how are you? it’s been so long, you’re so old already!
eh, congrats, i heard you did really well for your ib! you’re in uni now, right? what are you studying?
english lit?
well, as long as it makes you happy.
Literature majors have a hard time justifying their choice of study to everyone else. We all know what literature is – books, reading, that thing we used to do as kids but don’t have time for anymore. So why are we making time for it now? Why do we devote four years to a body of scholarship that no one sees, that by all accounts is entirely irrelevant to how the rest of the world experiences fiction? Why don’t we use that time to get a more lucrative degree, or at least, to write stuff that people will actually care about?
It’s tough to wrap your head around all these things, and honestly, I don’t blame anyone who can’t. And to be even more honest, I haven’t either. I ask myself these questions too.
Hi, I’m Grace. I’m a final-year English Literature and Communications & New Media major, and yes, people always ask me why I’m killing myself with two majors and USP when my majors have nothing to do with each other. They also ask me why I’m not in law school, because apparently I sound like a law student, and why I’m not studying literature overseas, because that’s apparently where you’re supposed to do it. My short answers are that I think it’s interesting, I got rejected, and I don’t have money. My real answers are much longer, and you’re about to read them right now.
I’ve made a lot of questionable choices over the course of my undergraduate education, but each one was made for a reason – which is something that I’ve only just begun to appreciate in my final year. It’s not because I don’t know what I’m doing. It’s because all the options given to me – all the default, convenient, institutionally-codified options – don’t align with what I want out of university, and what I want university to be. I like to joke about how I’ve “hacked the system” to get what I need, whether it’s a cross-supervised thesis about video games, a year-long exchange programme, or far more creative writing classes than a typical NUS literature major can afford to take, though there’s been more whimsy and coincidence involved than the joke implies. The result, as I’m finding out through compiling this ePortfolio, is a surprisingly coherent academic/artistic trajectory leading up to a prospective (probable) career in writing for local television.
So yeah, I guess I am trying to make myself happy, but happiness doesn’t mean self-indulgence. I’m only happy when I know that what I’m doing means something to the world, and I’ve only become more and more convinced that the university does not do that – that certain things about how academia has organised and constructed itself can sometimes be obstacles to producing (what I see as) useful knowledge. Hence you’ll find that this ePortfolio negotiates the institution and my own journey through it in tandem, aligning my personal struggles with larger academic issues. In my first post, I consider how my choice of majors reflects a bureaucratic divide that I feel doesn’t need to be there. Then I recall my angst about studying overseas in my second post and how it belies the western-centrism that suffuses education and the way we think about it. After that, my third post juxtaposes my past dilemmas about law school with the struggle between neutrality and advocacy that all investigative writing inevitably encounters. These posts are connected by my main research interest of how the internet is becoming literature, which I hope you’ll find interesting, but it really all leads to one overarching concern in my fourth and final post: How can we produce relevant, intimate, and innovative writing in academia, and how can I work towards the same things in local media when I start working? It’s really two questions entwined together, and thus you’ll see a gradual shift in perspective as you read through my posts from questioning what it means to be a researcher to what it means to be a writer regardless of context, positioning myself in this new, digital world even though I’m writing for so-called ‘traditional’ media. You’ll find a link to the next post at the end of the previous, if you feel like following it, or you can access them all from the top-left menu.
This is an ePortfolio about doing everything wrong. Yet, this is also a portfolio of trying to do right by myself, and how I see the world. I hope you’ll enjoy reading it as much as I enjoyed living it.
( start here if you feel like it. jump around if you want – i’m not stopping you! )