Bread Loaf - Week 1 Reflections

At the commencement of Bread Loaf School of English Summer 2007, the associate director gave a rather disconcerting speech surrounding the question, "Why do I go to Bread Loaf?" She pointed out that we are often hesitant to tell outsiders that we go to a place named after a common food item or to explain that we go there to study English literature (since, as English literature teachers, aren't we supposed to know it already?). She suggested that we respond cryptically, "I go because of the giraffe." Due to its obscure and arrogant literary reference, this would stave off further questions on the subject and make us seem appropriately random and haughty. She also suggested that she hoped we would not respond by saying, "I go because I want a master's degree."

But I *do* want a master's degree! Not only as a symbol of the study I've completed and the grades I've achieved, but as a ticket to places I want to go in the future. I don't see anything wrong with that, and it makes me tired that the academic community continues to insist on intellectual separatism (for what else does such a cryptic response induce?) and an unrealistic vision of study for study's sake. Of course I'm here because I love studying - but I would probably not be here, at least right now, if there were not the pragmatic aspect of it as well.

Anyway, I do usually say I'm going to study at Middlebury College, since Bread Loaf does lack some academic ooompf (though the Simpsons parodied it wonderfully in an episode when they go to study at "WordLoaf," and once you make the Simpsons...). Bread Loaf is the name of the mountain we can see as we walk to and from class, the shape reflecting the title, and it's a respectable institution that's been around for 88 years, Robert Frost, Willa Cather, Paul Muldoon, and other such notable writers and scholars spending their summers teaching in the mountains of Vermont. So there! :)

This year I'm rooming with my friend Sorina from Pennsylvania, next door to the girls from France, Aurelie and Patricia, and below the Kenyans -- all of them friends I made while studying in Oxford last summer. Though the academics on this campus are more rigorous than they were at Oxford, I miss Oxford as OXFORD! We are all a bit nostalgic, and take every opportunity to get in a car and drive to "downtown Middlebury," which is a contradiction in terms but definitely less isolated than this mountaintop retreat.

Classes have begun, and my first quandary was deciding whether to audit a third class and whether to drop out of Indian Prose to take a Theory and Criticism course - since the latter is a gap or hole in my understanding of literary criticism. By theory, I mean the categories under which critics organize themselves: Marxism, Feminism, Freudian - Psychoanalytical, New Historicism, Deconstructionism, Structuralism, and many more. No, I'm not certain what these all mean, but Indian Prose won out after all, even though the Professor dropped tons more reading in our laps on the first day!