Roland Barthes: Among the top three minds I wish I could steal.

I am a Junior. As a student at the College of Wooster, I am required at some point during my Junior Year to complete an Independent Study project. It is intimidating, even though it isn’t my first or final research project at this school. I have a legitimate opportunity to contribute to humanity’s body of knowledge.

The problem: I do not have enough ideas or expertise. Plus, my choice of majors leaves me with little precedent to reference. Data Science and English? While computational statistics offers legitimate avenues of literary analysis, no student at the College of Wooster has taken this path. Because of this, my advisors are in new territory too. I have less guidance than my fellow students have. My Study cannot fit into any sort of easy template either.

I fear venturing into uncharted wilds of knowledge, guided by my creativity and sustained by ambition. How do I stay alive?

I have to start early that’s how. Every month or so, I come up with an idea for Independent Study. I do not know if any of them are good. I might have to explore multiple to find a good one. That is fine. JIS is really just a first dart throw before Senior IS.

I hope I can pioneer this blend of studies for future Wooster students. Leaving that legacy may be a lofty goal, but it might be achievable.

Does anybody else have similar thoughts or anxieties? Is anybody else working on their Independent Study now? If so, I am very curious to hear what you’re working on. It might give me inspiration for my own project.

As mentioned in our class, stories with male protagonists can deal with a variety of different themes, while stories with female protagonists often have only one story: romance. They overcome difficulties and eventually marry the prince, which, in the context of the patriarchal society of the past, makes me wonder if the author’s purpose is to make them “subordinate” to men.

I recall reading novels I’ve read, most of which feature male protagonists. The one exception is that I have read almost all of the works of Eileen Chang, a very talented Chinese woman writer whose works mainly feature women as protagonists. However, the endings of these female protagonists are often tragic, seemingly unrelated to the glamorous words “heroism,” “finding yourself,” and “defeating the enemy” that often appear in novels with male protagonists. I think this is probably because Eileen Chang was a writer who was good at reflecting reality, and the women of that era were miserable.

And my question is, as more and more attention is paid to feminism, are there many stories with women as the main characters in the real sense? If so, how are these stories fundamentally different from those with male protagonists, i.e., if we replace the protagonist of a classic story with a woman, does the story still stand? What are the things that an author, especially a male author, needs to be aware of when he creates such stories? Is it easy for him to fall into the male gaze, stereotypes, or even sexism?

Roald Dahl’s Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf is, certainly, by no means unique. Without the already existent idea of Little Red Riding Hood, the tropes that Dahl leans upon for humour—Little Red Riding Hood’s familiar listing of what big this that or the other thing for instance—wouldn’t have nearly as much humour. The subversion of the expected lends the work its punch, with the remaking of Little Red Riding Hood into Miss Riding Hood. At the same time, beyond the expected tropes and borrowed plotline, Dahl’s authorship, sense of rhythm and rhyme, are something that many authors would struggle with and give the story a unique feel—the flickering eye, drawn pistol, and lovely furry wolfskin coat.

Clearly it’s a work, distinct in its own way and possessing artistic merit in its own right, but at the same time such a work is heavily reliant on the pre-existing narrative of Little Red Riding Hood. In a sense, Roald Dahl’s version of Little Red Riding Hood is essentially just fan fiction of the ‘original’—in so far as anybody knows the original—tale of Little Red Riding Hood.

Then, when considering authorship, and what works can and should be critically and academically studied, how far off is fan fiction, in the modern context, from that? Fairy tales were once considered not worthy of applied academic rigour—now it’s a sizable field in its own right. Fan studies is currently more the study of the culture of ‘fandom,’ but I’d hope one day it incorporates literary examinations of works of fan fiction as literary works in their own right, similar to what happened with fairy tales.

All in all though, the idea of authorship, of borrowed plotlines and reused tropes is one that’s interesting to me.