Jay Jay's Personal Goal Statement

[Jay Jay]

Blake and I are sitting next to each other in the large auditorium in the Classroom Building, listening to Dr. Patrick Murphy lecture in LIT3313: Science Fiction.  We are two of the three graduate graders for the course; our classmate Spencer is stuck on the other side of the classroom.  Dr. Murphy is lecturing on either The Dazzle of the Day or Girl in Landscape, I cannot recall which, and he starts speaking on ecophobia.  Our ears perk up, symbolically speaking.  We’ve been living and breathing Margaret Atwood’s Oryx and Crake and The Year of the Flood all semester long for another course, and Dr. Murphy has given us permission to teach the first half of Oryx and Crake to the undergraduates.  Ecophobia.  It’s perfect.  We begin to write down our ideas and thoughts on a piece of paper, our handwriting criss-crossing the page, alternating, crossing out ideas, making notes or changes to each other’s notes.  It’s sloppy, we misspell words, our writing becomes increasingly illegible as our excitement grows.  At the time, none of that matters to us, because we’re focused on capturing and recording the active act of collaboration before our inspiration flees.  

But it is the start of this independent study, although we did not know it at the time.  Within a few weeks we’re asking Dr. Murphy to oversee an independent study that combines our new fascination with ecocritical and ecofeminist theories with a field of literature, early American literature, which had already grabbed our attention and passion, thanks to Dr. Lisa Logan.  Would it be possible, we think to ourselves and to each other, to apply current ecocritical or ecofeminist theories to an early American text, a text that existed “before” ecocritical study?

This independent study, for me, is an academic experiment.  My goal is to learn the history of ecocritical theory, to identify and locate current trends in ecocritical theory, and apply aspects of ecocritical theory to selected texts.  My only experience with ecocritical theory comes from listening to Dr. Murphy lecture to his undergraduates, so I have much to learn.  I briefly encountered snippets of ecofeminism in Dr. Kathleen Oliver’s course, LIT6936: Theories of Space and Identity, this spring.  We read chapters from A Companion to Feminist Geography and Putting Women in Place that touched upon environmental issues, and the way in which an artificial link between woman, as a construct, and nature has been asserted as “natural.”  To be honest, these small doses of ecofeminist theory only served to whet my appetite for more—the field is fascinating, and I cannot wait to learn more about the theories and those who write them.  What does it mean to be an ecofeminist?  Can we locate ecofeminist authors or characters in early American literature?  If so, what role does race, gender, or class play?  

By the end of the course, I hope to have created a glossary of literary/jargon terms for the site (collaboratively, with Blake).  I want to be able to identity past and current trends in ecocritical theory, and contribute my own voice and ideas to the field.  The purpose of the blog is to share our reactions with the material with others—our peers, our professor, and other scholars who might visit the site.  While the formal assignments such as the paper proposal, abstracts, preliminary bibliography, and two papers will be clear and organized, the weekly reading responses will serve to record our process of exploration.  As such, they might written in a more “stream of consciousness” manner, or they might ask more questions than they answer.  Readers of the blog might see my handwritten notes uploaded to the blog, and you’ll be able to see the back-and-forth interaction between Blake and I on the site itself.  We’re also hoping that other graduate students that we know, and some that we’ve recently met at conferences, will be able to contribute to the blog as well, whether through guest posts or by leaving comments or recommendations.  It is our hope that the site becomes a resource center for other graduate students, faculty, and scholars.

I am looking forward to my academic experiment this summer, and sharing my experience with you all.

-Jay Jay