I realized I’m almost through with September and have not talked about the biggest chunk in my sophomore life thus far—my classes! There’s a reason why I’ve literally had no time to write about this. Life has been an absolute whirlwind. Here’s a snapshot of the residential problems plaguing our suite of four: I discovered black mold in my built-in closet last Friday and after lots of back-and-forth with the building manager and maintenance staff, we got it fixed (repairing the air-conditioning ventilation, painting the wall, sending my clothes to the dry cleaner, setting up a new portable wardrobe in the common room, etc.); last night, we noticed a small patch of black mold growing on our bedroom ceiling; today, an entourage came and arrived at a diagnosis that they needed to tear down part of our ceiling and our walls and eradicate the black mold infestation once and for all. In short, our room is no longer habitable as it is. UPDATE: my roommate, Ani, and I are moving to Adams temporarily until the Housing side fixes everything. It’s both strange and overwhelming, packing again, uprooting and anchoring the physical center of my life to another location after just getting used to DeWolfe.
What a day. But, I’ll be honest: this is a very skewed representation of what sophomore year has been like so far. Sophomore year, living in (or, more accurately speaking, on the periphery of—since we are in DeWolfe’s overflow housing instead of our affiliated Leverett House) an upperclassman house, the initial excitement of Shopping Week, seeing everyone again, reconfiguring the axis of my movements from the radius of the Yard to the Charles River to the restaurants of Harvard Square (an alarming statistic for my waistline: I have eaten at the dining hall for a grand total of fewer than seven times)… All these felt strangely natural, like slipping into another skin that is constituted by the atoms of past memories, unconscious habits, and the visible veins of known bonds.
My classes have also been unexpectedly rewarding and captivating. I love what I’m reading—some days I have to finish more than 300 pages in an afternoon—but I’m actually poring over each and pouring my mind wholeheartedly into every novel, secondary text, and philosophical treatise. I almost wonder why I didn’t do that in my last two semesters. I hope this sense of affection (quite lovingly) and fascination I currently harbor for what I’m learning in my classes won’t diminish as we approach the slew of midterm papers.
PHIL 129 Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason
One of my goals this semester was to take my first Philosophy class in college—I had loved studying epistemology (KI!) in JC and writing a research essay about the construction of historiography in fiction; I found that in retrospect I had unconsciously gravitated towards writing my HUM10 papers on Descartes and Nietzsche instead of, for instance, Austen and Joyce; I always entertained the thought of doing a secondary (read: minor) in Philosophy despite a distinct lack of concrete action on my part.
A friend recommended this class to me in the middle of shopping week but I was extremely hesitant, to say the least. But, in comparison, the other three Philosophy classes I had shopped were either too alienating, uninteresting, or foundational. When I finally shopped this class, forty minutes late and after missing the first session, it just felt right. Kant is, undoubtedly, incredibly dense and erudite = hard to digest. (How does he pack so much meaning into each sentence?!) His writings have also transformed the trajectory of Western thought, from epistemology to metaphysics, ethics to aesthetics, religion to politics. I see him as one of those thinkers that I need to read in order to even make sense of the world. Yet, I’ve not done so on my own initiative. But, I guess that’s what college is for—to really chew over and interrogate those books that we can’t conquer on our own or just wouldn’t have the devoted time and space to do so after we graduate.
We focus on one and only one of his major works of his for the whole semester, the Critique of Pure Reason (1781/87). The text presents an account of metaphysics, epistemology, and philosophy of mind, with Kant setting forth his criticisms of rationalist metaphysics and empiricist skepticism, and defending his views on the nature of the mind and of experience, the metaphysics of transcendental idealism, and the foundations of mathematics and natural science. I’m daunted but so, so excited.
HIST-LIT 90DI Speculative Fictions in Multiethnic America
This is my first History & Literature seminar! I’m not a huge sci-fi reader but the keywords in this class really caught my eye, in particular, techno-orientalism, post-race, and Afrofuturism. ‘Orientalism’ is one of those words that I will geek out about. I’ve researched about it in the foreign policy context, in Nietzsche’s On the Genealogy of Morality, and in relation to the epistemology of postcolonial fiction. But, I know close to nothing about techno-orientalism—for a genre like speculative fiction, how are new critical theories emerging and old ones recontextualized?
Growing up in a country as multicultural as Singapore, I’ve long had a fascination towards local narratives of multiethnic communities—consuming a diet of literature created by those on the periphery of the Western canon allowed me to imagine alternatives to how we live now. Yet, with age, I’ve recognized the pressing need to interrogate the ethics of representation in our global cultural matrix. In the genre of speculative fiction, reading works by writers other than the classic Jules Verne and Isaac Asimov entails an opening of our minds to the many possibilities of different, more hopeful ways of living as conceived from diverse experiences—such stories are a powerful resistance to the hegemonic (now splintering) visions of capitalism, of white domination, of nationalism, of technological ascendancy, etc.
ENGLISH 188GF Global Fictions
The reading list is to die for. How could I resist???
This course serves as an introduction to the global novel in English, as well as a survey of approaches to transnational literature. It considers issues of migration, colonialism, cosmopolitanism and globalization, religion and fundamentalism, environmental concerns, the global and divided city, racial and sexual politics, and international kinship. Authors include Teju Cole, Tsitsi Dangarembga, Liu Cixin, Mohsin Hamid, Jamaica Kincaid, Monique Truong, Michael Ondaatje, Ruth Ozeki, Arundhati Roy, and Ken Saro-Wiwa.
I realized last semester while taking Professor Homi Bhabha’s seminar on the genealogies of global imagination alongside HUM10’s survey of the literary canon that I relished the opportunity to read books that are truly global in nature. Reading about modern cities, diasporas, migrations, identities in flux, histories in contention, the legacies of colonialism, and multiple subjectivities, I hope I can better grapple with the tensions between power structures in existing literary traditions and these textual acts of resistance and imagination, which are reinscribed in contemporary negotiations of identity in a globalized world.
ENGLISH CLR Introduction to Screenwriting: Workshop
I continue my addiction to the English department’s creative writing workshops. This is the third semester in a row that I’m doing one—I really couldn’t help but apply. There’s something special about the small community, the devotion to the craft, and the intimacy of knowing your classmates through their writings and their critiques of yours. After doing two fiction writing workshops under Professors Claire Messud and Neel Mukherjee, I wanted to try something different this semester.
Screenwriting is something I’ve always wanted to do but never did. In last semester especially, I noticed how I like to write with a lens in my head in my short stories—panoptic sweeps, overlaying vignettes, cinematic memory, and realistic dialogue. In fact, filmmakers have inspired my imagination as much as writers have. I admire Hayao Miyazaki for the touch of innocence in the ethical complexity of his narratives, Chen Kaige’s visual flair that almost defies language, Wong Kar-wai’s silent yet emotionally intense approach, the infusion of romance and psychological intimacy in Wes Anderson’s nested framing stories, and Roberto Benigni’s use of comedy amid a collapsing world. Not sure if I’m going to stick with this current vision, but two main directions I hope to explore in my writing for film include: firstly, a magical realism that harkens to the worlds of Studio Ghibli, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and the martial arts epics of Louis Cha; secondly, local stories from across the global Asian diaspora that are driven by authentic voices.
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In some ways, this semester has been both completely like and unlike anything I expected. I am grateful for all these experiences and people, with moments of startling clarity, absorbing books that push the boundaries of my mind, and seemingly unending, candid conversations, full of childlike digressions and guileless interest that trickle on and on.
If you’re interested in hearing more about any of these classes, or what I’m reading, let me know and I’ll write another post!! Also, hopefully, the black mold goes away. Forever.
Lots of love,
