Hot air

I must admit, never have I been so terrified of going into a class as I am now with my Ph.D. course. Yesterday my professor asked each one of us our problematique for our dissertation and it felt like all the joy was sucked out of me because truth is, I don't have any problem, so to speak, to work on. While I do genuinely enjoy discussing the many critics and writers we read, I forgot that the professor operates on the assumption that everyone of us there is working on a dissertation. I do remember telling her that even as a graduate student I can handle the pressure of a Ph.D. class, and that I can work on that level without any special treatment. But that was when I foolishly blinded myself with the thought that Ph.D. classes will simply be about further (not necessarily deeper) discussions of different writers and critics and their works, which as it happens it also is. But the prospect excited me too much that I forgot postgraduate students are also supposed to be working on their dissertation.

Now I am in the same boat as the doctoral students are in. The difference is, they have a master's degree under their belt while I don't. But when I come to think of it, what really brought me to enroll in Comparative Lit are all the literary theories and the critics. I don't actually read much "literature" but rather more of the reactions to it. Talk about ambition. And taking the easy way in.

Now I find out that what I have to do really, if I plan to be literary scholar, is to find a writer or a bunch of similar ones, and devote my life to him or them. I'm thinking of becoming the preeminent Filipino Barthes or Habermas scholar, just to dodge accusations that I am merely mimicking Steve Carell's character in Little Miss Sunshine (who was a Proustian scholar) for lack of any real interest on any one writer. Barthes and Habermas because, well, they're quite celebrity intellectuals, and more people - I think - will know who I am working on compared to, say, Baudrillard and Sontag.

And if my analytical abilities can't cope up with my ambition, maybe I can just have T.F. Sering.