So, seriously. Been reading some essays on imperialism and collective consciousness. They're incredibly engaging, but very, very difficult to wrap your head around. The synchronous, and dependence, of domestic prosperity and imperialism is a fairly easy to read idea; but the idea that a consciousness (within) based on an imperialistic predilection to ignorance of home (without) is just really, really confoosing. It makes my brain hurt when people give these meta-fictional interpretations of text. I also enjoyed the irony of the latter idea, because the author wrote at some length on the question of a reading being dependent on ideas of the reader, and how to be understood isn't global, it's individual - I liked this, because I don't know anyone who understood what the hell she was talking about.
I appreciate why we're given these sorts of theories to look into, but sometimes I feel it's rather counter-productive, rather than beneficial. For instance, we use them as secondary source material for essays and exams - but if you don't fully understand an idea, and you simply use it for quoting, you're bound to misuse it, and instead of doing yourself credit, you're doing yourself out of marks. It seems irritating, because they include good quotes, and good ideas, but ideas of such complexity that you'd need to assiduously study them - with time you don't have - in order to be able to infer, and utilise, them correctly. It's a double-edged sword: Do you spend extra time on an idea in order to be able to be fully understanding of it, at the cost of the primary text; or do you ignore the secondary reading in order to fully engage with the text? Why there is a necessity for secondary source material is beyond me, sort of, because surely originality and self-ideas are more interesting to a marker, than re-hashed, or poorly reinterpreted source material? A balance invariably needs to be struck, but it's one beyond my friends and I.
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