disquisition

[truepenny]

PLAYER. I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory--they're all blood, you see.

--Tom Stoppard
  Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Act One

I don't know if dissertations get to have epigraphs, but if they do, this one is mine.

Haven't worked on the dis since Friday, when I finished reading the Rabinowitz. Just now got all the quotes I need into my monstrously large quote file and have flagged the two places in the introduction where Rabinowitz needs to go. Find myself daunted by the prospect of taking the thing apart sufficiently to integrate him, and so have decided to stop there.

Also v. v. tired. Shall hope to find my groove again tomorrow or Tuesday.

*sigh*

Comments

That--

[matociquala.livejournal.com]

--is my all-time favourite line from anywhere.

And my motto, when it comes to fiction *g*

Sleeep!

[maureenkspeller.livejournal.com]

I don't see why a dissertation shouldn't have an epigraph, and this one seems highly appropriate in the circumstances.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

I think you should use it, or at least submit it and hope.

I'm still peeved that the line from Moby Dick:

"It is by endless subdivisions based upon the most inconclusive differences, that some departments of natural history become so repellingly intricate."

did not occur to me in time to be the quote for my PhD thesis, which was about building tools to do evolutionary/taxonomic work with ribosomal RNA.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

And now I'm peeved on your behalf, because that's a wonderful quote.

[monanotlisa.livejournal.com]

PLAYER. I can do you blood and love without the rhetoric, and I can do you blood and rhetoric without the love, and I can do you all three concurrent or consecutive, but I can't do you love and rhetoric without the blood. Blood is compulsory--they're all blood, you see.

--Tom Stoppard
Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, Act One

Have always loved that quote...

[oracne.livejournal.com]

Brought up the Rabinowitz theory of authorial audience at the Frodo panel. People on the panel seemed to like the idea. Not sure if it influenced discussion after that, or not.

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Rabinowitz is actually even more complicated than this (but he doesn't lauch the third term until later in the book than I had gotten when I posted). He posits three audiences: the actual audience, authorial audience, and narrative audience. The narrative audience is the one within the book, if that makes any sense--the audience the narrator is writing for, for whom the novel is actually history. He remarks that the distance between authorial and narrative audience is one way to judge the "realism" or lack thereof of a book.

(The best example of narrative audience I can think of is in papersky's new book, where there are a couple of moments where it becomes perfectly obvious that the narrative audience, like the characters, are dragons.)

It's a really cool theory; I'm still assimilating it into my thought processes.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

I think I have to read this book. Even though I thought I would never read a theory book again after Derrida...