Class Notes 4/9 - & thoughts on my Final Paper Topic

Today in class we sat around in a circle to reveal and discuss people's individual paper topics. Some people are further along than others, which is okay because sometimes inspiration strikes us early, or at the last second, or in between.
--------
My inspiration struck this morning at about 8:40 am when I was scrambling to find a paper topic that I adored before class. Because if I don't love it, I won't write it. I grabbed three texts looking for a push towards a format for my Final Paper, because I knew that I wanted to write about: literature as an epiphany.....I just didn't know how to get there.

So as I was desperately going through my four book shelves that hold ungodly amounts of books I found Italo Calvino's The Uses of Literature, Lapham's Quarterly "Arts & Letters", and finally as an off hand thought, Alberto Manguel's A Reading Diary. I know what the book is about, but I've never read it, but reading the blurbs on the front and back, I knew this book would be a brilliant model.

"the membrane between life and literature is exquisitely permeable....A Reading Diary records glorious seepage between the two and, in the process, illuminates both." - Anne Fadiman

"an elegant and timely little book on the subjuect of the minor miracle that takes place everytime we open a book and a world that takes shape in our hands." - Star Tribune

"It's difficult to come away without wanting to start on your own lists and journals and literary bric-a-brac." - San Antonio Express-News

Here is a brief idea of what the book is about:
"In A Reading Diary, Alberto Manguel writes about what he's reading, as he makes connections with world events, with books he's read in the past, and books on his list to read.
As he writes about the experience of reading, he notices how the world around
him changes in what seems to be his hap-paced mad ride through literature and
life.
Manguel turns the experience of everyday into extraordinary
literariness. As he explains, "The experience of everyday life is negated by
what we want it to be, negated in turn by what we hope it really is." Surrounded
by stacks of books, he keeps notes of those moments when he was browsing through
books, rediscovering the classics he read years ago, and stumbling across
unlooked-for literary treasures."

So my paper will be my personal Reading Diary modeled after Alberto Manguel's . This year has been an epiphany. The dots are beginning to connect. What I am reading now illuminates what I have read, and what I have read illuminates what I've been reading. The more I read the more coincidences don't seem that coincidental anymore. Life and Literature and nearly inextricable from one another, and does life imitate art? Oscar Wilde might be someone I'm interested in, and my reading of Ulysses by James Joyce has been extremely influential with a lot of my connecting this year.

I'm interested in the "minor miracle" that takes place when we read, the little epiphanies, little explosions, the "oh's", and how do these all culminate into the mind shattering explosion? the big shebang? The ultimate epiphany? The still point? The collapse of space and time? When do we feel "strangely tired"? Is literature the music in the reeds that gives us hint at the bigger epiphany that may or may not lead us to exit stage left? What about anagnorsis, a recognition through literature. What literature dive bombs our very core, and we are sporagmosed, but enlightened?

This blog is my rough paper idea blog. I welcome comments and suggestions and critique.