Book Log

[anotherusedpage]

I believe I have not yet in 2011 read a book by a nondisabled white heterosexual man. If I keep this up until 2014 I might just about balance out my Oxford English degree....

Tiger Hills - Sarita Mandanna
Hero - Perry Moore
A Thousand Splendid Suns - Khaled Hosseini (Oh god I loved this so, so, so much. I'm really quite in love with Khaled Hosseini.)
The Reluctant Fundamentalist - Mohsin Hamid (This was on offer with the Khaled Hosseini in a train station book shop. I am SO GLAD I picked it up. It does really, really clever things with reader response theory and narrative. I have many thinky thoughts about it and would love to write it up properly at some point).
Telling Stories to Change the World: Global Voices on the Power of Narrative to Build Communities and Make Social Justice Claims - ed Rickie Solinger, Madeline Fox, Kayhan Irani
Sociology: The Basics - Ken Plummer

I wanted to read more of: Books by disabled people; books by women of colour, especially queer women of colour; black, queer, and disabled performance studies; black, queer, and disabled sociology; Jewish queer women.

Comments

[glittertigger]

I have no idea about her sexual orientation, but Naomi Alderman is a talented Jewish female writer and a feminist :)

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

For me, the proportion of people I studied who weren't able-bodied white heterosexual men depends on how firm the evidence has to be in order to adjudge them queer or disabled (I can't offhand think of a single author of colour that we studied - at my college, this was the greatest deficit by far). I'm happy to count Shakespeare and Marlowe, for instance, under queer, allowing for fairly significant changes to labels! PWDs include Herbert, Pope, Sterne, Smart, Austen, Keats, Hopkins, Woolf, Plath. (Provided one accepts chronic illness as disability: five of those people experienced chronic physical illness, in addition to e.g. Woolf, where it's not really clear to what extent her physical symptoms were related to/separate from her mental health.)

Naturally this only applies to my particular collection of people-studied, since yours may have been completely different! Your post made me pause and think about it, though. They're more diverse than I'd have expected, in some ways, but less so in others. Who did you do for 7 & 8? I don't remember if you've ever told me. I'd be interested to know if you studied any non-white authors, because, as I say, we never did.

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

(But - once again, for me - a huge problem is the fact that so few of the authors whom I see as disabled are widely considered to be so. It seems to be skated over vitually all the time, except when disability = pathology in the case of women writers with mental health problems. Argh.)

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

(I don't mean skated over by you! I hope that was obvious, but am completely neurotic about giving the wrong impression on lj. I'm thinking of all the criticism I read.)

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

I did the Beowulf poet for paper 7.

My paper 8 was the thing I refer to as my Big Queer Jesus disertation, I did a selection of contemporary queer playrights playwrites playrites dramatists alongside a selection of medieaval mystery cycle plays. Tony Kushner, Sarah Kane, Terrence McNally. So, yeah, loads of queer there, and some disabled actually.

Other than that, I did actually do a fair amount of women accross the board. Marjory Kempe - female and possibly disabled. Katherine Phillips - female and possibly queer. Anne Finch. A whole bunch of women gothic writers.

The biggest disrepancies actually come in the criticism. This is also the only place I can think of where I definitely read writers of colour, though - although only two spring to mind. Said, obviously, and one of the important medieval theology critics is an asian woman whose name is escaping me.

But mostly, it was white men airing their opinions. *grin*

(I was unsure about including queer in my categories, actually, because I'm sure a lot of the criticism I read was by queer white men).

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

Yes, absolutely. Would like to have read more about disability as disability rather than pathology. eg Margery Kempe might well have had some sort of seizure disorder and almost certainly had mental health difficulties by contemporary standards; but this is almost always only pointed out in order to dismiss her.

[thesofaofdeath.livejournal.com]

This may be a silly question, but did you ever cover Amy Levy during your degree?

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

AAAAH your paper 8 sounds amazing, what fun! Am a bit jealous.

I didn't do a lot of women writers - definitely fewer than some people. I did Woolf and Plath for Modern-for-Mods, and Woolf again for paper 7. My paper 8 was on Austen and Sterne. Other than those, I thiiiink the only one was Aphra Behn. To be honest, though, I could have pushed to do more, but I didn't mind a relatively traditional, canonical focus for the period papers - the majority of my non-university reading has always been women, so overall it didn't feel so very unbalanced at an experiential level. (Oh, no, actually I'd forgotten that I did do Udolpho, technically speaking - but not Gothic as a topic, the novel just happened to be set for me as extra work. Gothic as a topic was anathema to me because of the constantly-repeated story that "Girls do terribly badly at Gothic".)

I would have liked to Julian of N., though, that's probably who I most miss having worked on. But, who knows, may be able to one day. :) Doing the Beowulf-poet for paper 7 must have been Quite Incredible, btw.

[highfantastical.livejournal.com]

(We didn't do Said officially, because my tutor thought he was rub., so I just picked up a smattering, as it were. Enough to namecheck, but not a real understanding. I probably learned more about Orientalism from reading blogs. [Er, not saying I actually know a lot about Orientalism, because I...still don't.])

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

I don't think I actually did. *googles it*

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

I wish someone had told me this about the Gothic. I cam accross it reading examiner's notes about six weeks before exams. I wish I'd read examiner's notes right at the beginning of the course :D

Also, I wish I had brained in advance that when my tutor said 'Blake is rubbish' I should have taken this as a clue that I'd love Blake and done him instead of.... almost everything I did do for paper 6.

The only thing I had fun on with paper six was Grey, and that was because I was discovering neopaganism at the time. Sodding romantics. *grin*

I didn't read Julian of N, oddly. Still haven't. Beornwulf Poet for 7 was great. Although I don't remember what I wrote about. Probably wimminz. I remember getting frustrated that I wanted to draw paralels between elements of other legends, and my tutor was all with the 'but there's no evidence they could have been read by the Beornwulf poet!' and I didn't yet have the skills to say 'reader response! influence on interpretation either way!'

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

Thanks!

[anotherusedpage.livejournal.com]

Oh, I have in fact already read Disobedience! I'm just rubbish at remembering author names.

[thesofaofdeath.livejournal.com]

Queer Jewish proto-socialist of the Victorian era. Admittedly her letters and poems are more interesting than her novels.