Reading and Righting

Last week was our University Reading Week, so I spent most of my time writing...

Laptops, Notebooks and Flowers

We had a couple of essays to complete this week, and I actually quite enjoyed them! For one of my courses we were required to engage with a work of Performance Art, that we hadn't actually seen live, from before 2008, as a way of investigating how we discover Performance Art after the event has taken place; what survives? What is supposed to survive? The tricky element of this was the requirement to also make a strong argument for the work, and investigate how the piece developed this. And we only had 1,000 words! I have enough trouble sticking within a word count at the best of times! Fortunately (maybe!) I found a piece that really inspired me and I found it completely absorbing.

For our second essay I found even the prompt quite difficult; a piece of performative writing in response to one of the problems we have encountered so far during the semester... I couldn't even work out what that was; one of the descriptions I found online was "writing that does something, rather than just says something"... Hmmm... However, once I (possibly) cracked it, I actually found it really inspiring to work on.

Reading Week living up to its name

Alongside all of that I did find time to catch up on some reading, and I've even managed to make a start on Dissertation planning! I'm super-excited that I found a line in one of the books that ties together all of the random things I wanted to look at, and, not only brings them together in a way that I can hopefully argue coherently, but may actually provide the basis for my entire argument!

I had a one-to-one with my personal tutor, regarding my essays from last semester, and she told me that I needed to make my arguments stronger. The problem is that I'm not a particularly argumentative person - I don't like conflict! 

Using travel-time to read - with life-saving coffee to hand

This week we're back into the term, however our lecturers are on strike. I wrote about this a couple of weeks ago and my position hasn't changed. We're in constant communication as a group, and ploughing on with the set work - it's tricky, especially with the snow, but as you can see, we have plenty to keep us occupied!