a few links and my dissertation

Here is an interview I did with Mormon Artist magazine. There are also interviews with Orson Scott Card, Dave Wolverton (aka David Farland), Brandon Mull, and Ally Condie.

Here is a local magazine article about LAWKI month that I thought came out nicely.

Here is my regular column at Intergalactic Medicine Show, this one on Writing a Sympathetic Protagonist (and the importance of getting it done in the first chapter).

And just a few thought on my dissertation, which I have thought about more and more this year. I wanted to write it on Sophie von La Roche and the female Bildungsroman. I ended up being forced to write it on male and female Bildungsroman, comparing Goethe's Wilhelm Meister to Sophie von La Roche. You know it's not going to turn out positive to the woman writer when you compare her to Goethe. One of the people on my committee had told me in a Romantic Literature class a few years before that he didn't have any women on the syllabus because "we only have twelve weeks and they just weren't that important." The one period of literature in which women were the most important, and still they weren't important enough. Sigh! I went to Princeton thinking that the sexism would go down, but it wasn't true. It went up, and they also just refused to admit it.

Anyway, I ended up arguing that female Bildung is tricky because of reproduction, for women in a way that it isn't for men, and that sometimes women confuse themselves for their mothers and have to start over and over again to find Bildung. Also, I argued that women tend to be a little more chary about describing a utopia with no gender difference than men are. Dichotomy/no dichotomy is just another dichotomy, if you see what I mean. Does this make any sense outside of academia? Probably not. Of course, I had to make my obeisance to Goethe periodically because he is the "master" of everything in German literature. I find I am less interested in the work of a technically perfect artist than I am in the work of an artist who had interesting plots. And so I became a fantasy writer, go figure! They passed me, but I'm not sure they are proud of me. One reason to keep putting Princeton on my covers, just to embarrass them, eh?
 •  0 comments  •  flag
Share on Twitter
Published on December 23, 2010 16:46
No comments have been added yet.


Mette Ivie Harrison's Blog

Mette Ivie Harrison
Mette Ivie Harrison isn't a Goodreads Author (yet), but they do have a blog, so here are some recent posts imported from their feed.
Follow Mette Ivie Harrison's blog with rss.