Takeoff

I’m Jon Heggestad, a second-year PhD student in the English department at Stony Brook University. I came to Stony Brook after completing a program at King’s College, London called the MA in English: 1850 to the Present. There, I focused on Victorian literature, writing my MA thesis on the various ways George MacDonald pursued writing about faith and doubt in the many literary genres he engaged with throughout his life. Thanks to meeting Dr. Elyse Graham at Stony Brook, my interests have once more diverged into a dozen different topics that I’m happily (although, at times, chaotically) exploring. Now, I generally find myself focusing on a handful of camps, which fortunately overlap every now and then: 19th-century British and American literature, queer theory, and digital humanities.

I’m excited to delve into the content of this Digital Rhetoric course and use it as a way to explore digital spaces, expanding my interest in queer spaces both on- and off-line. Additionally, I look forward to better understanding how I’ll be able to integrate multimodal projects into my own teaching.

The name of my blog comes from a number of sources that I encountered in just the past month that struck me as relevant to both my life and my studies. In André Aciman’s Call Me By Your Name, the narrator admires another of the characters who simply states, “I know myself.” Finding himself somewhat intimidated by such a claim, the narrator reflects, “I had never heard someone his age [mid-twenties] say, I know myself.”¹ I had to pause when I read this; so often, it’s as if I don’t know myself at all. I don’t have the kind of confidence to say “You’d like me to try something new? Sorry, that’s not me,” but I don’t mind this in the least. I’ve always enjoyed the thought that all of life is a learning process, even though that might create more turbulence at times than is entirely necessary. Nevertheless, it reminds me of what W. H. Auden (who, by the way, credited George MacDonald as one of his main literary influences) said in The Dyer’s Hand:

Between the ages of twenty and forty we are engaged in the process of discovering who we are, which involves learning the difference between accidental limitations which it is our duty to outgrow and the necessary limitations of our nature beyond which we cannot trespass with impunity.²

When it comes to digital humanities, things are constantly changing as well; it’s one of the most fast-paced disciplines in the humanities. And although the field doesn’t necessarily need to be fast-paced, obsolesce is nevertheless a key term for DHers. Inspired by a recent interview I conducted with Dr. Jentery Sayers (an English professor at the University of Victoria) however, I hope to slow down just enough to explore these constant changes during the course of the semester—to think about what I can expect in the turbulence.