This gallery contains 3 photos.
My Personal Places When I imagine home unconsciously–the image that occurs as I wake from a dream, my thoughts as I idly drift from daily life into reverie–I see the house where my family moved in 1976. My parents still live there, … Continue reading
Thinking about my GSU home, my mind goes to the General Classroom Building’s 9th floor, where I had my office when I came to GSU in August 2000. My mental picture of the campus is inseparable from my first office here, my experiences settling into a new work “home,” and the building itself. Of course, GCB is no longer GCB; it’s [yikes! I’m drawing a blank! I just had to google it to find out] Langdale Hall.
The name change came after the English department moved its offices to the former Sun Trust Building at 25 Park Place. But this change in my physical map—the way I literally move through GSU’s campus—hasn’t made a change in my mental map. (Or, perhaps, my mental map is changing more slowly than my physical one). When I think of GSU, I mentally inhabit my 9th-floor GCB office.
I associate that space with meeting new colleagues, starting a new job, taking on new responsibilities, meeting a succession of students, researching and writing and grading an ever-new assortment of essays. In my mind, it has a sort of sheen of the new, of expansion and change and growth.
Yet as I walked on campus to capture my mental image of GCB in photographs, I found that I could not do so; this image exists in my imagination and not in reality. As I walked my old route from the Georgia State MARTA station, I realized how subterranean my pre-Park Place existence was. I’d walk underneath Collins Street (with its “Caution: Bridge Spalling” signs; looking up the unfamiliar “spalling,” I learned it means, essentially, “falling down”), then through the parking lot under the building, then to the same entrance/exit that the garbage goes through.
Going to teach in Classroom South, Kell, or Sparks, or trekking to the Library or Student Center, I’d again go under the building—past the rat traps and the dripping pipes, through the stale, dank air—to get to my destination.
How can THIS have the glow of expansion, the sheen of growth? Space is objective, and objectively, this space says “underfunded urban university that does not care about the appearance of things community outsiders rarely see.” But as a place informed by my experiences, GCB, subjectively enhanced, takes on a different character entirely.
Given the anniversary of both the 1916 Rising and WWI, and given the imbricated history of the two, this study abroad course considers English and Irish history and literature that prefigures, rises out of, or comments upon events affecting Ireland from 1914-1918. These years helped prepare the ground for an Irish nation—and for a bifurcated “Irish” identity—one based in what we know as the Republic of Ireland, the other in Northern Ireland. In order to better understand these texts and the complex literary and cultural identifications that they register, the course will also include theoretical studies of “place”—by which I mean “space invested with meaning in the context of power.”
This course will combine theoretical considerations, literary analysis and experiential learning in the places that formed the crucible of 20thand 21st century Irish identities. These posts reflect the class’s experiences, ideas, and insights while in Ireland, and while considering questions of place, representation, and identity.