When I look back on my memories from this semester– including even our online meetings– I’m amazed by the amount of laughter in my memories of this class. I rarely associate school and class with laughter; especially since I entered college, everything academic has seemed very serious. This class has taught me that serious literary criticism and laughter do not always need to be mutually exclusive, and that in fact there are some places where these two things can converge really wonderfully. This is an important lesson for me as a first-year, and one that I think I will carry with me throughout my time at Haverford and afterward. Not all of academia needs to be scary and serious, but can instead be funny and even Carnivalesque if we embrace the sides of it that we have in our readings this semester. I’m especially thinking about our reading of Rabelais– there is something really freeing to me about a novel that is simultaneously a deeply consequential work of religious, political, and academic parody and also an outrageous, funny, and Grotesque story to be laughed at. As a person who loves literary analysis but who also prefers to make a joke out of everything, I’m excited to go forward with my college career with the framework needed to find the Carnival in everything that I do and see. A huge part of this lesson, too, was through the Appetizer presentations. It was genuinely so nice to see how the Grotesque and the Carnivalesque manifest in the world through the perspectives of everyone in the class, and I loved sharing my perspectives as well. When I gave my Surrealist film presentation, I had so much fun watching all of the reactions to the scenes and hearing everyone’s thoughts. This class has opened my mind to embrace a new way of looking at the world, and it always felt like we were all finding this new way of thinking together, without judgement of one another or our ideas and thought processes. Since the move to online learning, these lessons have taken on more importance for me; as I consume large amounts of both media and homemade baked goods, I am better able to embrace the Grotesque aspects of life right now and to find little bits of the Carnivalesque in an otherwise not fun situation. I’m truly grateful to everyone in this class. It’s been so lovely to see all of your faces and talk to you every week, and I hope to see many of you when we finally can return to campus.
Bawdy Bodies
