Incoherent Scribblings

Whew! (Or is it phew?) Actually, it doesn’t matter. The only thing that matters tonight is that I have officially turned in my term paper!

Although I still have a slight case of the “would’a-should’a-could’as (I should’a worked harder on that transition paragraph and I could’a, if only I would’a had another day!), for the most part I am just happy to have turned the darn thing in. (Big thanks go out to Mr G who graciously helped me edit and revise it last night over a drink… or two).

I am sure everyone is just dying to know what my paper was about, so I will give you the title: “Ideology and The Jungle: A Marxist Reading.” (Note the colon in the title of the paper. As any good grad student will tell you, a colon in the title is a true mark of a serious research paper.) As you can probably guess from the paper’s title, I took one of the works we read this semester (The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair) and applied Marxist literary theory to it.

Before I did this paper I didn’t know a whole lot about Marxist criticism. I remembered the basics of the theory from my undergrad criticism class and that it was something that piqued my interest, but that was about it. So, as you can imagine, I spent a great deal of time learning about Marxist criticism before I even began thinking about how to apply it to The Jungle.

I would go into more detail if (1) I didn’t think it would bore what is left of my audience to death and (2) if I was still able to put together a coherent thought about it right now. However, since I am completely unable to do that I will just end this by saying that it was definitely a learning experience and I enjoyed it… but damn am I thankful it’s over!

(Wow! This post is sure living up to my blog’s name tonight. Sorry… I am just a little brain. dead.)