Are We Out of Our Comfort Zone Yet? PopLit’s Blog Portfolio

Once Upon a Time…

… I started PopLit…

When I signed up for the MA in Modernities, I had a specific idea of what the programme and its assessments would look like. Particularly, one word was looming over my shoulder: essays. Essays, essays, and even more essays. The varied assessment of the module EN6009 came as a surprise, particularly the blog creation, and in many ways, so did the relationship I developed with it.

From the building of the blog itself, to the decision of the direction I wanted to take, to the process of finding my voice within it, this experience was a far cry from the type of assessments I was used to. It required me to develop skills that I often neglected, and more often overlooked entirely. To be adaptable, to develop a creative vision, engage with different media, design, learn technical skills, be patient and consistent, and most importantly, to find my own voice outside of my comfort zone.

Before getting into the depth of the posts, it’s perhaps worth spending a moment to talk about the blog creation itself and the idea behind my baby, PopLit.

The Homepage banner of PopLit, which introduces the website and welcomes everyone!

Picture by my sister, Asia!

The idea of PopLit came before the development of the website itself, as I was trying to find the scope of the website. Following the lecturers’ guidance, I started thinking about what genuinely interested me: popular things. From engaging with the contemporary Byronic Hero to seeing the world through a vampire existentialist’s lens, the popular has always been something I like writing about, and I thought I could push it even further with the blog. And that is how PopLit was born: from the desire to create an engagement with popular culture through a literary lens, reflecting my interests as a scholar. This perspective is shaped by my Swiss background, where popular literature is often perceived as inferior (Toscano 14).

Now, the building of the blog itself felt like the most unfamiliar and intimidating aspect of the module. While writing was something I felt a bit more comfortable with, creating a website from scratch through WordPress was something entirely new.

PopLit was live on the 11th of October 2025 and I had to share the news!

My own chats 🙂

From designing a logo with my Canva Plus free trial to finding a colour palette, understanding how to edit my website, and the difference between a page, a template, and a post, the journey was not free of speed bumps. Nonetheless, despite the frustration I had at times, I can now see in retrospect how this process helped me develop persistence and adaptability, and more importantly, how it was the first step of a journey of finding the courage to leave my comfort zone and take steps in an unknown academic territory.

Notably enough, the first post in the blog stems from the desire to feel familiarity and comfort. I did not immediately begin with a blog entry for this module, but rather started with a reflection of one of my poems, a form of writing in which I felt more secure. As the poetry was both my own and centred around my roots, I was able to write from a position of relative confidence, engaging with themes of identity and origin without any external pressure.

“I believe ‘Province 2018’ is the only poem I could begin this blog with, as it is about my roots.” (Manini “Province 2018”)

The official opening of the blog also reflects this choice to start within a space I already understood, though it features a more exploratory writing. I developed my first formal blog post following Dr Corcoran’s seminar on witches’ origins and resonance in pop culture, beginning to slowly move away from my safety net. In this post, I analyse the figure of Alex Russo from one of my favourite shows ever, Wizards of Waverly Place, as a possible witch, starting to draw connections between broader theoretical discussions of the witch figure and a contemporary kids’ TV show. As I note in the post, “What struck me most was how a Disney sitcom character could be readily analysed through the same literal framework used to examine historical and cultural witch figures,” which highlights an early attempt to merge college work with texts I do not usually see in the classroom, but that I deeply love.

At the same time, the post is still partially situated within my comfort zone. In retrospect, the analysis’s structure feels like essay writing, working with definitions and textual evidence to support my arguments. The Oxford English Dictionary’s definitions of “witch” and “wizard” allow me to argue that Alex’s characterisation is actually closer to the witch’s rather than the wizard, as she “often uses magic recklessly for her own amusement.” (Manini “Wizard or Witch?”).

“Alex often uses magic recklessly for her own amusement, which aligns with the witch’s magic. In “Potion Commotion”, for example, she tries to use a love potion to make her crush fall in love with her. I suddenly realised that Alex’s characterisation shares more with the witch than with the wizard, especially in how she uses magic recklessly rather than embodying wisdom or authority.” (Manini, “Wizard or Witch?”)

“Potion Commotion.” Wizards of Waverly Place, season 1, episode 11, Disney, 2007. Disney+, https://shorturl.at/8jPCK.

This approach is not, in itself, problematic at all. I do believe that my argument needed this approach in order to demonstrate its validity, but I also think that it came from a deep desire to feel at ease, and nothing feels more familiar to a college student than an essay.

Following this initial post, my blog started to move a tiny bit beyond the boundaries of comfort, though not without little hiccups. After the Alex Russo’s post, I turned back to poetry again. And, after attending Dr Laird’s seminar on the “Leave No Trace” movement and climate change, I attempted to write a post on the topic multiple times, and found myself unable to do so. The seminar presented a topic which I felt was too distant from my own experience, which made it incredibly difficult to position myself critically in relation to it. Looking at it now, I think this was actually significant: it shows the extent to which I still needed a degree of comfort to be able to write. And thankfully, I never got rid of those seminar notes! (We’ll get to them later).

Photo of my notes on the seminar!

Notes taken on Goodnotes by me.

With the desire to still write a blog post about one of the English department’s seminars, I then attended Dr Gibbs’s seminar “Exonerative Determinism and the Beset White Male: Naturalism in the Novels of Paul Auster” which discussed the role of relativism in Paul Austen’s novels. Aside from finding it particularly enjoyable, the talk helped me see my sister’s failure of her first driving test “in a different light” (Manini “Driving Tests”). The similarity between Fleissner’s idea of naturalism as a nonlinear, repetitive motion and cars stuck in morning traffic helped me connect Dr Gibbs’s talk to my sister’s experience. As I remark in the post, “if the environment was strong enough to shape Archie’s entire life path, it must have some influence on smaller things,” such as my sister’s driving test (Manini “Driving Tests”).

Although naturalism should not remove responsibility from individuals entirely, I appreciated how it helped me see things differently, as reflected in the post. I started to merge the boundary between academic discourse and my personal experience, using the former to better understand the latter, particularly in moments of difficulty, such as the failure of a driving test. I also started following my thoughts and instinct more, though the presence of my sister was reassuring, and I feel it allowed me to explore more abstract ideas while being grounded in reality.

“If the environment was strong enough to shape Archie’s entire life path, it must have some influence on smaller things, and I started seeing how a part of the driving test was outside my sister’s control, as so many different factors could shape someone’s experience.” (Manini “Driving Tests”)

A further stage in this development can be seen in what I consider one of my personal favourites among the blog posts: my analysis of the “bubble of privilege” through a comparison of Glinda in Wicked: For Good and Kevin in Kindred. The post starts from material explored in class, although it more deliberately engages with themes I found to be more complex and potentially sensitive. Writing about privilege placed me slightly outside my comfort zone, as I was aware of the risk of approaching the topic without enough nuance or care.

In the post, I explore how both characters, Kevin and Glinda, exist within their own “bubble of privilege”, which conditions their perception of the world, detaching them from their respective realities. The comparative analysis allowed me to work with different genres and contexts, which I found profoundly enriching.

As Kevin cannot realise how his white skin constitutes an immense privilege for him as he time-travels with Dana, Glinda’s skin is not green like Elphaba’s, and, together with her background and her popularity, she is incredibly privileged. As I note in the post, both characters possess “innate and conferred privileges by those around them, which construct a bubble;” however, “although Glinda is able to pop the bubble, Kevin appears to be unable to do so” with Kevin’s privilege described as “historical, racial, [and] patriarchal,… which distorts his sense of self.” (Manini “A Bubble of Privilege”).

The difference in the structures of privilege was central to the comparison, as it shapes the trajectories of the characters and whether their bubbles can or cannot be popped.

With this post, I felt I was taking another step away from familiarity, as the characters did not appear linked at first, and I debated leaving what is now the post’s argument as a thought. I also found myself enjoying the process more, learning through the writing itself, and becoming more willing to explore my analytical instincts. The positive reception of this post among my peers gave me some confidence to pursue my ideas more often, as I was delighted they enjoyed what I had to say about the topic.

On a design level, the post also contributed to the visual appeal of the blog as a whole. The fact that Glinda’s aesthetic (a mixture of blue, lavender, and pink) blended very well with the colour palette of PopLit made me think more carefully about presentation, leading me to incorporate a Wicked: For Good quote into the blog’s homepage. With the union between the blog and the post, together with the fact that I finally had a sufficient number of posts to call the blog a blog, I started to see PopLit growing.

“It’s not lying. It’s seeing things in a different way. – Wicked: For Good

The quote on the homepage!

Wicked: For Good. Directed by Jon M. Chu, performances by Cynthia Erivo, Ariana Grande, and Jonathan Bailey, Ethan Slater, Bowen Yang, Peter Dinklage, Michelle Yeoh, Jeff Goldblum, 2025.

What I feel changed my approach even further is the post that received the most comments on my website, which is the one about TonyPitony, 67, and the Brainrot, all read through the lens of Dada. After a well-deserved Christmas break, I knew I had to go back to blogging, but the only thing I could think about was TonyPitony. He is a singer I had been listening to frequently, who became famous for the obscenity of his texts. Because after the “Bubble” post, I had promised myself I would follow my thoughts a bit more, I started writing about him.

The post is a new beginning for the blog, as it changed my understanding of what can constitute academic analysis. If previous posts were grounded in texts, people, or themes that I saw as more familiar or academic to me, this post directly engaged with elements of digital culture, which I was afraid could be perceived as less legitimate to discuss in an academic context. Particularly, I feared that rejection of meaning could be misunderstood as a lack of critical value, and that TonyPitony’s obscene texts would be seen as just offensive.

TonyPitony’s album cover!

It’s never too late to listen to him

Yet, I leveraged these fears to shape my post, and rejection of meaning and disgust became central to the analysis. Rather than treat the lack of meaning as inherently problematic, I looked for similarities in literature, finding TonyPitony, 67, and the Brainrot to be really adjacent to the modernist movement of Dada. As mentioned in the post: Tzara’s refusal to explain Dada because “[he] hate[s] common sense” (1) aligns with TonyPitony’s lyrics: in both cases, rejection is at the core of the action.” (Manini “TonyPitony”). Additionally, Dada’s inclusion of “every product of disgust” also helped me draw a connection between the movement and TonyPitony’s lyrics (Tzara qtd. in Manini “TonyPitony”). With its analysis, the post shows a new desire to follow my instincts more, despite possible fears and second-guesses.

I might be crazy, but I see so much similarity here!

“The Art Critic 1919-20 Raoul Hausmann 1886-1971 Purchased 1974.” Tate, www.tate.org.uk/art/work/T01918. “Italian brainrot: Do not read this article if you are over six: you won’t get it.” The Times, www.thetimes.com/us/news-today/article/ballerina-cappuccina-brain-rot-characters-tl8f62xw3.

As soon as I finished this post, we started working, during our EN6009 lectures, on creating an Open Access journal in class (the MA never stops!). For the specific assignment, my group decided to create The Reject Project, a collaborative space between our blogs, which encouraged us to work on ideas which might have been discarded otherwise.

The logo of The Reject Project, which we all inserted in our posts!

Logo by me and my Canva free trial (I have infinite emails)

I will not get into details of the specific post as it is part of another assignment (and I am aware of the policy of double submission!). Yet, looking at the Reject Project as a whole now, I see how important it was: the project reflects my attempts as a scholar to slowly leave my comfort zone by following ideas I might usually reject.

I know this post is veeeery long, so if you would like a break, enjoy some YouTube videos related to the texts I mentioned 🙂

Welcome Back!

A few paragraphs above, I mentioned how I attended Dr Laird’s seminar, but I could not write much about it at first. Well, it is never too late to work on something you had previously deemed too far away from your experience. While reading over my notes about Dr Laird’s seminar, I asked myself why the topic was not speaking to me. As I was running the possible answers through my mind, I could see the post shaping into my hands: maybe the tension and the perceived dissonance with the topic could be the object of my post…

When writing, I felt a tension between the ethics of leaving no trace and my own understanding of the distribution of climate change’s responsibility, together with my perceived desire for my generation to “make noise” in order to be heard when speaking about the urgency of climate change. Thus, the post ended up being more of a reflection about this dissonance.

“We must make noise, we must be loud, marching, posting, demanding, and show the impact of corporations on our environment. This tension does not have to be a flaw, but a little trampoline to start thinking about different reactions to climate change, such as withdrawal and visibility.” (Manini “Better Late Than Never”)

I had never really written a post questioning notions, so the reflection was an important step for me as it allowed me to connect the seminar, literature, and theory to my life and the incredibly far-reaching issue of climate change. Although I feared being misunderstood and the fact that my thoughts might not be worth writing about, I wrote it anyway, following my instinct. Perhaps I had the confidence I lacked in October, as I have developed the ability to trust my thoughts a bit more, take some risks, and peep outside my comfort zone.

As we enter the final stage of my scholarly development (during the MA, it will continue after that, I promise), I must mention my reflection on the Textualities 2026 mini-conference, which included such a wide range of postgraduate work that I found really engaging with questions of boundaries and experimentation. The event was enjoyable overall, although it created a kind of healthy discomfort.

As mentioned in the reflection, I found the PechaKucha format fairly challenging. As someone very comfortable working with more structured, lesson-format PowerPoints, and with taking her time while presenting (if you ask my students, they will tell you I am always running late), the Pecha Kucha’s format was not just unfamiliar, but also frustrating at times. However, discomfort is needed when learning something new; not everything needs to be easy, and the Pecha Kucha really forced me to explore the potential of pictures and the importance of pacing (and rehearsing) when presenting.

Me at the conference with the PechaKucha! We did it 🙂

Picture by my favourite, Jude

And, this experience perfectly connects with the trajectory of my blog (what a coincidence!). Looking back at the blog, I see how I have been gradually trying to move away from what feels safe, to go towards something more exploratory and unknown. The themes discussed during the conference, together with my reflection on their challenging boundaries, reflect this change.

The final post in the blog, as of now, is my analysis of Young Sherlock, which I believe represents an important moment of development throughout the MA. It is also one of my longest posts, reflecting the level of confidence I have reached in following my thoughts. In the post, I apply contrapuntal reading to the 2026 series, comparing it with my findings on The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes as well, to explore and raise questions on the presence of imperial structures in the contemporary text. The post circles back to my analysis of Alex Russo, as it uses theory to explore a more contemporary text.

“The show moves from the imperial centre to some peripheries, which, however, remain European. Although there is more movement compared to The Adventures, it must be remarked how this very movement is made possible by imperial networks and expansion, and it still reveals the underlying presence of the empire behind Sherlock’s mobility.” (Manini “Do You Also See”)

Nonetheless, the post is clearly different from my first one. Alongside Edward Said’s concept of contrapuntal reading, I started to use my own academic work, comparing Young Sherlock to The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes, using my recently submitted essay. Although quoting myself was unusual and a bit strange at first, doing it was of extreme importance to me. Throughout the blog, I had to learn to trust my thoughts and instincts; in this post, I started trusting my own academic voice, which was a significant step to make.

Thinking about the short, yet wonderful, evolution of PopLit, the main change is in my engagement with the material. Although I am constantly interested in popular culture, the blog pushed me around a bit, making me move towards an unknown territory, full of experimentation and risks. Despite the challenges, I do believe I slowly gained more confidence and trust in my reasoning, as I moved from familiar structures and themes to more instinctive posts, to even explore disagreement and quote myself! It might be banal, but PopLit changed my approach to literary analysis and interests.

PopLit is not only a space where I submitted assigned work, but also one where I was able to think, question, take risks, and grow as a scholar. The biggest risk will be now, after leaving the MA bubble: will I continue blogging? I would like to think I will. Trusting myself has been great.

(I’m not crying, I’ve just got a PopLit in my eye)