After four months I've finally been "inspired" by a lecture!! I suppose I was spoiled last year in my EAS 102 class, when there was one superlative lecture on average in a month. Anyway, it was actually an enlightening half lecture.
See, the first hour of the lecture the prof had to cover the stuff on Wordsworth that he wasn't able to finish last week, and well, you'll remember my feelings on Wordsworth--hate him! So yeah, I was pretty much going in and out on that part of the lecture, but after the break he started talking about Emma (by Jane Austen) and I didn't need to finish my Vector bar to keep awake for that!
He talked about the narrative techniques Austen used, like the internal focalizer and free indirect discourse, and how those techniques were essential to the meaning of the book. I can't possibly summarize his lecture properly, so I'm not going to try, but suffice to say, it was so intriguing that it made and makes me want to read the whole book over again, paying minute attention to the focalizer and type of discourse! I even want to try to jump ahead and look for examples of irony and figure out the significance of puzzles and riddles in the story, which is part of what he (my prof) is supposed to talk about next week!
Unfortunately, I suspect it would take a really long time to reread and examine Emma in as close detail as I would like. It's too bad I couldn't take just one or two courses a year and really be able to put all my energy into those two courses. That would be so awesome; I'd probably feel enlightended/inspired most of the time, rather than just once in a while. =Þ
