Manic Vampire Baby

So Jamis has confirmed our worse fears. He is really undead. How would you like to wake up to this every morning? Yeah, I didn't think so. Although, our increased garlic consumption doesn't seem to phase him. We hope this vampire thing is just a phase that will pass along with his tendency to bite - necks that is.

The Wait is Over...a new one begins

Finally our wait is over. Firstly, I have finally graduated from my Master's program. I was able graduate with a 4.0. If nothing else, I am pleased with myself. There was a good group that came to my graduation to support me. My parents and my little sister Lindsay flew from Idaho to be with us that day. My in-laws were there as well as Morgan's grandparents and aunt and uncle came as well. Thanks to everyone who came and supported us on that day. We had a hooding ceremony where everyone receiving the master's degree was able to spend a moment pick someone to bestow the master's hood on the graduate and then explain who the individual is and why he or she was picked to bestow the hood on the graduate. I picked Morgan to place the hood on me. She's the best.
In other news - In the fall, we will be starting another step in our schooling. I was accepted into a Ph.D. program and will be starting that in the fall. I will start the Ph.D. program at Idaho State in English and the Teaching of English. It is a program that specializes in producing teacher scholars rather than researcher scholars. I look forward to it.
We have also been offered a one-year appointment to teach English full time at BYU-Idaho. I will be teaching composition courses with maybe an option later to teach a literature course. It will be a full teaching load, but I know that I will have a lot of fun.
So, in theory I will work full-time and start my Ph.D. program part time. It will be a crazy but fun time. The immediate plans are to move back to Idaho in June and get ourselves braced for the start of the next school year.

Waiting

Waiting, waiting, waiting. I hate waiting. I have passed my comps (yeah!) and I am mostly done with my classes now. It looks like I will pass the classes and graduate just fine. Now we are just waiting to hear back from schools and Ph.D. programs. Hopefully we will hear back within a few weeks. In the meantime, we are waiting to head back to Fargo in two weeks for a conference I will be presenting at. I will be showing how the genre of Kunstlerroman with its inherent conflicts can be transposed onto Sartrean psychoanalysis. I will be illustrating this point with Ishiguro's An Artist of the Floating World. Should be great laughs for all involved.

We are also waiting for Spring. I am on "spring vacation" right now, but the temperatures are still in the 30s at best, there is still snow on the ground, and the sun has not been visible all week. This is a joke. Call me old fashioned, but when I have spring break, I want it to be in the spring. Anyway, we will let everyone know our future as we learn about it.

Christmas '09

We had a great time in Idaho this year. Here are some pics from our trip.

Reading List for the Comps

I received my reading list for the comprehensive exams that will take place in February. I am very pleased with the reading list. I either presented/suggested to others to present/ or brought up 8 out of the 17 works during the course of our tutorial without knowing beforehand that the works would be on the exam. Pleased? Relieved? Smug? Yes, all of the above. Out of the entire list, there are only 2 works that I have not had a decent amount of exposure to already: The Woman Warrior by Hong-Kingston and Midnight's Children by Rushdie. I think that I can possibly do this thing. Possibly. I'm just excited that Hawthorne and M Shelley are both represented.

Grad studies

Many people have started to ask me about my intended course of study and where I am applying to. First the easy question. So far, I have applications being sent to Idaho State University, University of Utah, Washington State University - Pullman, and University of Minnesota - Twin Cities. I am looking for some other University in the mid-west to apply to as well. I have found through research that the regions of the country that are consistently hire the most professors are the Northwest, Midwest, and Mid-Atlantic. So I am focusing my search for schools to those regions. Ultimately, I want to end up at a junior college or a small university where the focus will be on the students rather than on research and bringing prestige to the university down that route. Because of this, I want a program that will have some emphasis on pedagogy - for this reason, ISU would be my top choice (not to mention it has a 94% placement history for tenure track jobs among its graduates). However, WSU has a great program that is much more established than ISU. UofU program is pretty good, and it has a great philosophy program that I can tap into (more on that later). UM-TC is just an all around great school. I would like one more in the Mid-west just to get a round 5 options. So what do I want to focus on?
Well, as I said before, I want pedagogy to be some part of it, but I am too in love with abstract ideas to focus completely on something useful as pedagogy. On face value, I want to specialize in Romanticism. In particular, I want to focus on how Romanticism acted as a transition between German Idealism to Existentialism. I think that it is interesting how a movement that was strictly philosophical could be incorporated with a movement that is mostly literary, and then (I feel) morph into a movement that splits pretty evenly into literary and philosophical writing. If I can pull this off, I could possibly find a job for a position in 18th, 19th, or early 20th century lit (although I wont hold my breath). In particular, I want to focus on some of the dark romantics (Hawthorne, Shelley, Byron, etc) and the parallels that they share with the first Existentialist - Kierkegaard (a contemporary of many of them). I am in the process now of writing a paper comparing Hawthorne's The Marble Faun with Albert Camus' The Fall. I am looking at how the two men use the symbol of the Christian doctrine of the Fall of Adam to shed light as to the meaning of life. Since both men have radically different backgrounds with Christianity it is interesting how they are both drawn to Christian doctrine to explore the human condition. It is also interesting all of the similarities they draw from the symbolism and where they depart.
Anyway. Since this is what I want to do, I need a program that will allow me access to a good philosophy department. I just hope that I am able to get in to a good program.

GRE & Grad School Future

I think that Morgan and i are looking more and more at going on straight from Winona and getting into a Ph.D. program somewhere. I was going to apply to the University of Illinois, but due to the widespread corruption in the system that has been recently exposed in that university system (but it's Illinois - I shouldn't be too surprised), we are shifting our search elsewhere. I have recently taken the GRE (both general and subject) and am pleased to announce that overal, my scores are good enough to get me in almost anywhere. Granted, my math was low (52nd percentile), but all of my programs look to make sure that the cumulative GRE score is over 1100 (I cleared that easily), and their main focus is on the analytic and verbal sections. I received a 5.5 out of 6 for the analytic putting me in the 88th percentile, and I received a score on the verbal section that put me in the 94th percentile. I do have to say it was a good feeling to see that I am in the top 6% of individuals who have taken the test at least in the verbal section. So, I am now garnering some good letters of recommendation in the hope that I will be accepted into a program by next fall. If not, it's off to find a teaching job for a year in order to try again. Anyone know of some good schools?