Masters Defense...dun, dun dun! And the Paper I did not write.

So I'm trying to prepare to defend my masters project today.

One thing I may have a hard time with is Paradise Lost. It's a long and complicated text, and I can't keep all the angels and demons/devils straight, especially because I don't think Philip Pullman created exact parallels in His Dark Materials. I don't think Paradise Lost is that relevant to my project persay, but Dr. Smith is a hardcore Milton fan. Also, a lot of our attitudes about the Fall of Adam and Eve come from the widely read Paradise Lost as much as they do from the bible, so actually it is relevant. Since there is no time to read Paradise Lost for a third time in my life, I am sparknoting this morning, but I must say, Sparknotes offers some biased evaluation on the text, though they make attempts to be fair.

I'm also worried that no one will ask me about rhetorical theory in my defense since it's not relevant to the lit and tech writing people on my committee. I'm fairly sure they will ask me what I would do with the project in the future. I think I'll talk about its potential for book length development, but emphasize that while a full book focusing on the rhetoric of His Dark Materials is possible and would be interesting, my focus would be on developing the theory and using more example texts to illustrate the potential of the theory. That way I can draw in more Burke and what I did with Abby's paper last spring.

I'm nervous.

I also still need to write the paper that was due yesterday but that I had the wrong date for. I'm a putz, and grad school is melting my brain, but I think I have mulled through the topic enough to crank out a paper. It's funny how after completing my masters project a 15 page, well-supported paper seems like nothing.

I'm going to talk about the Indian nationalist movement to unify India through mapping the Mother Goddess over the nation of India and how that made India into a specifically Hindi nation, creating oppression for Muslim Indians and others.

Then I'm going to talk about how The Smile of Vanuvati traces the Mother Goddess back through history in the form of the parallels of land and an iconic doll in order to connect the Mother Goddess to a more open history of India, which is more inclusive of Muslims and other historically present groups.

The Smile of Vanuvati is set in the state of Gujarat, which has seen intense violence between Hindi and Muslin groups even in recent years, so the book is a timely response to the tensions there.

Okay, back to defense mode. I need to shower and get dressed.

Working on My Project

I'm putting all homework, etc on hold until I get my project done. I'm not nearly far enough.

I was reading through The Amber Spyglass again to mark the major points I want to talk about, and I got hooked re-reading about the land of the dead. I was thinking about Pullman's argument about death. He describes the land of the dead as a prison camp, where the souls of people are kept cooped up in a space crowded with spirits, and it's dark.

For Pullman, a more beautiful death is the release of the souls to nature and the material world. The souls fall apart and become a part of the larger world, losing their individualistic identity as they return to nature.

In rereading The Amber Spyglass, I was reminded of the Parsee/Zoroastrian death described in Cracking India. Parsees build towers where they place their dead to be fed upon by birds. It sounds kind of gross, but they think their bodies belong to nature after they pass.

I really like that idea. Oddly enough, it might have more appeal to me than even cremation and spreading ashes. Ash is good and all, but bird poop might be better to spread. No one is going to let me get away with that though. Bummer.

TED Talks Help Me with Literary Interpretation

As I've mentioned before, I'm doing my writing project on His Dark Materials by Philip Pullman, looking at the rhetorical moves of the text and how it might impact Christian readers. A lot of my textual analysis is focused around the role of Dust in Pullman's retelling of Paradise Lost / The Fall of Adam and Eve.

I watched the following TED talks video to help me to understand the potential relationship between Dust as original sin in The Golden Compass  and Dust as dark matter or shadow particles in The Subtle Knife.



Yay science videos that explain things clearly!