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FRANKENSTEIN, OR THE MODERN PROMETHEUS by Mary Shelly. Special binding by Dmitry Koutsipetsidis

[cyborgsurrogate]

Weeks 12 and 13

Everything's happening, it seems!

It's been a challenging few weeks for a few reasons (hence why this post is, like, nearly a week late at this point). It does feel like several different difficult things are all kind of culminating at once.

The non-grad school things are: my fiance getting a new job nearly two hours away, which is necessitating both a move and a new job search for myself. While I don't necessarily love my job, it feels strange to be leaving a place I know so well. It's also scary to be applying to new jobs. Also, I had known that a) housing costs have skyrocketed pretty universally and that b) housing in the Austin area in particular was heinously expensive, but I just wasn't anticipating spending as much on housing as we're going to have to -- which is all to say, I'm not sure how we're going to afford to move. I'd also already planned a trip to visit my family (thank you non-refundable tickets!) for about a week before our lease was up, so that will be a fun problem for future me.

Grad school-related struggles for me have been primarily scheduling and organizing myself. With all three of my finals due on basically the same day, and all of them requiring slightly more intensive writing processes, I've been floundering a bit to finish them. I had to make a rotation schedule eventually, because while I initially was planning on just knocking out one of them at a time, I found I was getting stressed out at the idea of not making progress on whichever papers I was not working on. The rotation schedule is... kind of working? But not really.

Perhaps the biggest lesson learned through all of this is that life does not go on pause as we tackle our biggest obstacles. Grad school has not been easy, and while karmic balance might dictate that the rest of my life should be going smoothly as I struggle through the most work-intensive part of my life thus far... that just isn't happening! At this point, I'm just a horse praying to my horse-god that I reach that carrot I've been chasing after at the end of that rope by the end of the year, so that maybe 2024 will be a more recuperative time for me.

[cyborgsurrogate]

Weeks 10 and 11

It feels good to have finished my review of literature. Here's hoping I actually did it right!

That was pretty much all of Week 10: reading, writing, worrying I did it all wrong, asking for second opinions, rereading, rewriting, re-worrying, etc. until I finally just hit the submit button. I get the feeling that's going to be a lot of the next few months as well.

Week 11 was a lot of diagramming. I'm thinking that my thesis may be taking a slightly different slant now and I'm accepting that I need to follow the direction the research guides me toward. So, I'm in the midst of reworking my original ideas for my thesis.

I'm also working toward writing a conference-ready paper about Frankenstein that will serve both as a final for my Brit Lit course and also guide (or perhaps even BE) a chapter of my thesis on Frankenstein as the AI creation of a male scientist struggling with womb envy and the reification of subjection in his own life.

I'm also trying to take care of myself a little more. Work has been difficult lately and this thesis work hasn't exactly been easy. I'm trying to shift myself to a more slow-and-steady route instead of the sort of ALL-IN-then-take-a-break route I've been on so far.

[cyborgsurrogate]

Weeks 7 and 8

I think this is maybe the most relieved I've ever been for the approach of Spring Break. Thankfully, my Spring Break for my teaching job and for my grad school lines up so I will be truly able to rest and relax this week (although one of my profs seems to think it's not Spring Break for some reason? That's a whole other can of worms).

These last two weeks were just a lot of reading. I feel like I'm getting the hang of refining my own eading strategies for the sake of this research (i.e., not wasting a whole week reading a book that I won't even use).

My work with note-taking on Frankenstein, as it turns out, was not even close to complete, because I'm not examining a few other angles. But hey - I at least have a physical copy of the book now instead of a digital one on my dinky old Kindle.

I got an order of about 5 books in this week that I'm going to start working my way through.

Discipline and Punish by Michele Foucault (excited to finally have a physical copy of this one!)

R.U.R. by Karel Capek (another one I've only ever read digitally)

Day Zero by Robert Cargill

Walkaway by Cory Doctora

The Mother Code by Carol Stivers

Ancillary Justice by Ann Leckey

Working my way through each of these one by one! I also put a few others on hold at the public library, so hopefully they'll be in soon.

[cyborgsurrogate]

Weeks 5 and 6

Texas had a big freeze this week (again), so I got some time off from work. I was able to get in some much-needed rest and also a good chunk of reading.

Time has been a really valuable resource for all of this work. And what's becoming frustrating for me these last two weeks is how often I use my time to research something and, after all this time has passed and all this effort has been put into reading, I realize this source or resource doesn't actually work for my research purposes. That was my experience this week. I had two (hopeful) novels that were recommended to me by friends and colleagues as texts that seemed to fit my general thesis goals. However, while both were good reads, generally speaking, only one of them would be useful for my thesis and even then the story really doesn't lend itself to the meat of my work, and would really only be helpful as a supplement. And while, as I said, I enjoyed the books, it's hard not to feel like that's just time wasted. And I can't help but feel that it's going to continue happening.

Reads for the week:

Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro

Machines Like Me by Ian McEwan

Two chapters of A Thousand Plateaus

[cyborgsurrogate]

Weeks 3 and 4

Whoops! It seems I never completed and published my post for last week. And, honestly, this is fine with me because my Week 3 post would have been short regardless. With several after-school events for my day job (teaching) as well as figuring out details for my grandmother's service, all I really managed to accomplish was reading some theoretical texts and taking notes. I'm finally getting back on track this week.

As for this last week, my abstract/prospectus is complete and submitted, as is my (admittedly, late) thesis topic approval. I've got a good start on my review of literature, too, although I'm discovering every day that I have more and more that I want to add.

I'm running into two blank spaces that I'm really determined to fill. First, I think I need a more modern piece of AI fiction to write about. The most recent entry in the literary works I'm examining is the film Ex Machina which is (and this hit me like a load of bricks) about 10 years old. And with so many advances in artificial intelligence in the last few years, I think I need to find a piece of fiction that really uses all of the modern apparatus that already exists and builds on that rather than the (at times, extremely) speculative uses of AI in the other works I'm examining. So, while this is a fun excuse for me to read some new fiction, I also am afraid of the idea of wasting time reading something that I won't use. I'm sure probably most literature scholars do that at some point, but time feels so precious right now.

The other blank space I'm going to work toward filling is really maybe broadening my theoretical scope a bit rather than solely narrowing. While the narrow view will be helpful in the outcome, I think there is a lot more to object-oriented ontology than the onticology Bryant writes about in. The Democracy of Objects and I think I need to brush up on more of that before I can really feel confident expressing these ideas in a way that makes broad sense. The good news for this blank space is that I've already gotten a few ideas for texts to work with here. And besides finishing up my first draft of my Review of Literature, that will be the top of my to-do for this week!

[cyborgsurrogate]

Week 2

The week started out strong but came to two abrupt halts.

First, it seems that my laptop is broken. Thankfully I’ve recovered my files, and I’m doubly thankful that autosave exists, but I’m now restricted to using my fiancé’s iPad or the public library computers for research, which I’m hoping I’ll get used to until I can afford a new laptop. Right now I’m typing this up from my phone.

My grandmother also passed away on Friday. Elisa didn’t speak any English, and when I lived near her, I could barely speak Spanish, but despite the language barrier she never showed anything but love and warmth. She was also one of the hardest workers I know, having worked in the fields well into her 70s, dedicating her evenings and weekends to volunteering for the church, all while being the single mother of nine children. I’m going to miss her dearly.

Previous to all of that, I had a productive week. Only one of my books has arrived of the few that I ordered, but I’m making my way through and finding more usefulness in it than I thought. I also realized that some of Deleuze and Guattari’s work might be of a much larger use to me than I previously imagined, so I’ve been thumbing through A Thousand Plateaus this week. More impactfully, though, I think that I’ve completed and compiled my notes on Frankenstein for everything I’m going to be using from the text. I’ve also polished my abstract up and I feel really satisfied with it. I was in the midst of polishing up my prospectus when my computer went under, but I was near completion so there isn’t much left to be done there.

These last couple of days have been hard, but I’m going to keep up the hard work as much as I can for this upcoming week; I know that Elisa would want me to.

[cyborgsurrogate]

mike mignola

[cyborgsurrogate]

That is very good horror, but what follows is more horrid still: Frankenstein, the scientist, runs away and abandons the newborn monster, who is and remains nameless. Here, I think, is where Mary Shelley’s book is most interesting, most powerful and most feminine: in the motif of revulsion against newborn life, and the drama of guilt, dread, and flight surrounding birth and its consequences (…) Frankenstein seems to be distinctly a woman’s mythmaking on the subject of birth precisely because its emphasis is not upon what preceds birth, not upon birth itself, but what follows upon birth: the trauma of afterbirth

Ellen Moers, Literary Women (via morrovvinds)

[cyborgsurrogate]

Week 1

One week down, though it hardly feels like it's been a week. This week has been a lot of processing. Lots of list-making and note-taking.

I've discovered a series of articles and essays by Donna Haraway on cyborg feminism that I think could be of real use to my thesis and found an interesting mix of amusement and horror in another essay by Marilyn Maness Mehaffy that suggested that fetal sonograms might be the ultimate cyborg. Both made me realize there's a lot of meat in the differentiation of cyborgs and androids and AI in fiction which is an angle I haven't previously focused in on as in-depth as I'm now realizing I can.

I'm making my way through Frankenstein as well, right now, both for Brit Lit and my thesis. Hopefully, despite work being as crazy as it has been (note: I broke up a fight today! Yay, eighth grade!) I'll finish up in the next couple of days. It's been many years since I last read it, so I'm rediscovering all sorts of things I missed out on the first time through.

I have a few more books I ordered when my paycheck came through on Friday! Cross your fingers they'll get here soon. I'm anxious to start working my way through them.