renaissance. The class I'm writing this for, Literature and the Book, is my favorite class I've taken this semester. I've loved analyzing how they sold books during the Renaissance and book catalogs is a perfect way to do that. I get to use some really great databases to look at microfilm and some actually books from our library's special collections. This isn't as relaxed as Sarah Silverman, but book history is something I really enjoy so it seems fun to me.
I've also written some papers about actual books (go figure) and analyzed passages. These kind of papers are awesome if you have a great argument. I remember my freshman year I took Intro to the English Major and did less than desired on the first paper. When we wrote about The Tempest
I got a really good argument going about gender and the New World in my paper. I was so proud to get my first A in the English department.
I complain about writing papers a lot, but honestly I feel pretty lucky to be an English major and write papers about things that interest me all the time, instead of just taking exams about things I don't care about.
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