I’m working on my graduating paper now. Discouraged, under-stress, time limited, I have simplified it from its own original questions. As long as i can submit it this month and get the exam next month I have nothing to complain. I’ll finish the real project later on.
I need to graduate in November since being an undergrad too long is no good (That’s what Dad and Mom says, almost an imperative). A scholarship application is waiting in February and I still need time to make a theses proposal. Hopefully the time left between November and February will be enough to make a decent proposal on—I’m not sure, can it off.
To share my grad paper’s discussion a little—so don’t go anywhere yet. You may help me with this—it is actually an analysis on factors that render a movement in a cultural escalator. Cultural escalator, we know, is a term coined by Stuart Hall to address the phenomenon of different reception of works (cultural product like art) in different eras. For instance, Shakespearean drama in the 16th century was a popular work while now it is an esoteric canon. So was Charles Dickens’ works written in 19th century which in the present have the same fate. This is the moving up in a cultural escalator. The moving down is Pavarotti’s on Puccini’s Nessun Dorma and Mondrian’s motives on Converse shoes i think.
But I’m not analysing all them. I got Art Spiegelman’s Maus on my table instead. Maus managed to win the Pulitzer Prize for Special Citation-Letter in 1992. A year previously it entered the Museum of Modern Art with “Project: Art Spiegelman” an exhibition of drawings in the book. Maus phenomenon is quite revolutionary since the fact that it is formally a work with popular charcteristic (read: kitsch) but nevertheless could be accepted in the circle of canonical masterpiece.
When today you find that The New York Review of Books has special reviews on the so called graphic novels, or now you read Marjan Satrapi’s Persepolis with some sense of literary awareness (maybe Joe Sacco’s Palestine as well) and getting more familiar or bothered with the ever-increasing population of non-children comics in the nearest Gramedia bookstore, it all owe Maus success to some degree or another.
But for the time being, since I’m severely discouraged, let me just chill out a little with that Smooth Escape and a few bottles of beer.
