Back to Academentia: Summer '05, Part the First

The first six-week session of summer is over. I just plain enjoyed French in addition to making progress in it. But I found the noise level of the undergrads a bit disconcerting. They were born in a multifeed, sensory-overload environment and handle any amount of what I’d call distraction without turning a hair, whereas the milieu I grew up in required silence for concentration and one focal point at any given time. They don’t modulate their voices at all no matter what’s going on around them, so that oftentimes we had ten normal-or-louder conversations going on at once in the classroom. My fifty-two-year-old auditory equipment wasn’t up to the challenge of sorting out the professor’s voice in what seemed to me a confusing cacophony.

I feel certain I could pass the reading exam at this point but I still plan to take Reading and Conversation in the fall, and take the exam afterwards; then in the spring perhaps take the Latin reading exam course.

Victorian Studies was fantastic; taught by John Fenstermaker, who in his graduate days was research assistant to Richard Altick, one of the previous generation’s preeminent Victorian scholars and author or editor of a dozen books that still serve as unique core resources in Victorian Studies. And together they wrote The Art of Literary Research. I’m beyond impressed! I wrote papers on Scrooge and the spirit of Carlyle’s Past and Present, the question of Purity in Tess of the D’Urbervilles, and Victorian social issues in Jane Eyre.

But the pressing question: what sank my sidebar?? So far no answers from Blogger.