After reading Kindred, I came up with my perfect program: Proust + Faulkner (+ Butler). It would have to be at least 2 quarters long, and have less of an overarching project element than this program, so we could really get involved with such a huge amount of text. I’d want it to be all of In Search of Lost Time, or at least selections throughout like we did here, and at least a few volumes of Faulkner, with whom I’m not familiar enough to guess what would make a good program (I read Go Down, Moses in high school, and that’s it, but I know that they pretty much all overlap and intertwine). It would be great to do it with faculty with expertise in French and American history and literature, a lot like this program. I’m kind of sad now that I’ve already read the Proust so it won’t be fresh to take this imaginary program! It would be so great: memory, history, time; the events of the mid 19th through early-mid 20th centuries and how there were world events but also totally different national and regional preoccupations (which is much less true in our highly globalized modern world); the difference between telling a long story with one narrator and telling it in a fragmented, multi-perspective, multi-generational way…it would be so cool.

This is the type of thought process that makes me feel sure I have to go to grad school and be ‘an academic’ forever because this is one of the few things I get really excited about (others include contemporary folk-rock music, television, and food, none of which are really futures for a non-musician, non-filmmaker who would much rather eat than cook). I know some academics view teaching as a drudgery to be endured in order to research and write but teaching excites me too! Like as much as I want to take this program I imagined, I would also love to teach it, even though I know how frustrating undergraduates can be, because I am already frustrated by my peers a non-zero amount of the time. But sometimes they’re also impressive, exciting, invigorating, surprising, and inspiring, so I don’t think teaching could be all bad; probably far from it.  Most of the time I dread the future, because that’s just how my brain is wired (thanks, anxiety disorder), but sometimes, like now, I get hopeful and excited and super, super nerdy. Yay books! Yay the future!