Soft Cover

Ever since going to university I have been nailing the titling of essays with a consistency I’m not sure I’ll ever achieve again. A 6 page scene analysis on the 2000 film adaptation of Hamlet’s inclusion of an additional final scene? The Power Epilogue: How Fortinbras Evades the Saw (In That He is Not Cut from This Version of Hamlet). Damn that’s good. What about an 8 page meditation about Don Delillo’s use of comedy in his seminal novel White Noise to make a serious indictment of contemporary American society while simultaneously remaining a fun, pleasurable read? A Spoonful of Sugar Makes the Dylar Go Down: Humour as a Rhetorical Technique in White Noise. Oooh, girl. Oooh.

But now I’ve written this paper about the sub-genre of premature ejaculation poetry in Restoration Literature and when it came time to title it — 90% of the reason I wrote the thing in the first place — I completely choked. This should have been a slam dunk for me. I’ve lost it. I’m sitting next to my phone, staring at it, resisting the urge to phone up my prof and say: “Look, I know I already put my essay in your drop box the other day, but I have a stronger title now: The Impo’tance of Female Writers: How Aphra Behn Handles Male Material. If you could just let me do this…”

But the moment’s passed. She’s moved on. She’s marking other essays now.