Nyssa's Learning Outcome Reflections

Gain Shakespeare Literacy

Breadth: Over the course of the semester, I read at least one play from each of the major genres of Shakespeare: Taming of the Shrew, a comedy; Henry V and Richard II, histories; A Winter's Tale, a romance; and  King Lear, a tragedy. Through reading these plays, I was able to expand my knowledge of Shakespeare from what I had acquired during high school, which focused mostly on the tragedies. And, since I read the Digital Dialogue posts and research papers of other students in the class, I feel at least conversant in other Shakespeare plays, as well as the general character and plot types that Shakespeare often uses.

Depth: Before this semester, I had only the vaguest of ideas of what King Lear was about. Now, after closely reading it, researching it, watching a film adaptation of it, and writing a paper about it, I feel confident in my knowledge of that play. I read it at least twice through this semester, and I think part of the depth requirement is feeling deeply as a response to the play. My paper really helped me emotionally tap into the play in a way that I find difficult for most other texts. I can immerse myself into the tragic examination of family relationships and old age because of my deep involvement with and understanding of the text.

Performance, stage and screen: I only got to watch one stage adaptation this semester, Henry V, but I watched film adaptations of Taming of the Shrew, Henry V, and King Lear. I was able to sharpen my film analysis skills through examining choices made in the adaptation, and overall what I learned was the flexibility and creativity involved in adapting Shakespeare plays. Especially helpful for me was realizing that Henry V has been portrayed as both rah-rah patriotism and harmful jingoism throughout the years, a difference I hadn't really thought possible before researching adaptations. I can now comment more intelligently on the differences between film and stage adaptations and the original Shakespeare text.

Legacy (history, scholarship, popular culture): My first paper on Taming of the Shrew really helped me understand the historical context of Shakespeare's plays, as did reading and commenting on other students' papers. For Paul's paper, for instance, I had to remind myself of the religious relations of Shakespeare's time to help him work through potential pitfalls in his argument. And though I nearly neglected the scholarly tradition for blindness in King Lear in my fervor over disability studies, Dr. Burton pushed me in the right direction and helped me acknowledge the traditional approach to the play in scholarship. Reading other students' papers also got me interested in all sorts of Shakespeare scholarship that I wouldn't have had time to research on my own. It's harder to gauge my increased knowledge of Shakespeare in popular culture, but I have been able to integrate ideas and quotes from Shakespeare into my everyday life; I was even able to identify a misplaced Shakespeare quote in an early draft of David's paper.

Analyze Shakespeare Critically

I found that the more I was forced to articulate what I thought about the plays, either through writing in forums, blogs, and papers or through recording my thesis video, the more intelligently I was able to read the plays. I really developed my close reading skills (kind of my most prized skill from the English major) in being able to write a paper that revolved around them; I was able to take both scholarly traditions and historical context into account when reading a play and use these contexts in tempering my claims. I feel like I did a pretty good job over the course of the semester about avoiding easy arguments and Shakespeare platitudes, and my paper displays the consideration I took over multiple facets of an argument.

Engage Shakespeare Creatively

Like everyone else is going to say, the sonnet project helped me be creative with Shakespearean material. I really enjoyed the time I spent trying to get my meter down perfectly. Also, though, the Youtube videos I made, though I didn't really edit them much at all, let me know that more creative ventures are possible further in the future. It's not an impossible thing to make videos, and I'm excited about having that realization.

Share Shakespeare Meaningfully

Most of my Shakespeare sharing came from talking things over with my husband, Neal. I got used to talking about a books that (gasp!) many people have actually read. On the one hand, this means that I might not get to used the most developed forms of my arguments, but it helped me figure out what approaches to the texts would matter to and be understood by most people. Talking through my arguments with my peers in class really helped me fight my way out of the worst parts of academese, so now I'm prepared to enter the real world with experience writing (another gasp!) readable prose.

Gain Digital Literacy

This is the part of the class that I struggled with the most. I felt like I had to prove myself in my topic before asking people for their input on it, so that really hampered my outreach. I was also discouraged when most of the people I reached out to didn't get back to me. But I did learn how to search through blogs and social media to find things that people are talking about, which will be useful in the future far beyond a class on Shakespeare. I did, however, gain some bravery in talking to other people on the Internet, so I'm at least glad I gave the digital aspect of this class a try. I feel a little more connected with people in the world--like I can at least ask people questions without being terrified of what will happen.

Story of Nyssa's Paper

When we first started blogging about our final papers, I thought I might look at women in film adaptations of Shakespeare. I had had a lot of success with this line of thought in my midterm paper and on our class forums, so I thought I was good to go on my topic. But I was drawn back to King Lear, and specifically Gloucester, by the macabre portrayal of the blinding scene in the 2008 film adaptation of the play. I started doing tentative Internet searches about blindness in King Lear, and I came across the Kenneth Jernigan speech that I knew I had to respond to somehow. So I threw myself into the unfamiliar world of disability studies. I'm so glad I decided to follow that hunch I had about King Lear, the attraction I had to the torture scene. I could have gone what is a safe route for me and analyzed more about women in Shakespeare, but I'm thankful now that I expanded my scholarly repertoire.

Story time!
Photo Credit: Jody Art

As I started working on the research for this paper, I initially got very excited about the social aspect of the paper. I had found people I could talk to through Facebook, and I was determined to get to know as much about blindness as I could. Overall, the Facebook responses didn't pan out, but I did make a lot of progress by immersing myself in the writings of Georgina Kleege and in the primary text of King Lear. Ultimately, the quest of my paper was figuring out how I could put my close reading skills to good use. I toyed around with a couple of thesis ideas (see posts here and here), but Dr. Burton rightly corrected my course by saying that my claims were almost making themselves trivial. I had to figure out a way to make my research matter to the real world, and I was cloistering my close reading to a self-referential approach--one not useful to anyone but the most insulated of scholars.

After that, I still continued introspecting so that I could clarify my ideas (really to myself) about what I wanted my paper to accomplish. I filmed and posted a video in which I talked about my major claims, and I tried to choose a specific venue and audience for my paper when I clearly was not sure who I was writing to. As I started writing rough drafts (see posts here and here), David helped me sort out the flow of ideas in my paper and the significance they could have. I visited him in the BYU Writing Center to talk about style and communication issues I was having, and he's been encouraging about my paper throughout this process. My paper really started coming together when I did the focused annotated bibliography. At this point, I had all the tools I was going to use, even if the final form of the paper was still a bit nebulous.

Things really turned around, though, when I met with Dr. Burton to talk about my paper. Basically, he told me, I had gone in almost the opposite direction in my paper's insulation. Instead of staying cozy in the primary text, I had written so much about blindness and disability studies that I was kind of ignoring traditional readings of King Lear that have been circulated for centuries. This feedback led me to rework over half may paper (see posts here and here), and I was pleased with the result. Even though I did make other attempts to reach out directly to experts in the field, my paper was developed mostly by situating it correctly on the spectrum of radical and traditional readings, and this process was helped mostly through peer and professor feedback.

Despite this setback, I'm proud of the paper I wrote; proud enough that I submitted it to an actual academic journal in the field of literary disability studies. For me, this paper was something that needed to be molded and polished not just by my own thought but from feedback from the people around me, and I'm proud to say that I learned to write in the discourse of an entirely new field for me this semester.

Paper Submitted

Well, I finally did it. I finally submitted my paper to the BYU Scholar's Archive and to the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.

That latter submission took a lot of mental effort. I composed the email, proofread it, made sure I followed their submissions guidelines, stared at the email, checked Facebook, still stared at the email, stared off into space, and finally hit the send button. I was a little nervous about having someone outside of class actually read my paper, but I have my fingers crossed that there will be some good results from this.

Well, there's already been one: I submitted to a real-life academic journal! And I wound up feeling pretty good about it.

EDIT: Here is the cover letter I used to submit my paper. It is a bit utilitarian, I admit, but based on their submissions guidelines, it seemed to be what they were expecting. I included the abstract as part of the document I attached to the email, also per submissions guidelines.

Dr. David Bolt: 

Please find attached my submission for the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies, "'I'd Say I Had Eyes Again': Redeeming Shakespeare's Gloucester for the Blind." This is an original article; it has not been previously published, nor is it under consideration for publication elsewhere. 

Biographical Note:Nyssa Silvester graduated from Brigham Young University in 2013 with her BA in English, along with minors in editing and women's studies. Her academic interests include feminist theory, history of the book, and disability studies. She lives in Provo, Utah, where she edits fiction in her spare time. 

Thank

 you for your consideration

,
Nyssa Silvester

Nyssa Silvester: "I'd Say I Had Eyes Again": Redeeming Shakespeare's Gloucester for the Blind

In the recent rise of disability studies, scholars like Georgina Kleege have drawn attention to the lack of role models for the blind in classic literature. Instead, literature tends to perpetuate harmful stereotypes of blindness, including blindness accompanied by compensatory powers and blindness as punishment for sin. Shakespeare's King Lear would seem to fall into these stereotypical traps in its treatment of Gloucester during the Dover Cliff scene, where his son Edgar supposedly fools him into thinking he's jumped off a towering cliff. Based on textual evidence, though, we can read Gloucester as collaborating with Edgar in constructing this scene for the audience. Therefore, Gloucester exhibits agency and hope in crafting his renewal, and he can serve as a start for blind role models in classic literature.

Paper found here.

The Proto-Final Draft

Okay, all. After grueling hours of figuring out what I was trying to say, I think I have my draft down pretty well. I think there are some things I want to tweak in my thesis so that it's a little more cohesive, but I'm going to call that good for tonight. Let me know if you have any comments!

A New Paragraph: Traditional Readings of Sight in King Lear

When I met with Dr. Burton, he suggested that my paper's argument would be stronger if I established more of a counterargument in the traditional readings of King Lear. Here is a paragraph detailing the usual way blindness is read in the play and the problems it brings up for blind studies. The next paragraph I'm going to be putting together is one that takes seriously the unity that might be disturbed in the play with my rereading. I'll take the play more seriously and try to find a new way to establish Shakespeare's parallels if I'm saying that Gloucester isn't be tricked by Edgar the way he's tricked by Edmund.

So anyway, here's the first of the new paragraphs:

The traditional reading of Gloucester’s blindness capitalizes on blindness as a reductive literary symbol. Harold C. Goddard presents a typical reading of the blind Gloucester in his essay on King Lear. Goddard points out the theme of sight and perception throughout the play: “The scene in question [Dover Cliffs scene] . . . is centered on the eyes and eyesight of Gloucester. But consider King Lear as a whole: does not practically everything in it turn on this subject of seeing? Darkness and light; blindness and vision--visions and blindness, indeed, of every kind” (143). Goddard is assuredly right to draw attention to the sight that pervades the text--there is ample evidence and justfication to bring up these parallels--but, published in 1960, his work comes from a critical tradition that does not problematize representations of disability in literature. His writing comes on especially shaky ground by today’s standards of criticism when he says, “In this, his version of The Last Judgment, Shakespeare has demonstrated that hatred and revenge are a plucking-out of the human imagination as fatal to man’s power to find his way in the universe as Cornwall’s plucking out of Gloucester’s eyes was to the guidance of his body on earth” (170). Goddard has gone so far in his textual analysis that blindness has become merely a symbol for him, abstracted as far as the Final Judgment, with no mention of the Gloucester, the actual blind character, except to say that his lack of sight equates to a lack of guidance. Even more recent and informal looks at blindness in King Lear do not push back against the purely metaphorical meaning of blindness. Sylvia Morris, an academic Shakespeare blogger, says, “The most striking [references Shakespeare makes to eyes and sight] occur in King Lear where the physical act of seeing is a metaphor for understanding and self-awareness. Sometimes words aren’t enough, and then Shakespeare translates the metaphor into action.” Even when blindness is enacted onstage, Morris chalks this action up not to character but to an extension of metaphor. It is just these types of analyses that Georgina Kleege rebuffs in her own work as “merely another version of the old story--the blind man as instructive spectacle, useful to everyone but himself” (90). Kleege seems, in essence, to want the blind in literature to be instructive in a different way, to learn how to live without site and thus, by implication, to serve as a model for blind readers. To be able to read blind role models into classic literature, we have to suspend, at least for a moment, our sighted focus on the symbolism of blindness and explore the character presented on the page without this imposed interpretive weight.

Response to Criticism

I didn't have a lot of time in class to talk about my draft with Paul and Bailey, but Paul did have some good tips for me. He mentioned that I was possibly making too big of assumptions of what a general audience would know and gave recommendations about how I could fix that perception. He also helped me work out the flow of my paper and be able to read it at the sentence and word level. That way it will read a lot easier, and the editing process should really refine it.

Lizy had a good suggestion on my post of my essay, too. She mentioned a counterargument that I should address, namely the invasion of France that grows in the background until act V. Truth be told, that plot point of the play had always been really confusing to me, so Lizy has inspired me anew to contextualize my reading in the play, even the parts that I didn't understand as much. Thank you!

Narrowing Down the Publishing Venues

I was really inspired in class today by the fact that Paul is submitting to RMMLA. Holy cow! Also, Dr. Burton's criticism of Criterion (good place to publish, horrible place to actually be read) rang true of some of the other venues I was considering. With that in mind, I'm going to put a lot of my possible venues on the backburner and focus on one very promising opportunity: the Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies.

This journal quite recently published a special issue about blindness in literature, at least one of the articles I plan to integrate into my final paper. (See my annotated bibliography.) With that inclusion, I can really become part of the discussion this journal is fostering, and people might actually read the paper.

Which is, of course, terrifying.

Some things I need to do to mitigate the terror:

• Find a solid organization for my paper. I've been writing a little freehand up until now, but I need to have a series of moves planned out the way that Bailey does.
• Make sure I address every contingency in my close readings. I'm making quite a radical claim, and I need to show that I've done my homework. This will probably mean spending a lot more time in the primary text this weekend.
• Really make sure I'm understanding the points of view of the people I'm quoting. If I want to be part of a discussion, I have to listen first, talk second.

Anyone else have tips about how to make this paper great?

A Bit Confused: My Response to Leah

Leah, I just read your draft on teaching Shakespeare in high schools, and I left it a bit confused. It didn't sound like the paper I had been reading about or talking with you about. I felt like you were making too many claims, and I didn't know where to focus my attention. Here are some things that threw me for a loop and some ways to help things feel more cohesive.

The Progress Draft

Okay, so here's the rough draft that I have for today. It's not quite finished, but I've made a lot of progress since my last one, most notably in doing my close reading. That's where the focus of my paper is, and I would really love some feedback on how convincing my interpretations are. Thanks!

Keeping It Scholarly: Some Tips for Paul

I already talked with Paul about his paper a lot in class today, but I figured it would be a good idea to write down what I had said earlier so we can all refer to it later.

First of all, Paul, I think your paper is coming together really well. You are clearly an accomplished writer, and you know how to put a paper together and integrate those sources. My problems however, come mainly from oversights that could make your paper seem less scholarly. And since you've submitted to RMMLA, I would love to help you catch those and give the paper that finishing scholarly edge.

Pulling It Together: A Brief, But More Relevant, Post

Last week, I wrote about contacting other scholars, and a few days ago, I wrote about the disappointment I was facing because no one wrote back to me. But that disappointed is lifted!

I got a reply from Julia Miele Rodas, who is currently teaching a Fictions of Disability class. And even though it might not have turned out how I originally expected, I was excited to receive a reply. I emailed Dr. Rodas to see if there were any people in her class who were focusing on blindness and might want to talk to me. This is the email I got back:

Nyssa--

Thanks for writing; I'm so glad to hear of your interest. Unfortunately, my students have not yet developed focused projects, so I don't know yet if anyone will be researching blindness specifically. And, since I'm a Victorianist, I'm not sure how much guidance I could give you when it comes to Shakespeare, but perhaps I can at least point you a little further down the road.

Attached are two pieces, one by myself and the other by Georgina Kleege, that might help jump start your thinking (hoping PDF format will be accessible). You might also want to consider taking a look at the "Disabled Shakespeares" section of this issue of DSQ (open access, link below).

http://dsq-sds.org/issue/view/42

Please touch base again to share thinking or questions--always interested . . .

Best,
Julia

 So now I have more reading material and someone I can email again with my ideas. I'm glad to have at least some success.

Things are just hard right now.

I've been trying to get all my ducks in a row to start writing my paper, but tonight has made it very hard.

My cat went missing while I was working at Leading Edge, and my husband and I have been up all night so far looking for her.

Funnily enough, the last time I was in Dr. Burton's class, my cat from childhood passed away. I don't want to be superstitious or anything . . .

Anyway, if you could send prayers our way, we would very much appreciate it.

Focused Annotated Bibliography

Harold C. Goddard, Meaning of Shakespeare, vol. 2
Scholarly monograph, ebook found through library, a little over fifty years old
As can be inferred from the date on this scholarship, Goddard takes an old school approach to analyzing the blindness in King Lear. Despite the difference in approach though, I think he comes to some good conclusions that should be talked about.

Georgina Kleege, Sight Unseen
Scholarly monograph, found in physical library, between ten and fifty years old
This book has been my go-to source for literary stereotypes of the blind, and it really helped me dive into the field of disability studies. Though Kleege is legally blind, she still watches movie and takes part in visual culture, making her a valuable bridge between two worlds. Her comments are insightful if challenging, sometimes, but her book has been very helpful for reorienting my viewpoint on blindness in literature.

Kenneth Jernigan, "Is Literature Against Us?"
Speech given at National Federation of the Blind meeting (potential stakeholders), between ten and fifty years old
The article that started it all for me. Kenneth Jernigan brings this conversation about blindness in literature to a head when he claims that classic literature, including King Lear, has been doing the blind a disservice by perpetuating harmful stereotypes to mostly sighted readers. Writing that I need to address in my paper.

Sylvia Morris, "Sight and Blindness in Shakespeare"
Academic blog, very recent
Though this is much more of a traditional reading of blindness in literature, one not really informed by disability studies, it provides several interesting links to the history of sight and how it has been valued throughout the past few centuries. This could prove really interesting as a contrast to my research.


Robert B. Pierce,"'I Stumbled When I Saw: Interpreting Gloucester's Blindness in King Lear"
Academic Journal, within past ten years
Pierce takes much the same approach I do to King Lear, trying to work through the way that blindness is used in it. My work will in a way be building off his; he points to the interaction of the blind Gloucester and the mad Lear as a way of breaking away from the traditional presentation of the blind in literature, and his discussions of blind stereotypes are useful. My thesis will hopefully bring his work to a more pointed conclusion.

David Richman, "Smelling Their Way to Dover: A Blind Director's Take on Blind Gloucester"
Found through footnote in Pierce, academic journal, within past ten years
This piece is fascinating and evocative, immediately issuing a challenge to the sighted reader that the fear of blindness is restricted to the sighted. I don't agree with Richman's staging of the cliffs of Dover scene, which he wants to make as darkly humorous as possible in order to highlight the emotions the audience feels about the violent blinding of Gloucester, but I will probably be pushing back against this piece in my own work.

Hannah Thompson, "Andromaque: Audio Description in the Seventeenth Century" (or similar posts from the Blind Spot blog
Academic blog, very recent
Thompson, herself a legally blind woman, writes in this post about a French play that, like King Lear, featured extensive description of the scene, this time because people in the audience couldn't see what was happening on the small stage. It might be interesting to put this play into dialogue with the way this kind of ekphrasis is used in King Lear.

Amy Vidali, "Seeing What We Know: Disability and Theories of Metaphor"
Academic journal, within past ten years
Vidali takes a classic disability studies approach and deconstructs the metaphor we have of "seeing as knowing." She proposes ways that disability studies can deal with these deeply ingrained elements of sighted culture, and since the topic is about seeing and knowledge, this article is very pertinent to the Dover Cliffs scene, where Gloucester is supposedly fooled by the sighted Edgar.

Quick Update before the Bibliography

This week has been exhausting.

Since finding out last week that I didn't get an internship that I was counting on, I've been frantically job hunting, and that's hard to do in Provo. It takes far more time than I ever thought it would (why does every single company have its own application site? Why can't they just take my resume?), and it's discouraging when you get rejected again and again. Discouraging enough to detract from schoolwork.

Also, it doesn't help that no one I've emailed for my paper has gotten back to me. More discouragement.

Sorry this post doesn't specifically have to do with Shakespeare, but I'll try to pull it together later tonight. If you guys could post encouraging comments, I would really appreciate it.

I Was Brave Today: Expanding my Social Scholarship

Today's blog post won't be very long. I finally got up the nerve to contact two scholars on disability studies or blindness in literature, and I'm hoping that these efforts work out well. I feel like I was too nervous to do a good job introducing myself and my topic, but here are the two people I emailed. I hope they write back so I can reassure them that I'm not as silly as I may have sounded the first time around.

I wish I had thought ahead and used a fountain pen.
 But I was stuck with email.
Photo credit TMAB2003

Hannah Thompson of Blind Spot

Dr. Thompson studies post-Revolution French literature and has been keeping this blog on cultural manifestations of blindness for about a year. I emailed her this morning specifically about how she, as a legally blind woman, interprets literature that she loves in spite of the way blindness is portrayed in it. I'm really hoping to hear back from her, but I'm nervous.

I found her site through Ice Rocket, which is a way cooler tool than I thought it would be.

Julia Miele Rodas

Dr. Rodas doesn't necessarily specialize in blindness, but she does list disability studies as one of her main research interests. I mostly contacted her because she's teaching a class right now about disability in literature. I asked her if maybe she could put me in touch with some of her students who might be studying blindness, so I'm hoping that works out! It would be fun to talk with people at the same stage of research as me.
Syllabus for her class.

So, sorry this was short, but I spent most of my research this morning just mustering the courage to send those emails.

The First Three Pages

Well, guys, it's finally coming together. And after analyzing my audiences and going through some more scholarship, I discovered just how bold my thesis needed to be to work. I was up against hundreds of years of interpretations at the expense of the blind Gloucester, so I proposed a radical new way of reading King Lear.

I think my response to Jonathan Goldberg gets a little fuzzy near the end, but you'll have to tell me what you think. Obviously, this is not a complete draft, but it was a great way for me to get the ball rolling. Bring on the feedback!

Audiences and Publishing Venues

And here is a stretching cat.
Photo credit play4smee

I decided to evaluate my audience in three different ways: the potential readers I could attract, the publication venues I could realistically pursue, and the publication venues that would be a stretch for me.

Potential Audiences

Well, everybody, of course! But seriously, it's been hard for me to think of specific audiences the way Kara did so beautifully. I'll write at least what I have thought about:

Blind people looking for relatable literature. Much of my paper discusses harmful blind stereotypes and ways to read King Lear so that these stereotypes are assuaged. Maybe that discussion will open up King Lear a little more to the blind looking for fair representations in literature. I feel like I may be really presumptuous in aiming for this audience, though.

Undergraduate students new to disability studies. I'm hoping that talking about disability studies in a book that so many people have read will serve as a good introduction for students stumbling across the theory as I did.

Other theorists of blindness in literature. Some scholars have posed the question of how to interpret older texts that show blindness in stereotypical ways, and I'm hoping that my paper can offer some commentary of how to start this process.

"Realistic Goals" for Publication

Since my topic isn't one that most Shakespeare blogs really focus on, it seems like I should pursue more traditional scholarly routes. That said, I did reference a Shakespeare blog in my bibliography, so maybe I could submit my paper as a response to that post. My other options include the following:

BYU's English Symposium, but I want to go far beyond this venue if at all possible. The venue seems really insulated, and that's not really what I want.

BYU's Criterion. Criterion is a respectable publication and is starting to gain some traction as a nationwide undergraduate journal for literary criticism. From what I can tell, they tend to like diverse approaches to literature, so I think I would have a decent chance of publishing with them.

Susquehanna University's Literature and Creative Writing Conference. This is a relatively new literature conference, and its typical presenter is from a college in or around Pennsylvania. I could add some diversity to their lineup through both my topic and my university.

National Undergraduate Literary Conference. Though this is a national conference, its location in Ogden makes it seem accessible to someone like me without a whole lot of conference experience. It feels like a good fit.

"Stretch Goals" for Publication

National Undergraduate Research Conference. I kind of see this as one step up from the National Undergraduate Literary Conference because it caters to students of all disciplines and is held on the East Coast instead of in Utah and therefore might have more diversity among the educational background of the students. I think my paper could appeal here because it's a topic that not a lot of people are writing about, and that would set me apart.

Columbia Journal of Literary Criticism. I break into a nervous sweat just thinking about publishing with as prestigious an institution as Columbia, but I don't think I should sell myself short. I've been putting a lot of good research and thinking into this paper, and it's a fascinating topic, so I may have a chance.

Journal of Literary and Cultural Disability Studies. This is really a stretch goal because this journal is not reserved for undergraduate publications. It would mean submitting a real abstract to be published alongside PhDs and professors. I don't know if I'm ready for this, but I might still give it a shot.

Video Preview: King Lear and Blindness

Don't you love the pained look on my face when I talk about my ideas?

Anyway, this video helped me pick out the most salient points of my argument, the ones I need to focus on the most: the cliffs of Dover scene read as Edgar giving his father new life (not read as a comedy, in other words) and the little glimmers of hope for Gloucester's future that are in surrounding scenes. Clearly, blind studies needs to be included as a background, but I need to get back to diving into the primary text even more than I already have.

Helping David Out: The Merchant of Venice in Asia

I'm excited to have David be my paper-development partner, especially since there are so many avenues he could pursue in writing about The Merchant of Venice. Because the entry from David's bibliography I was most interested in was Maobingi, and because I've been watching a lot of anime recently (how did I not know about Fullmetal Alchemist before now?), I wanted to see what the Asian world was doing with Merchant.