Category: Scraps

A useful miscellany of short and sweet posts.

Scrap: Connecting the Dots

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Because this is my last semester at USC Upstate, I’m taking Senior Seminar: essentially, a 15-week-long writing workshop for a capstone paper. Knowing that I was going to take this course, I brainstormed all year for topic ideas. Writing 25 pages is easy for me, but a good, meaty thesis can be difficult to come by. By the beginning of this semester, I had two ideas: use the Order of the Real to explain body horror, or talk about the dearth of positive menstruation portrayals in literature and its impact on women and girls. Continue reading →

SCRAP: Literature Study Tips

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“It’s not what you read: it’s what you can get away with not reading. They don’t expect you to read every single word. They’re purposefully overloading you so you can develop the skill of selective reading and figuring out what you need to know.”

Tim Lemire, I’m an English Major—Now What?

SCRAP: Fall Semester 2014 Reading List

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I say to myself every semester, This is it. This is the one. This is the semester where I read everything. Then life happens, I read about 60% of what’s required, and I pass with flying colors. So this semester, I’m telling myself something different: I’m going to read everything I need to read. If I find that I don’t need to read something I’ve begun, I’ll quit it, and move on to bigger and better things.

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Scrap: Writing about Horror

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I got some new material this week for a scholarly article I’ve been mulling over for quite some time. The essay, titled—in my head—“The Real: a Psychoanalytic Approach to Body Horror,” would combine Slavoj Žižek’s interpretation of Jacques Lacan’s Order of the Real with squirmy, David Lynch-style scenes from literature and film in order to discuss how and why this horror subgenre affects us. Continue reading →