February 24, 2008
Charles Dickens
…is really awesome. And really hilarious but also almost painfully poignant at times. I’m reading Great Expectations for my Victorian novel class and I can’t believe I’ve never read anything by him before. Plus I am really struck by the similarities between Dickens’s writing and John Irving (whose books I love passionately). The parallels are crazy. Also, for some reason the spacing is not working correctly in this post, so it is going to end up looking like one long rambling block of text. So be it. New paragraph!I really do intend to write more in this, but I am totally swamped with work right now. On a personal note, though, I think I’m leaning towards solely majoring in English instead of English and International Studies. This is part of a larger internal battle over what I want to do graduate work in. I am dying to get my PhD in English literature, but I am having serious doubts over whether or not I want to be stuck in academia for the rest of my life (assuming, of course, that I could get a job in academia, which is sort of a big assumption). There’s no good way to do both English and IR work, and if I’m to be totally honest, my desire to do an English PhD is purely selfish. I just really want to spend 6-7 years of my life studying literature. And I can’t reconcile that with my intense believe that I have a responsibility to go into humanitarian aid in some form or another. I just feel compelled to do it (something I feel alternately ambivalent and excited about, depending on the day), and I know I’d only feel guilty if I abandoned it for some other career path. Who knows.
