early september

Well, it's been a few days since I last updated and that's mostly because I haven't done much in the last couple days related directly to my leaving, but I've got some news today, so.

A few days ago I received an email from UEA asking me to fill out online registration, which is the first half of the registration process. There are meetings once I'm there that will complete it. It was just regular, boring informational stuff so I won't go into detail about it. I did have a little trouble uploading the picture for my campus card because the last step told me to read something that wasn't there and then click a button that wasn't there...so I emailed the technical team and we'll see what happens, I guess.

The reason I'm writing is because I've found out what classes I'm taking! I sent in a module enrollment form which had the classes I was interested in and then a second and third choice for each. My first choices, of course, were the creative writing classes for poetry and fiction, and then a third-year module for children's literature, but I was warned several times that classes fill up quickly in creative writing and it's more than possible I'd be placed in my second- or third-choice modules.

I didn't know we'd even know what modules we were enrolled in until we got there and talked to a counselor because I'd read something like that on the website, but when I finished registration I saw a tab called "student" up in the corner and clicked on it, and it took me to a page that contained some information about my student information. There was a link at the bottom that said it was my timetable; without much thought of classes at all, and more thought of registration and orientation information, I clicked through, and found neither registration nor orientation information, but rather my module timetable.

I immediately noticed that I only have class on Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays. As I wish to travel on the weekends, this was highly welcome information. All the class information is in a sort of code that I can't read, though, so at first glance I couldn't tell what classes I'd been assigned.

I brought up the course catalogue and found that I've been placed in "Eighteenth-Century Writing," "Modernism," and "Creative Writing: Prose Fiction."

I'm slightly exasperated that it seems to me that I'm rather bent on doing poetry in an academic setting and most of the feedback I am receiving is working against that. However, I'm thrilled to have made it into the fiction course, as that will complete my emphasis in creative writing in fiction once I get back to UCI, and then I'll just have two classes left for poetry. That and, the main reason I chose to attend UEA without much thought about other options is because of their creative writing program, which is highly successful and well-regarded.

Taken directly from the Course Catalogue for the school of Literature, Drama and Creative writing:


2012/3 - LDCE2Y11 EIGHTEENTH-CENTURY WRITING

This module reads major British fiction and some poetry of the eighteenth century in terms of its relation to the development of society which is recognisably modern. We will examine such writers as Defoe, Swift, Pope, Richardson, Fielding and Sterne, and exploring the ‘rise of the novel’, the coming dominance of prose representation in journalism and fiction, the rise of the middle class, the move to an urban cash- nexus society governed by reason and contractual economic exchange, and the construction of new kinds of subjectivities for men and women according to the needs of middle-class patriarchy. In many ways, this module studies the development of the ‘modern mind’.

&


2012/3 - LDCE2Z15 MODERNISM

The purpose of this module is to study the literature of the early decades of the twentieth century - very roughly 1900-1930 - in particular the work of those authors who attempted to break with received norms of literary style and content. The module is organised as a series of thematic explorations - poetic experiment, memory and desire, myth and innovation, and so on - and thus does not follow a chronological structure. The sequence of guiding lectures focuses its deliberations on a set of specific texts, with their contexts, and these are taken up for discussion in the accompanying seminars. 'Modernism' is this constructed gradually over the semester as a mosaic of closely related issues, each one reflecting on the others. As well as providing an overview of defining textual features, in prose and poetry, the module is concerned also with the interrelation of text and context, offering a range of ways of conceiving of modernist literature as both of, and self-consciously ahead of, its historical moment.



I'm least excited for Eighteenth-Century Writing, though I'm sure that I'll enjoy it once I'm actually in the class. I've read all the aforementioned writers save Sterne, and I even really enjoy Defoe, so at the least, there's that. As for Modernism--it sounds a lot like we'll be studying some history as well, which sounds interesting but I hope it's more interesting than the course description. (i.e. that is only possible if we study Virginia Woolf. Have I told you, I'm naming a daughter Adeline?)

I have an appointment with STA travel tomorrow to book a return ticket and I have to go by financial aid and call the bank and then research on the international student ID card to see if I can use it for transactions abroad instead of the account I just set up with nameless banker at nameless bank. Feeling slightly--er--stressed, but I have time to pull last-minute things together before I leave.