Crisis of intellectualism

It is nearing the end of March and the runup to the end of the second semester of my MA is upon me. If you'd asked me last year at this time where I'd be right now intellectually, I'd have told you blithely that I'd be pumped up about my thesis, finishing up my coursework and happily enjoying the community of a bunch of like-minded students around me.

Is this my reality? Not really. Ok, no it isn't. Instead, I find myself trudging along in coursework that bears little resemblance to what I'm interested in. The digital theory and studies component of my classes is all tacked on at the end and is the first thing to be truncated in the interests of time. Rather than dealing with digital culture, every single class has at least one week, if not two or three, on psychoanalytic theory and visual culture (ick ick ick!). My fellow students are all into anthropological or visual culture/arts media topics. And an excellent paper by a PhD student in my program about the need to look at the technocultural layers of the web has shaken my faith in my thesis topic -- she's said it all, what more is there to say?

I guess I'm lucky that my RAships are with excellent and distinguished academics who are both working on digital topics, but they are topics of interest to me in the slightest. This makes it hard to drum up the enthusiasm to do the work.

The only bright spot in this semester is my Foucault reading class.

I'm sorely tempted to take the summer off and see if I can rekindle myself and my intellectualism over the warmer months. Or at least just do a single reading course, perhaps in the influence of science fiction on digital culture, particularly in the way space cowboys and soldiers have influenced video games. Perhaps if I do that I can find a niche area for myself in comparative literature, a field I'm getting more and more interested in.