It's true. After 8 years after my last incursion into academia, I've re-entered the fray. An MA in Film Studies at the university up the road. Part-time of course; I don't want to be a poverty-stricken student again (and PJ won't let me off my half of the rent). It's been interestingly challenging so far, and with us halfway through a 12-week whistlestop tour of critical theory: classic Marxism, Althusserian Marxism, realism, mise-en-scene, son et lumiere -- with feminism, Freudian psychoanalysis, auterism and cognitive poetics still to come. History was much easier -- just one damn thing after the other and rarely questioning the nature of reality. And we had proper titles for our essays; today's task was applying one of the critical approaches we've studied to a film of our choice (British/American, 1940-60), and in just 1000 words. A terrifying experience; despite my day-to-day job and occasional bursts of effort on this blog, I do very little actual writing -- and certainly none of the high-falutin' pretentious nonsense that is academic debate ... sorry, discourse. But it's done. It needs to be revised, of course, arguments tightened and structure changed. And then I need to prepare a seminar presentation on genre for Tuesday. And maybe at that point I'll stop dreaming about writing essays and lecturing on how to read the Western.
About five years ago I had the option to acquire an MA from my alma mater -- for just 10 quid. I turned it down -- perhaps misguidedly. We'll see.
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