Age of Iron

Age of Iron

I'm currently taking a module called EN3249: The Body: Politics, Poetics, Perception. Maybe it's just me, but it promises to be one of the most interesting modules I've taken thus far. It discusses the issue of corporeality: the bodily experience of a reader reading a text, the corporeality of the narrative and the metanarrative,

It's a level 3000 module, so I was initially hesitant to take it, as I'm one of the very few non-Arts students taking it to fulfill a Minor in English Studies and from the first few lectures, I noticed it was a small class of 35, mostly Arts majors (I'm a Statistics major) and the topic of discussion (it was Roland Barthes's Camera Lucida then on the issue of corporeality of signifiers whose images were captured in photographs) seemed rather philosophical and 'hardcore' literature, so to speak. Add to that the fact that should I take the module, it would be my sixth module for this semester, which is insane, really, but I must carry on anyway.

After an email exchange with my (pretty) lecturer and discussions with Karen, Arthur, Joanne, I decided to keep the module in the end (and drop, with a slightly heavy heart, this other level 3000 module on 19th Century Literature and Culture). I don't quite regret my decision, and I'm enjoying the intellectual tickle of this module. A cause of slight alarm, though: I went to the first tutorial last Friday, and we had a grand total of 10 students in the class (my smallest tutorial ever, and yet in another group Dr Yeo said she had only 6), and after a round of introductions, I learned that all the rest of them, are either Year 3 or Year 2 Literature majors! Haha oh my dear Lord what am I getting into? Haha.

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The second book we're discussing for The Body is this J.M.Coetzee novel, Age of Iron. Coetzee is South African, and a Nobel Prize winner for Literature, and his novels, according to Dr Yeo, are depressing.


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