When I signed up for this class I was so intrigued by the title. Literature of Awe. A class about Literature and Awe sounds like it would be a fun class and it was. I thought starting off the semester with 2001:A Space Odyssey was a great way to so the many faces of awe. The book and certainly the movie had a little bit of everything. It had the terror, and the transcendent, the spectacle and the sublime.
However, I think when I really got into researching awe I found it often in religion. I wrote about a book called Believing in Christ By Stephen Robinson and explored what I felt was awe.
As the semester went on we looked at the idea of awe in the every day. We had our wonder journals, which helped me see wonder in the world but in my mind awe was reserved for rare moments of transcendent feelings.
Once I figured out I wanted to write about those feelings, what I called Ultimate Awe, I wrote a blog post about Frozen. I had just seen the movie and had walked out with my mind racing over the possible implications of the movie. There was just so much more there than a talking snowman. As I thought about the themes and the issues in Frozen I began to think of other musicals. I thought about focusing my paper for the class on stage musicals.
The note cards activity helped me focus my idea on the scripts of musical. I figured it was a literature class and scripts are literature.
I had the best time reading and re-reading scripts that for the longest time i did nothing else. I got caught in a rut after I researched a few theorists who either said nothing about theater or who genuinely opposed it. The next week I did a post about being transformed by language. In this very important post I regained some energy to keep going with my paper. I had talked to Dr. Burton about my topic and he showed me the very important connection between history and musicals, novels and musicals, and spectacle and musicals. I also found a large amount of testimonials about the power of musicals around this time and started collecting some of these for my project.
Then we wrote an outline of our paper and a bibliography. I put everything I had written down on the blog and tried to put it in a logical order. That beginning outline helped me a lot with organizing my paper even though I didn't end up using a lot if the sections. I think the bibliography helped the most. Both the class bibliography and my own made me look at my sources and see what side of my paper i need to beef up more. It was also very nice to have done a bibliography prior to finishing my paper becasue there was less to add at the end of the writing process.
Throughout the process I looked up venues where I could submit my paper. Most of the venues I found were for established/professional writers or ones that were part of a theater guild that would write for big theater magazines. I went to the Humanities help desk in the library and the research assistant showed me the University of Las Vegas website that pools together lots of different undergraduate journals and conferences. I found a few options there and then went and talked to the music librarian on the 4th floor. She is the nicest lady and she just happened to be my good friends mom. It was really cool to talk to her again and she was super helpful. She emailed three people for me and I got a response from one about a conference in Oklahoma. (Ironically, Oklahoma! the musical, is in my paper) I will see!
As far as my project goes, it's changed a lot. I sent out a personal message to 25 people in Facebook asking them to answer a series of questions with a video and i only got one. The one I got was pretty thorough though. So I started making an infographic of the most popular musicals but I sucked at it and learning how to make it really nice was confusing. I went back to a video and decide to make a video about Frozen which sort of started this whole idea anyway. It's an interesting little video walking through the elements of a musical and then through the themes that are central to the piece.
I think the biggest thing that motivated me to write my paper was my personal love of musicals. My favorite post I did this semester is the one called, Prototyping My Story, On My Own. If you haven't seen this video please go watch it here.
Oh and this thing! Kind of Important.
Final Paper
Thank you!
I loved ...
that every time I went to work on my paper this semester I got distracted and had to watch a song from a musical on youtube for the sake of research.
that I have a wonder journal
and that I got to take a whole semester and appreciate the awe in everything in my life.
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