Today I had my very first graduate course. Here I am, Lauren Rosales the graduate student:



Of course, being the first day of class, not much actually occurred. And since I only had the one class today, from 10:55 until 12:10, the day itself has not been much different than other days. But it is, symbolically, significant nonetheless.

The course I went to today was Modernist Arts in Britain. Here is a brief snippet from the course syllabus:

"We will pay particular attention to the arts of modernism in early twentieth-century Britain, focusing on three interrelated and overlapping areas: 1) The near obsession with houses, rooms, their interiors, and the narrative representation of interiority in modernist fiction; 2) Modernist magazines and the manifestos through which various arts groups (the Vorticists, Omega, Bloomsbury) and individuals (Wyndham Lewis, Roger Fry, Virginia Woolf) promoted their versions of the “new”; 3) Modernism and public/popular culture, including the 1924 Empire Exhibition at Wembley, exhibition posters, the London Underground, advertisements, and documentary films."

I am excited to consider Virginia Woolf through her use of public spaces in London, and to see how her own writings on the city might be able to inform such an angled reading of the novels. I bought a book this summer called The London Scene which has I think six essays that she wrote on the city; obviously, my own love for London is very compatible with the angle that this class is taking. Oh, sweet London. I miss thee.

After class, I joined a couple of my classmates for sushi in the mall up the hill from the main library. We discussed the difference in size of our previous schools, and to explain how small Hendrix was I mentioned the tradition of the senior superlatives. Both my companions denounced it as "awful" and rather catty, to which I of course agreed. Tradition or not--the more I think of it, the more I see Hendrix's student body as a mean-spirited bunch. I know I myself am rather harsh and judgmental, as well as prone to bitterness, but that doesn't change anything. Perhaps I fit in more than I thought.

In any case, I have officially begun graduate school as of today!