Under Construction

Obvi­ously, anoth­er long time has passed since the begin­ning of term without any updates or news from me. The reas­ons are man­i­fold: pro­jects, work, admin.

Pro­jects:
I had planned on open­ing the blog to the web (finally), and chan­ging the entire struc­ture to a pub­lic­a­tion-only blog i.e. one in which I only com­ment on my cur­rent research. In part this is owed to the feeble stu­dent feed­back in the last term, in part to some of the func­tion of the blog being taken over by Stud-IP links and ref­er­ences. What has fur­ther pre­ven­ted me, how­ever, are the pro­jects them­selves. Too much hap­pen­ing there at the same time. I am wait­ing for edit­or feed­back from a journ­al and an antho­logy on two papers I have sub­mit­ted. I am also wait­ing for any move­ment in the realm of the GNEL pro­ceed­ings volume of 2009 (!!!) the paper for which I sub­mit­ted in April 2009. Christ. By the time it finally appears on the mar­ket it will be so out­dated, the cob­webs around the papers will con­sti­tute an emer­ging galaxy. I am cur­rently writ­ing a paper on Andrew Motion’s Waine­wright the Pois­on­er and Jane Rogers’ Prom­ised Lands, which is not pro­gress­ing nearly as well or as fast as I would want. And I am in the pro­cess of research­ing a paper for next year’s Gesell­schaft für Aus­trali­en­stud­i­en con­fer­ence in Stut­tgart, on cane toads and their icon­o­graphy in Oz. And my primary text body for the con­vict nov­el pro­ject prop­er has exploded from once 41 to now 73 nov­els, which makes the pro­ject nat­ur­ally even more worth­while but also ever so much more of a challenge. 

In short: I am inund­ated with pro­jects. So much mater­i­al, so little time.

Teach­ing. Two out of three ordin­ary sem­inars have star­ted quite well this term, and are a pleas­ure to work with. Truly, I keep think­ing what a priv­ilege it actu­ally is to be teach­ing, to engage in pro­duct­ive and inspir­a­tion­al dis­cus­sions, to really touch people’s minds and hearts. In this, I am happy. Then there’s one course (not men­tion­ing names…) that drives me to dis­trac­tion. Unpre­pared stu­dents who lack the basic curi­os­ity to even both­er about the top­ics and who expect me to provide Club Med levels of enter­tain­ment instead of con­sid­er­ing uni­ver­sity as an insti­tu­tion first & fore­most ded­ic­ated to their edu­ca­tion. Theirs. Not mine. Addi­tion­ally, this term has brought around the lec­ture in the Basismodul at my door, in front of a pretty strong group of over 60 people (I know, I know, Wiwi and Law Stud­ies will just lol at that; but in Eng­lish Lit, you know… 60 is a crowd). And that, let me tell you, is a dif­fer­ent kettle of fish alto­geth­er. After two hours at the micro, I am drained and exhausted. And just glad to creep off the stage and back into my shell (i.e. office), to pon­der that I have faced about 1/3rd of inter­ested or even fas­cin­ated faces, 1/3rd of per­plexed or intrigued faces, and a final third of incred­ibly bored expres­sions. Or worse, people who browse the web on their phones & laptops, who chat with their friends… in short who could­n’t care less about the His­tory of Eng­lish Drama ses­sion cur­rently presen­ted by yours truly. So much on touch­ing people’s minds: van­ity, thy name is lecturer!

And finally, admin. As you prob­ably know, I have the dubi­ous hon­our of being the insti­tute’s Prü­fungs­beau­ftragte. The exam enrol­ment for the Dip­lo­ma’s & Mas­ter­’s stu­dents has just fin­ished. I am due to deliv­er the res­ults of the first batch of Staat­sexa­mensk­lausuren at the LISA tomor­row. I have strung up names and dates for the oral exams for teach­ers, and come up with a (so far) coher­ent plan that seems to work, and will have to do some­thing sim­il­ar for the oral exams of oth­er courses pretty soon. This, of course, on the side of the usu­al x mails I answer every day, the handouts by stu­dents I check before their present­a­tions, the office hours, the non-office hours appoint­ments… I could go on.

The long and short of it: some­thing had to fall by the way­side, and in this case it has been the blog. Blog­ging (blog­ging ser­i­ously) needs an amount of time and ded­ic­a­tion that I cur­rently do not have, peri­od. I will have to think about what this situ­ation means with regard to my ori­gin­al, some­what high-faloot­ing plans men­tioned above. No idea so far.

So this blog, after hav­ing been launched optim­ist­ic­ally last term, is cur­rently back to being UNDER CONSTRUCTION
I’ll keep you pos­ted. Live long & prosper. 😉