Mid-Semester Progress Report

Hey all,

As with everyone else in the group, this semester has been so busy for me that I have hardly had the time to reflect on anything I've done thus far. I've simply been living day-to-day and sleeping on the weekends only. I wasn't anticipating being nearly as stressed out or busy as I have been, so I quit my summer job (that I wanted to keep) within a couple of weeks of starting the semester. To sum up, senior year is hard.

I'm currently doing my Capstone in Communication Studies and it is easily the hardest paper I've ever written. As I told you all previously, I'm doing my paper on the HBO television show True Blood. I've written the literature review and have the rest of the paper sans the conclusion due next week. To clarify my topic, I'm attempting to comment on notions of citizenship as they are brought up in the show. Specifically, I'm using the Great Revelation on the show - vampires revealing their existence to the world due to the invention of synthetic blood by Japanese scientists - as an event in the Badiou sense, meaning that it was an "event" that restructured the way that we look at reality, thus laying bare the social constructs that existed all along, but were simply hiding underneath the surface. I'm not so certain as to how successful I am in achieving my goals, but I am trying harder than I ever have to say something that is valuable to the academic community as a whole. I hope that when I present the fruits of my labor at the beginning of December, people will see my research as contributing to a larger community of media scholars. I'm currently in freak-out mode, death con level 7. But, besides wanting to throw all of my materials from the class into a deep crevasse, it's going pretty well. But, I really don't like talking about Capstone, at all. So, let's move on to something more pleasant.

I have really enjoyed the conversations we've been having in class this semester. I think the complete, smaller group is nice and allows me to get to know more about each person than I would if the class was still as large as when we began Paideia. I thought the conversation we had involving Laurel's reading was interesting, because I didn't initially take the same concepts from the reading as others seemed to. We spoke about the chauvinist assumptions in German modern art (during the same time period) that dictated that women could not make the same art as men, even questioning the ability of them to be artistic. Thus, German art from the modernist period is still evolving as a movement as we move further and further away from those chauvinist assumptions. I also like how our conversations embrace the tangents that arise during discussion, as opposed to always trying to get back on track. I think this more closely mirrors everyday conversation that one might have in a similar, non-school setting. In this, I see Paideia as being incredibly valuable because it does something that no other class at this school does. It allows genuine conversation to develop and then the participants get to decide in which direction to take the class.

In all, I can't wait for this semester to be over.

Brady