The Wit and Wisdom of Oscar Wilde. 9:00-12:00, Tuesday and Thursday.
So lighthearted, right? I mean, yeah, Oscar died of an unknown cause, destitute, after 2 miserable years in prison picking apart material until his fingers bled, but he was at least funny. And stuff. Well, before he went to prison. Even though his death was sad, for the most part we just enjoyed his wit and wisdom.
Last Year's Schedule:
Victorian Murders. 9:00-12:00, Monday and Wednesday.
Genocide: Two Case Studies. 12:00-3:00, Monday and Wednesday.
Last year's May Term was definitely not for the faint of heart. It beat the crap right out of me, so that by the time May had ended, I was not only exhausted, but super depressed. Both the classes were wonderful, and I would recommend them to anyone, but not both in the same term.
Victorian Murders was a blast. It sounds grim, and bits of it really were, but we started off the term with Sherlock and his creator, Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. We got to watch the old Jeremy Brett TV series, which to me is the epitome of any Sherlock portrayal. Jeremy (I'm on first name terms with a lot of actors in my head; in case you didn't get that from the Imaginary Dinner party post, I think they're all my friends) is the perfect Sherlock. There isn't anyone that matches up to him. The closest anyone has come is Benedict Cumberbatch, and he's only like one notch below Jeremy Brett in my opinion.
The grim parts came when we talked about Jack the Ripper and how many prostitutes inhabited Victorian London. And how dirty and gross Victorian London was.
We capped off the semester in that class last year with a presentation (Elree was teaching). My group did one on the Victorian Death culture. That was where I was introduced to all kinds of fun stuff: hair jewelry made out of the hair of the deceased, and the dead baby pictures. And mourning customs. If someone died (ie a husband); if you were a woman, you'd basically wear black for the next 20 years of your life and then after that, you could wear light purple with black lace. And then, after that period, if you were still alive, you could wear color.
The dead baby thing nearly killed our group, but not in the way you'd expect. It was so morose and morbid that after the initial shock wore off, it sort of became the running "I'm so going to hell" joke--because you either laughed at it, or you had hysterical attacks of simultaneous disgust and sadness. It got to the point that we were a little worried about laughing up in front of the classroom during the presentation. It really wasn't funny that the babies were dead. It was funny that there were pictures of them. We started thinking up some really ridiculous ways to jazz up the Victorian Dead Baby pictures.
They really are terribly sad and also terribly creepy. And we were really super tired and mentally exhausted. Super tired mentally exhausted college students do not have good coping mechanisms when things are sad and creepy and way eccentric.
The second class was the real downer, though. I don't know what moment of mental instability convinced me that I'd be able to handle the Genocide class without some sort of emotional effect. This coming from a girl that was in shock for weeks after watching a Holocaust documentary, who was in a play about the Holocaust in High School that made her physically ill, and who cried in APUSH from watching the slideshow about WWII when it got to that point in history.
Genocide the class was miserable. It took me about a week to remember why momentous historical tragedies and I don't mix. We watched a movie about the Wansee Protocol, and for me that was the one that hit the hardest. There was no violence or anything like that; it just documented a bunch of German leaders (except Hitler, he asked them to solve the "Jewish Problem" but didn't tell them how, so that he couldn't technically carry the blame for it, which was, forgive me, BULLCRAP) meeting together to decide the fate of an entire ethnic and cultural nation. The way in which they talked about it, so cavalierly, as if they were deciding who was going to mow the grass, made me actually physically ill.
And, it brought up some concerning ethical questions, like: it's so easy to say that if we saw a social injustice or atrocity like the Holocaust going on that we'd do something about it, but would we really if it threatened our family or our own lives? That's one of the reasons why not too many German citizens spoke out, if they at least suspected what was going on--it was safer to be a bystander.
I have to say that learning about genocide like that is important, though--remembering history, in theory, allows us from repeating gigantic mistakes. That's why I took the class; as a world citizen I want to remember what happened to the Jews and the Armenians. It's my duty to learn so I can do my best to keep it from happening again, and NOT be a bystander.
Even though after the class ended, I was so raw that the Auschwitz scene in X-Men: First Class made me cry, shake through the rest of the movie, and then cry again when I got home. I had to spend the rest of the night chilling just so I wouldn't be a wreck. And that was a comic book movie! When I saw Sarah's Key with my friend Kelsey the next fall (again, thinking I'd be fine) I nearly threw up the tomato soup I was eating.
Sometimes, I think I have the memory span of a goldfish. I'm like, "No, no, I'll be fine, I'm desensitized now, it can't possibly still upset me that much..."
I need to write myself a reminder note: YES HILARY IT WILL UPSET YOU THAT MUCH.
May Term last year was rough, but I wouldn't trade it. I made some great friends from it (Johnathan Ford is a big one), I got to talk about Sherlock for part of the term, and I continued to try to be a good world citizen. Oh, and one last thing.
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