Day 201 and the End of the Semester

Yes, I've been abroad for 201 days. Yes, the semester is over. I finished classes on Tuesday, so I was finished with classes in my junior year of college in March (at Dickinson, classes don't end until May. Classes officially end at UEA on Friday, April 3). I handed in my final paper about the Holocaust today, but I have two more papers due May 5 and 6, respectively. Lastly, my final project for Dickinson is due June 12, which I've been working steadily on for a few weeks.

The assignment for the project is relatively open. The requirements are as follows: we need to have an experiential component (some sort of interaction with the community or British people) , a research component, and we need to write a research paper. The paper, however, is quite open to creative interpretation.

My project has evolved a few times since its conception. My original plan was to interview people who were alive during World War II (Norwich was hit quite hard during the Blitz) and then write a short piece of fiction based on their lives. The interviews would be complemented by outside research of both primary and secondary sources.

A few weeks later, my plan changed. We've been focusing on what it means to be British, so I wanted my project to have something to do with the question, "What does it mean to be British?" I decided to keep the research component, but decided to do interviews with people not only of the World War II generation, but also subsequent generations to see if I could trace changes and similarities within the past 60 years in British identity. I then decided to write short pieces of creative non-fiction (a la Hunter Thompson, Truman Capote, Tom Wolfe, but from a 3rd person perspective) about each person I interviewed, creating different chapters in a chronological study of personal perceptions of British identity. To add another dimension, I wanted to take photographic portraits of the people I interviewed to accompany the writing, to put a face to the stories.

Alas, my idea changed again, but this time less drastically. I realized that one interview was nowhere near enough time to get to know enough about a person to write non-fiction about them, so I abandoned the creative non-fiction idea but kept the chapter aspect and nixed the photographs.

The final idea: write short pieces of fiction based on the interviews and incorporate them (somehow) seamlessly into my research paper (i.e. not having two different sections: fiction and research paper).

So that's that. I've conducted two interviews, one with a 57 year-old minister whose grandfather shook hands with Hitler and 76 year-old man who drives an awesome red sports car. The interviews have been incredibly successful. I got excellent impressions about how each man perceives his own British identity and the identity of the British people as a whole. It also made me happy when the older gentleman told me he was really enjoying the interview because it was really making him think about things that he doesn't usually think about. To make someone who has been around for so long suddenly reconsider who they are and the culture they're apart of is a very good feeling.

I have another interview tonight with Tom, the first of the interviews with someone of my generation. I'll probably finish the interviews when I return from the first leg of my travels in late April.

That being said, on Monday, myself and several members of the Dickinson Humanities program will be going to see Waiting for Godot by Samuel Beckett, probably my favorite playwright. The production stars Ian McKellen and Patrick Stewart. I'm INCREDIBLY excited. Then, Tuesday, my flight leaves for Milan at 2 p.m. An exciting 17 days it will be!