I can’t believe it’s time to start working on essays. I’m not used to these short terms, and Christmas is creeping closer all too soon. The Making Progress essay is much easier because I’m so much more familiar with the period. I’m thinking of working on the image of Roman Charity in fiction of the period and using that to investigate the father-daughter relationships in Victorian literature. There seems to be a thread running through a number of the novels we’ve looked at (and some I’ve read previously) that links devoted daughters with inadequate fathers. I might be able to work at a contrast between this and the earlier Romantic images of the mutually devoted paternal relationship (e.g. Edgeworth’s fiction) to illustrate a breakdown in patriarchal authority (or even, perhaps, in religious devotion, since Little Dorrit’s adoration of and devotion to her father assumes almost a sacred colour). Alternatively I might do something about the web nature or interrelatedness of Victorian society, but I’m leaning towards the former (which might be obvious!)

But the transatlantic class is much more challenging because the seminars seem to only touch on the surface of issues and the course materials seems so diverse and eclectic. I have little background in this study and I’m a little anxious about where to go. I might be safer focusing on one novel, but as it’s a 5000-word essay (about 16-20 pages), I don’t want to limit myself too much. I have a vague idea that I might be able to work on something to do with the Lost Generation of expatriate writers (mainly those in Paris) in the 1920s, and how they came to the European city searching for literary freedom and a cosmopolitan release from the stifling capital materialism of post-war America, in the process developing an American voice. Why did they have to leave America to find that voice? How did they contribute to the emergence of American culture (perhaps I could include the development of jazz in Paris by American musicians) and how did their absence from America allow them to define or at least reflect their nation? The problem with this is that it all seems to be theory and I’m not incredibly well read in expatriate writers. I’ve read a couple of Hemingway novels, Fitzgerald’s Great Gatsby and Tender is the Night, Rhys’s Good Morning, Midnight and Ford’s The Good Soldier, and some secondary literature on Paris, including Shakespeare & Co. and Hemingway’s Paris biography, but I still don’t feel very familiar with the period.

There’s also the option of working on something about the relationship between Americanness and modernism – do they mean the same thing in the twentieth century or are they distinct? Here the problem might be too much breadth of material… Perhaps I could link the two ideas together: the Lost Generation are frequently viewed as one of the defining aspects of modernism. Was this modernism Americanism or a universal movement? Then we move into tricky territory of defining modernism, which is not a route I think I want to go down!

Perhaps I’ll look more into this Americanness issue… perhaps something about the imagery or the vocabulary of Americanness. But for now I’m going to stop rambling, since no one is even going to read this (and if they started, they certainly wouldn't have made it this far)…

Lori made an incredible meal tonight. The whole house smells fantastic. Pork in a balsamic sauce with apple and shallots. We had baked potatoes and I roasted some asparagus. Hey, we may work like students, but we certainly aren’t eating like students (no baked beans in our cupboards!)

I’m going to watch the BBC adaptation of Middlemarch. Even our entertainment is literary...