Tom & Alissa

If you haven’t picked up on it, I’m considering a return to school as a graduate student - at the moment, I’m looking at Gallatin at NYU. Gallatin is a “school of individualized studies”, which means that the student structures his or her degree program by choosing classes and designing research under the guidance of an academic adviser.

Having been homeschooled, I’m really excited by this prospect. It’s not that my parents practiced self-directed learning (also known as unschooling, and to my mind, a bad idea). I followed a very rigid curriculum and probably took way too many subjects (intermediate formal logic in seventh grade? why not?). But on the other hand, the way my parents practiced homeschooling - hands-off when I was in high school, expecting me to do all my scheduling by myself - prepared me for higher education by giving me the ability to schedule work well and develop good work habits. It doesn’t mean that I still don’t push off work until the last minute, sometimes - but at least it’s always in my mind and I rarely miss deadlines.

In any case, now that I’m a grown-up and it’s actually appropriate to practice self-directed learning, the idea of structuring my own degree according to my interests and aptitudes has been totally fascinating me. My undergraduate was earned out of practicalit, rather than interest, and I had only two classes in my entire four years at RPI that I really was interested in - introduction to literature and philosophy of law. I was good at what I did there; I’m just bored by IT in general. It’s interesting enough to keep me awake (mostly the structural and sociological elements) but not enough to keep me going forever. So, recalling those two classes I actually liked, plus my general lifelong obsession with books and philosophies, I thought I’d like to combine literature and intellectual history in some way, maybe with some film thrown in.

But the more I read, the more I realize that I’m really most interested in the twentieth century (including the last seven years; twenty-first century studies wouldn’t fill up a M.A.); the literature, the thought, the people, the diversity, the leaps and bounds that humanity seems to have taken. I think there’s a few reasons this is interesting to me - I was born in the late twentieth century so at least I remember the last twenty years to some degree; the world has changed so much since 1900, and it seems like those changes have been greater than in many of the previous centuries; globalization means that the literature of different cultures has been more readily available; more people in the West from more social classes enter college than previously; and frankly, I have a fantastic grounding in ancient history from the Egyptians through the Greeks and Romans and up through the Renaissance (and of course, American history from the puritans and pilgrims in England through present, though I know nothing of modern Canadian or Mexican history) and so I’m terribly intrigued by everything that’s gone on in philosophy since 1900. I sort of grew up in the bunker, unwittingly, and since much of the twentieth century is scary and “evil”, some homeschooling curriculums tend to skip over it.

But mostly, I’m totally entranced by the most recent of literature. Tomorrow is my books-I-read-this-month post, but I have read books by Truman Capote and Cormac McCarthy and this morning I started on The Corrections by Jonathan Franzen which has me thoroughly entranced and wanting to grab people on the street and asked them if they’ve read this book and then wax eloquent over the first thirty pages, which is all I’ve read so far because it’s that good. (In a subway ride and a lunch time, I usually would have hit at least 70 pages in most books.) I’ve read many of the old books and they’re close to my heart, but there’s something about this later literature that has me so excited about reading again.

What could I get out of studying the effects of modern philosophy on modern literature? Frankly, I’m not sure yet. But what I do know is that literature has the power to affect culture in a shorter timeframe than most of the other arts, maybe all, and I want to know what that means and what to do about it. And I love thinking and academia.

Maybe I’ll be a professor.