So I did say that I will continue my previous post of my university education, but obviously I never really got to it after more than a week haha. And then I received a surprise promo on Shihui's Twitterfeed!! So here it goes, I took that as impetus to pick up where I left off. 

I really really enjoyed my Literature course tremendously over the past three years. There were some slight dramas with my choice of minor, because I initially wanted to minor in English Studies, which is a combination of English as a language and English as a literature study.And I am so so glad that I decided to do English as a literature study fully! But I am not the best Literature student haha. Yes I read widely, and yes I enjoy reading, but the truth is that I read very slowly too! So there's 6 to 8 thick novels per module, and I barely get through 3 most of the time hahaha. Which is sometimes enough, because the exams tend to need only involve about 2 to 3 books for analysis, because you have essay choices. When I was doing A'Levels, we did about 6 texts in two years! Now we have to do it for ONE module alone, in three months only! I love it when the professor decides to put poetry as set texts, which is awesome as poetry is really my strong point and it is a lot easier to plow through. But I still love the stuff I learnt in my books Literature classes, because it really demanded from you a wide knowledge from as diverse disciplines as required. We had to dabble in psychological analyses, feminist writings, post-colonial writings, postmodernist deconstructions, modernist hallmarks, war, tragedies... Of these all, 19th century novels were the most painful, because that's when Victorian writers like Dickens and gang began exploring novels as holistic forms to encapsulate life, which means they wrote the longest novels ever with the longest plots and so many twists and characters! 

Which is why also, that I signed up for a lot of film studies modules! It is much easier to go to class and watch a movie, than to carry a book around everywhere I go every day of the week (which I still seldom read). Now film analysis is more fun. We try to understand how certain techniques unique to the camera gets rendered and portrayed as a moving image, and hence sound lighting cinematography editing all matters. Different camera angles or different panning modes or colors or editing sequences go under our literary knives. And then the really cool stuff comes in when we study auteurs, stuff like how Tim Burton movies always have macabre themes; and spectator theories with performativity, like how we react when watching a performed movie. 

For most parts I really really love my Literature exposure, and it is a shame that I couldn't take more modules from the department! Since I am only taking a minor, I really only need to take 6 modules, which is not a lot when you come to think of it. I would have been really interested in script writing for theatrical plays, or cultural studies! Yes I am hugely interested in cultural studies, you may recall from previous blog post about my affiliations with cultural geography. Which is what I sit in my Literature class and what I do! I unpick all those analyses and criticisms about the literary text with geographic underpinnings hahaha! All Literature students need huge reserves of knowledge in practically every philosophical topic possible, and  I am so thankful that my geographic discipline actually sufficiently prepared me in deconstructionist thought that I was able to throw in geographic jargon about space and place, as my only way to act smart in front of the class haha! But it is often airy-fairy mumbo-jumbo. Sometimes I can sit in class and everyone is talking English (and not even bombastic vocabulary), but for the life of me I can't understand a single concept. Ditto. About 30% of the time it flies above my head, and that's when I am secretly thankful that I am not a full-fledged Literature student.

For all the new friends I've made though, it was worth every bit of time and effort to stay alive through those Literature classes. I was basically hanging out with a lot of Year 2s (I was Year 3), and they all think that I am in their classes with an unfair advantage and that I am attempting to wreck the curve, but truth be told I am not very smart, and they are fantastic at critical thinking. Although you have to keep in mind the 30% information leak, which means either they are spouting nonsense, or I really am not equipped with the best Literature toolbox. 

More to come! Final installment on Geography next. 

This post is where I try to make sense of what I study in school. If you don't already know, or if you just need a recap, I am a Geography major and also taking a English Literature minor at undergraduate bachelor degree level now. Whenever people ask me what I'm studying, and I reply with that following identity, most often than not a lot of people tend towards a greater understanding of my literature discipline rather than my geography discipline. And I can easily see why, because literature is really quite straightforward. You read and analyze books and authors and stuff like that. But people don't really have that strong an idea when I say geography! They think rocks and volcanoes and earthquakes and tornadoes, or they think I am some explorer on a ship, or they think I know where all the countries are in the world and I know the capital city and the flag of each country. So here's an attempt to try and reason out (for you and for myself too) my interests in literature and in geography!

Literature is a better conversation starter generally, because people are excited to tell me about the books they've read! Yup the myths about all literature students are true, I do read a lot and I read very diversely too. I read anything from guidebooks, fiction novels, non-fiction topics, dramatic plays, poetry, newspapers, periodicals, magazines, online stuff, it's endless. But don't expect me to discuss about the novel plots or details of the stuff that I've read! Although I really enjoy the process of reading, I tend not to remember story plots more than a month after I've finished reading the book. Same goes for movies; I can't remember what happened in the movie after a few weeks of watching it haha. For university classes, we easily cover 6 to 8 thick books in a single literature module, and it is generally organized by themes (tragedy, psychoanalysis, etc.) or by period (17th century, 18th...). And the literature department in my school lumps Theater Studies and Cultural Studies and Film Studies under the same department too! I had a lot of interest in films, so my literature discipline is best described as half Film Studies, and half analyses of books from different periods. I've basically read everything from epic poetry like Paradise Lost, to modernist and postmodernist novels which are definitely more easily to digest haha. And I've watched quite a lot of films too!

Geography is more airy-fairy in a sense, because our sub-topics can very easily be mistaken as Sociology topics! Broadly speaking, I am 90% human geographer and 10% physical geographer. The physical aspects are very apparent; basically anything to do with rocks or climate or natural hazards or water management or earth topography things haha. Human or social geography is more difficult to quantify, we have sub-disciplines in urban planning, population analysis (ageing, health, migration), economics, geopolitics, cultural or social analyses, feminism, tourism, and a lot more! We tend to identify ourselves with a few dominant sub-disciplines! I've dabbled a bit into one of everything, but I am very interested in cultural geographies, topics like cultural hegemony, power and resistance, culture and politics, race, gender, stuff like that haha. I've taken a lot of economic geography modules too, but was never really interested in it heh. What really distinguishes the geographic thought is the idea of spatial and temporal contexts, like yes we talk about ageing, but we look into specifically why ageing in Singapore is different from that in Japan, because of culture differences, differing government policies... To put it as succinctly and as simply as possible!

More about this tomorrow night, I hope! To be continued. 

Yes yes I know I am not the most consistent blogger haha. But school's been really busy, and I do have many things to write about, but most of the time I am more compelled to writing assignments or small essays for school work! Really cannot believe that I am actually in my fourth year of university studying already. I can't imagine where all that time went in the last three years. With that too, this is possibly my final year of studying in an actual school too, considering that I am not thinking of post-grad masters or any other degrees or anything like that. Have no idea where or what will happen in future, but yeah I don't really want to study anything anymore for quite some time, because school is stressful!

It is quite a surreal experience, to put it in overtly-cliched terms. Partly because of awesome course-mates whose friendships I am finally beginning to appreciate. I've always kinda drifted through my past few years in university without really bothering to socialize much with school friends. I mean, like I do know people and I do talk to them and have occasional lunches with some of them. But now that the whole year's cohort of Geog majors are lumped into compulsory core honors modules, I see all of them practically every day in school and we hang out a lot more.

And I have never felt more inadequate too haha, because I constantly think that all of them are so much more sharper and more critical thinkers than I am! Sitting through discussions in class usually shuts me up, because I don't have much substantial stuff to add value to their incisive critiques haha! I always thought I read "widely" enough, but oh my gosh these people know stuff from philosophers and politicians and theologians and what-have-you, and I don't even remember much of what I learnt in previous semesters! But it is a good learning experience, and I really love learning and finding out new stuff and everything.

Add to the fact that I am not doing the honors thesis paper, and I really feel like I'm just taking honors programme for the sake of doing it. Almost 95% of the whole cohort are busy with the thesis papers, but here I am preferring to slog it through endless modular work instead. And I always feel inferior when people ask me what my research is on, but I sheepishly tell them I'm not doing thesis because I really can't think of anything that I want to write and research on. We kinda identify ourselves to our various geographic allegiances here, like you can be an economic geographer or a social geographer interested in feminism or urban cities geographer or cultural geographer or environmental sciences geographer. I try very hard to stick to cultural geographies because that is the sub-discipline where I think I have my strongest grasp on. But more about this in another future blog post!

The last thing that I'm struck with is how almost everyone of my course-mates have some inkling of what they wanna do when they graduate. A sizable portion of them will become teachers. Others are looking at civil service jobs, or NGOs, or wherever. And I really have no idea where my degree in geography is going to lead me. Maybe I should just go be a global explorer or something! But yeah I don't have a clue what I am going to do after I graduate, and right now I have a eerie thought that I will probably never step into a geographically-related field ever again.

We will see how this goes. And yes I promise to write in this blog diligently! I do have stuff to write about haha.