Hanging on to the Bandwagon

As for many other people posting on the blog, this week has been hectic for me, and I feel like I haven't made as much progress as I would have wanted. I have been working on my annotated bibliography, but for right now, I'm going to do a brief post on a few other aspects of this process.

Helping Other Projects

This is (not) me, thinking.
CC License by Ed Yourdon.

Throughout the course of this blog, I've been paying special attention to the development of David's ideas (see comments on posts here, here, and here, for example). He felt like he was challenged to write something new about Shylock in Merchant of Venice, and I've been helping him work through his ideas to get to a specific point that he could write a ten-page paper about.

Another person in the class that I've been helping with her project is Kara. She's been having a few problems narrowing down her topic too, but I talked with her about a few different approaches she could take, and I recommended that she look into homeschooling materials because of her interest in the way Shakespeare is taught to children outside of the classroom. She included this kind of information in her annotated bibliography, so I hope it was helpful for her.

I haven't quite been able to find blindness in literature projects that I've been able to help with, but I'm getting up the nerve to comment on several blog posts. More on that to come in the future.

Planning for Class Time

The problems I'm running into on my paper have to do with how I perform my close reading. As I mentioned in my previous post, I have to tread pretty carefully in disability studies, a new approach to literature for me. I've been fortunate to talk with David during class time as I work through a lot of my ideas, and he shared this student video with me as a way to get me thinking about how blindness is represented across different mediums. Kara has also been helpful as a sounding board to bounce ideas off.

Basically, during class, I just need to be able to articulate which directions my close readings are taking me. This is of course going to be more helpful with David and Kara than with anyone else because they've already heard me talk about the problem that disability studies poses to Gloucester in King Lear. I'm getting very close to having an articulated idea, but I need to talk through it and get feedback.

Tweethis

Speaking of an articulated idea, here's my attempt at one:

Despite the blind stereotypes that Gloucester seems to uphold, if we read the cliffs of Dover scene as Edgar's attempt to renew Gloucester's life in spite of his blindness, we can see that Gloucester's agony is separated from his actual blindness and that he represents a more human blind man than disability studies scholars have previously given him credit for.

This may sound like the idea I first articulated when I encountered the topic of blindness in King Lear, but it's much more informed by scholarship and close reading. Hopefully that will become more clear when I post my annotated bibliography later tonight.

In the meantime, please help me distill this tweethis. To me, though it's kind of the main conclusion of my argument and evidence, it also feels like only one facet of Gloucester that I plan to address. What would you like to see me do with it?