You know that feeling when you're in class and think "I'm amazingly interested by what this professor is saying" and then you think "I'm amazingly interested by what the other students are saying" and then you walk out and think "I think I'm really going to like this class"? Yeah?
If not, maybe re-think your major, 'cause that's a real bummer.
I don't have anything to report except that I love my Modern American Fiction. I get to re-read "The Things They Carried" along with a host of other books, I love my professor, and my seminar leader is actually both interesting and interested. It feels like the perfect follow up to a Penn class I took, Classic Texts in American Culture, which was through the history department and covered major iconic texts from "Common Sense" to Stephen King's "Carrie". This class instead focuses on post-1945 fiction. Everyone makes fun of me for taking American fiction while in London, but now that I've been to my first class I know it was an amazing choice, because it really is a genuinely different perspective. And to be able to hear about America from a foreign perspective forces me to acknowledge that actually things in the U.S. are not like things in the rest of the world and our history is unique and strange in the same way that we view other countries as unique and strange.
In summary: it was a good day.
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