you who philosophize disgrace and criticize all fears.

we're choosing our BA this year, and we have several courses & classes to choose from. and i. cannot. choose. it's torture. i want all of those.

i mean, how am i supposed to choose between this:

• Victorian Gothic fiction
• The course focuses on Victorian Gothic fiction — on novels such as Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights, Bram Stoker’s Dracula, Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations and The Mystery of Edwin Drood, Hardy’s Tess of the D’Urbervilles, Sheridan LeFanu’s Uncle Silas, Arthur Conan Doyle’s The Hound of the Baskervilles. The course offers an introduction to the Gothic novel as well as helps students analyse different aspects of the Gothic in Victorian fiction. In particular, emphasis will be laid on the literary characters — villains, their victims and on the ways of presenting them in the novels.

and this:

• Sensing the City: Contemporary American Urban Literature
• The course aims to familiarize students with representations of the city in contemporary American literature. We’ll be mostly interested in the literary pictures of the city as it is perceived and experienced by its human inhabitant, not only through his/her sense of sight, but also that of hearing, smell, touch. The earliest texts under consideration will be those written in the 1950s and 1960s, such as James Baldwin’s Go Tell It on the Mountain and Saul Bellow’s Herzog. We’ll also focus on novels depicting the 21st-century city, including Don DeLillo’s Falling Man with its account of 9/11 and Jennifer Egan’s Pulitzerprize winning 2010 novel A Visit from the Goon Squad, in which the primary constitutive element of the city is the sound of music it is filled with. Apart from the discussions of literary texts, we’ll also practice critical reading and writing skills necessary for the successful completion of the B.A. thesis.

oh, but that's not all, second course is a choice between this:

• The worlds of late Renaissance drama: Perverted politics. Illegitimate sex. The triumph of the wicked?
• The course will focus on the political and sensational elements of late Renaissance drama, especially tragedy. Authors to be discussed include William Shakespeare, John Webster, Thomas Middleton, and John Ford.

and this:

• Our class will be devoted to American short fiction of the XX century. The aim of the course is to increase students’ awareness of the underlying structure of the American short story and to demonstrate its basic shift from the plotted story to the plotless kind with the action significantly pruned. Regardless of the type of story analysed, our theoretical assumption concerning the artistic unity of the short story as a distinct literary genre is in keeping with the approach represented by the New Criticism and its method of “close reading”. Such an approach is in our case tantamount to an in-depth examination of particular works. Our ultimate goal would be to perceive the interrelatedness between the artistic unity of the story discussed and its theme brought out by the storyteller.

i'm thinking gothic fiction for the former, and american short fiction for the latter. thing is, both are very popular and i don't know if i'll get on the list. if i do, and really, really hope so, i'll try to get the professors to let me attend the other ones, too.

literature, man. i love this shit.