Sample Student Research Project 2018: Journal
LITR
4328 American Renaissance / Model Assignments
Sample Student Research Project 2018:
Journal
Carolyn Edmundson
A Cancer Patient’s Guide to
Literature
Day One
It started like any other day. They
always do. It ended in a great whirlwind of dilemma and confusion, of sadness
and distaste for everything the day had turned into. I went back for results
from a previous test and heard some monstrously loud words, though not screamed
but gently whispered. CANCER. The decision is normally made for you, you fight
it. As a full-time student, a full-time mom, and a full-time employee, fighting
seemed like just another beast to add to the plate. So, you fit it in the way
you fit anything else in, shove it right into your schedule and deal with it.
What happened next is astonishing to say
the least. Some of my worlds began to collide. Literally. No really, literally.
Can other cancer patients see it too? God, I hope so. Everyone needs to know. I
have a plan now, and I will show them, and you, that there is a great escape in
a book. There is someone else, somewhere else, a million genres and eras away
that felt just as you do, or did, in a moment of their life. By accepting this
you make new friends that help you understand your feelings. If you have a brain
tumor like me, you have friends there to talk you through the dark hours at
night (they aren’t actually there though, that is the brain tumor). It may seem
crazy, but a story, novel or poem can take you a million miles away, and then
drop you back exactly where you are with a better understanding of what is
happening in that precise moment in life.
What does that look like? It is a little
dark and twisted, undoubtably gothic but also whimsical and romantic in the
oddest way. It is Emerson and Poe, Dickinson and Warner. It is oceans and lost
loves, fear and hiding. It is also something that when you come out of the other
side you are a better, worldlier person. It is learning from the past and, with
that new knowledge, creating a new future. It is literature and cancer, words
and truths. It all gets tangled into a new reality, that is interesting and
real, if you let it be. A book can be your helper, your sympathetic friend, your
source of entertainment, an escape and so much more.
So that is where this all starts. I went
to class, a new cancer patient, and came out a new person. It is cliché, but it
wasn’t the teacher that changed me, but rather the words on the pages that
transformed my soul into someone who had these people who understood me, they
really understood me. I went in with the word cancer on my forehead and came out
a lover of the written word; that wasn’t a label, it was so much more. I hope
that in writing my feelings, in expressing my thoughts, you too can have this
peace, this understanding, in a book.
Day Two—What it all Means
If you look on the Webster dictionary
under ‘cancer’, you will see in big bold letters; “Did You Know?” Followed by
this “fun fact” about cancer:
“The Latin word cancer, meaning “Crab,”
was also given as a name to several diseases. One of the diseases was the
abnormal, spreading mass of tissue we call a tumor. A possible explanation for
this extended use of cancer is that Romans thought some tumors looked like
many-legged crabs. A French descendant of this Latin word was borrowed into
English as canker. It is now applied to several plant and animal disorders. In
the 14th century, the Latin word cancer in the sense of “tumor” was
borrowed directly into English, giving us our modern spelling and sense.”
My first thought after reading this, “I
don’t care”. What I do care about though is why cancer ties in so well to the
literature I am reading right now and why it makes me feel the way I do. A lot
of what I am reading is from the romantic era where “feelings, emotions and
imagination take priority over logic and facts” (Dr White Course Site). I need
this right now. I want how I feel to be more important than the logic coming out
of my doctor’s mouth because feelings matter. It is also important to recognize
some other important parts of the movement like: will of a person, nature and
how it affects us, nostalgia for days past, innocence from childhood and wisdom
as we age and go through things. As cancer patients, we are living and breathing
these emotions, and that fact is what draws us unaware to this writing style. So
yesterday you told us about gothic being a part of this too and that seems
contradictory? Thanks for asking! I think that while we enjoy feeling the
romantic aspects of life, it is also important to acknowledge the dark parts
too. Not every day will be happy and hopeful, however not every day will be sad
and disturbing either. Life and cancer are both about balance. My mom always
told me, “not every day is rainbows and sunshine,” but I never knew how right
she was until yesterday, when my busy life came to a crashing halt for a moment,
and I was then catapulted into a new understanding of how my life would now be.
So yes, having cancer is romantic, but it is also gothic. I am ok with that…are
you?
Day Five—Poe and the Art of Loss
Annabel Lee is
romantic and tragic and speaks straight to the soul. Poe starts the poem by
creating this beautiful picture (especially so if you have a brain tumor) of him
and Annabel. “She was a child and I was a child, / In this kingdom by the sea.”
Isn’t life like that though? We are all like children in many ways, shuffling
along and living however we can, in whatever ways make sense, until the sense
runs out of life. Poe then tells us the angels in heaven were so jealous of the
happiness that he and Annabel had “that the wind came out of the cloud, chilling
/ and killing my Annabel Lee.” Both the wind and a doctor are a death sentence.
They both swoop in and change everything in an instance.
Ligeia is another Poe poem about lost love.
Poe said, “and now
those eyes shone less and less frequently upon the pages over which I pored.
Ligeia grew ill.” He watched another great love slowly leave him, taken away.
That is the way cancer is, and it doesn’t have to be a person. Cancer takes away
so much more than that; your self-worth, self-love, time, health, hair, organs,
limbs. Cancer is a taker-of-joy, sometimes.
My love for life died five days ago and
now I am stuck longing for that love, just as Poe longs for Annabel and Ligeia.
It is romantic and gothic. The childlike days are gone and replaced with
darkness. You are a walking Ambien commercial where the cloud constantly rains
on your head. That is cancer, and that is Poe.
Day Fourteen—Dickinson in the Dark
It is three a.m. and I can’t sleep.
Nothing new, too many thoughts are racing through my mind. Today’s reading of
Emily Dickinson’s I Felt a Funeral in My
Brain is stuck in my thoughts. There is something in my brain. Truth. How
does Emily Dickinson know about that though?
As a gothic writer, she is the dark and twisty I think
about first. She is the spider that crawls up in your brain and gives you dark
thoughts, which parallel with the hallucinations and are even more twisted than
you care to acknowledge. Two weeks in now and treatments have started. I am sick
as a dog but pushing through my crowded life like always. The creaking
floorboards are resonating in my mind like the “creak across my soul” that
Dickinson feels. The line I identify with the most at three a.m. is only three
small words: “Wrecked, solitary, here.” That is exactly how it is. Your body is
wrecked, your mind is wrecked, your soul is wrecked. Nothing about cancer makes
you feel surrounded by understanding, though people sure do try to understand.
Cancer is lonely and isolating. But most of all, you are here. Here in this
present moment living every awful second of every awful day. Here trying your
best to get to the other side to the new title, “survivor”. But also, the “here”
that Dickinson doesn’t speak about. The “here” where her poem, though sad and
real, is understanding in your moment of desperation. Sometimes we need only to
feel what we are feeling and have understanding from someone and when no human
around us can understand, why not turn to this literary character, this writer,
who for some brief moment in time knows exactly what is happening in our lives
and is silently pushing us through our day with that gentle nudge of acceptance.
Day Eighteen—Emerson the Romantic
Some things don’t need to be entirely
understood to be meaningful to a wounded soul. For me, that is Emerson. When
reading Nature, I felt an
overwhelming sense of confusion. What universe is this? I learned though that
sometimes we need pages to reach us, but sometimes we just need lines. When
Emerson spoke of stars, my heart smiled, “because though always present, they
are inaccessible.” Why would something beautiful that you can’t have make you
happy? Some things are just meant to be looked at, to be reveled on, but not
actually touched. God gave us stars as one of those things, and sometimes when
life is messy, and things are not looking great, it is nice to just watch
something beautiful and enjoy it for what it is. The other side of this is to be
able to dream. Emerson says that “a dream may let us deeper into the secret of
nature than a hundred concerted experiments.” You can dream anything. Dreams are
another escape from reality. Even better, to read a book that speaks to you,
there is one of those for everyone, and then take that book and turn it into a
dream, so when you lay your head down at night the things you see aren’t dark
and awful, but an extension of the book you have laying on your chest as you
sleep. Finding the right book for you is important. Not everyone is made for
Emerson (or Chaucer or Dickinson or Poe, for that matter), so you must find your
author or genre. When you do then like Emerson says, “he (man) works on the
world with his understanding alone.” The only way to accept what is happening
and move forward is to understand it and have understanding from the world
around you. Create your world for yourself. Whatever you need, whatever you
want, whatever you read…let it be things that make you feel as nature makes one
feel, whimsical, free, and understood.
Day twenty-four—The World
An understanding has passed these few
days and a new form of life takes place when reading
The Wide, Wide World. As a mom,
reading the beginning of this novel with Ellen and her very sick mother brought
some new horror, and fight to my life. Ellen “sobbed controllably” and often. At
the same time, the strength coming from her mother as she died was inspirational
enough to stir up a little hope. “Remember, dear Ellen, God sends no trouble
upon his children but in love; and though we cannot see how, He will no doubt
make all this work for our good.” Insert your name for Ellen’s if you need that
today. I did. Mrs. Montgomery may have had to just accept her illness, but it
doesn’t mean we have to. At the same time, we can draw on the courage and the
positivity of her words throughout the novel and feel a little transformation in
our souls. That is the way Romanticism
works. A little fire inside burning bright like a first love that sets ablaze.
It infects you if you let it. Books are good like that. You can also see how
others in a cancer patient’s life feel, watching their loved ones in pain. “She
burst into another fit of sorrow; not so violent as the former, but with a touch
of hopelessness in it which went yet more to her mother’s heart. Passion in the
first said, “I cannot;” despair now seemed to say, “I must.” In feeling
hopeless, I think our loved ones too feel hopeless for the love they know they
will be losing. If we can find hope anywhere; a scripture, a book, a movie…then
we can share our hope with them so that they too can feel that a tomorrow is
coming. Spoiler alert though, Ellen’s mother doesn’t make it.
Day 37—Darkness with the Slave
Sometimes we don’t find hope in our
reading, just understanding is enough. When reading Harriot Jacobs, the story
she told hiding under the floorboards screamed to me, SHE GETS ME. I have been
hiding under this heaviness, this weight of cancer, that holds me down and
banishes me from everything my friends and family are doing. I can’t go to
parties or family gatherings, no baseball or football games, or anywhere fun
because fun has a big bad word written over it: “germs”. Harriot also had to
hide but not because of cancer, because of her skin color. She said that while
in the darkness she had “no
thoughts to occupy my mind, except the
dreary past and the uncertain future.” I was steamrolled by this today. The past
does seem dreary now, especially since it is something long ago and not
attainable anymore. Can we ever go back to that life? Are things ever the same
again?
“The stars were
shining through the boughs above me. How they mocked me, with their bright, calm
light!” This is my favorite quote from her story. Sometimes it feels like life
is just laughing at you. You are forced to sit back, miserable and wait for
change. Taking solace in a stranger’s understanding is a rarity that can change
you on the inside though. Give it a try, I think you will be pleasantly
surprised.
Day 133—An Insider’s View to Literature
If American literature from the past
isn’t for you, have no fear, there are many books that can still speak to you
with a much more modern twist. When researching for this journal, I tried to
find any evidence that someone had tried to see if throwing yourself into
reading made cancer less miserable. It is a fact for me, the world hasn’t caught
on yet. I might be able to bring about breaking news, so that is exciting! There
are, however, a ton of novels and memoirs written by cancer survivors and people
who have dealt closely with cancer. Not particularly for my journal today, but
My Sister’s Keeper was a pretty good
book and movie, very realistic and if you ever need to cry just watch the film.
I read a book called A Requiem for the
Living in my research. He gives the back story before he had cancer and
leads it into his life with cancer. If you need someone to live and breathe a
day in the life with you, Jeff Metcalf is your guy. I was reading in the library
and he has a great sense of humor which made me laugh a little and I really
appreciate a good laugh every now and again these days.
Another novel,
Racing Odysseus, is pretty
stimulating. They are both fairly easy reads, both interesting and both
something to get into when searching for some understanding. If you are a
college student, read the second one.
There are books upon books for self-help
and the “right things to do” when you have cancer. Don’t do it…don’t try to go
down that rabbit hole. There is nothing that works for everyone. Except one
thing, and that is literature. Books are for everyone because we as humans are
all looking for the same things: love, understanding, acceptance.
Day 151—Ending
Don’t worry, this ending isn’t me dying.
I just don’t need this journal anymore. I’m in remission and living until the
next MRI. My class is coming to an end and so there isn’t any more readings to
compare to cancer. Maybe it isn’t really an end but more a pause?
I think I learned what I already knew,
that literature is always breathing life into us, but it just seemed to be even
more than I thought it was. The romantic and the gothic collided with cancer and
we all came out victorious. Poe, Emerson, Warner, and Jacobs all are classics,
and I am a model of the afterlife, the after-cancer life. What more can you ask
for? I would love for someone to do some research on how books can change our
lives when we are dealing with cancer. I think there must be something to it,
there has to be more meaning that just my thoughts and words because I can’t
possibly be the only one affected. Every literature major agrees, a book can
change your life so maybe we can pass that love of books on to every cancer
patient, up at three in the morning searching for understanding. Every bad day
and good day, every piece of reality and every bit of fantasy, there is always
something to read to relate to. That is the beauty of it all. Whether you need
to be transformed, to escape, to run away, to hide…whatever you need, you can
find it in a book.
I think that if we can learn to hurl ourselves into the
words, we can be taken wherever we need to go. My favorite line of literature I
have read comes from a pretty famous book, the Bible. Romans 5:8 says, “I loved
you at your darkest.” It is beautiful and haunting, it is a promise and an
answer to an unasked question. It is a reminder that even when you are sick and
feel like dying, even when you do wrong, and even when you hurt, you are still
loved. It is cancer. And it is literature.
Works Cited
Emerson, Ralph Waldo,
Nature, 1836, Dr. White Course Site
Poe, Edgar Allan,
Annabel Lee, 1849, Dr. White Course Site
Poe, Edgar Allan,
Ligeia, Dr. White Course Site
Jacobs, Harriet, 1861,
Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl,
Dr. White Course site
Dickinson, Emily,
I Felt a Funeral in My Brain, Dr. White Course Site
Warner, Susan, The
Wide, Wide World, Dr. White Course Site
Marion Webster Dictionary, online
Gothic page, Dr. White Course Site
Romantic era page, Dr. White Course Site
Metcalf, Jeff,
Requiem for the Living
Martin, Roger,
Racing Odysseus
"Great Star" flag of pre-Civil War USA