Weird Semester Theme?
Okay, so I thought it was a bit funny/cool when right after we read My Father's Mask in class, my Italian professor went off on a whole lecture about masks (maschera in Italian, just in case anyone was wondering) in the play Enrico IV. Zach should know what I'm talking about.
Now, I'm starting to think this is some sort of weird theme for my semester, because we got into the same topic in my Dante class the day after we did the paper presentations and I started reading that article Andy had on masks. Granted, the Dante class is also taught by the same Italian professor, but...
Anyway, to my point: Anyone else have weird crossover themes with their classes? As this is about the third time this has happened to me, I'm starting to wonder if my professors don't get together and conspire at the beginning of the year. :P
Now, I'm starting to think this is some sort of weird theme for my semester, because we got into the same topic in my Dante class the day after we did the paper presentations and I started reading that article Andy had on masks. Granted, the Dante class is also taught by the same Italian professor, but...
Anyway, to my point: Anyone else have weird crossover themes with their classes? As this is about the third time this has happened to me, I'm starting to wonder if my professors don't get together and conspire at the beginning of the year. :P
posted by Tara at 4:54 PM
7 Comments:
i have synestesia mentioned in all 4 of my classes. 2 creative writings, 1 adv brit lit, and this class. go figure. actually, i find that every semester has some kind of common topic, no matter what the difference in class is.
I was thinking about that too that day in Italian.
Last spring semester, my english 103 (philanthropy themed) and sociology class kept overlapping. Sometimes I couldn't remember which class I had heard a particular thing in.
we talked about fairies in my history class (survey of Irish history) and in my English class. So, I guess that is kind of crossover. However, we didn't talk about it in depth in any of my classes.
I wish I could have. This semester, my other classes were only Math and CS courses. I had no other chance to even correlate, unless one of my math teachers went insane and started talking about how masks wormed their way into discrete math. Oh well.
Such overlaps are the ideal of the classical liberal-arts education, and they occur not because the teachers intend them (you have my word on that) but because you are thinking about the material and applying it to other stuff you encounter -- again, an ideal situation. I congratulate you all. And Keith has my sympathies, though he would find more math-and-computer-science overlap in my science fiction classes, especially the fiction of Ted Chiang and Cory Doctorow.
If y'all can recommend to me any sources on synesthesia, masks and fairies that were invoked in your other classes, I'd appreciate it.
I posted some links (that I hope worked!) about synesthesia earlier, but you can't go wrong with anything Richard Cytowic. Here are some other resources I've found on synesthesia when I was writing that paper last semester:
Dann, Kevin T. Bright Colors Falsely Seen. Yale University Press: New Haven, 1998.
Harrison, John. Synesthesia: The Strangest Thing. Oxford University Press: Oxford, 2001.
Hubbard, Edward M. & Vilayanur S. Ramachandran. “Hearing Colors, Tasting Shapes.” Scientific American Mind. Vol. 16, Issue 3. 2005.
A standardized test battery for the study of Synesthesia. UT Center for Synesthesia Internal Report. Oct, 2005. [www.synesthete.org]
*This one's actually a "test" for synesthesia, but if you want to play with it, be careful; it takes a lot longer than they tell you it will.
If anyone really wants to understand it, though, I would suggest visiting some of the web forums on the subject. One of the main difficulties with getting a good picture of synesthesia is that synesthetes find it difficult to actually describe, so you get a lot of "Well it's kind of like this, but not" type descriptions. Scientists usually end up trying to describe it as analagous to an actual physical perception, though, which just isn't it.
And in case anyone didn't notice, this is kind of my pet obsession for the year.
did you all have godderichi (i butchered that name), because I had an italian film class with him and he was all about masks twenty four seven. Also, I had Brave New World mentioned by professors in my Shakespeare and Dostoevsky classes, and I'm pretty sure we mentioned it in here too
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