dispatch: Bussy gets the axe

[truepenny]

So my insomnia dropped by for a chat last night. And one of the many things I realized while sitting up 'til 2 a.m. is that there's no reason on this green earth or any other that Chapman's Bussy plays should be in this dissertation. They add nothing, and it does me no good to succumb to Bowers syndrome and talk about them merely because I've read them. They don't add anything to the argument of the chapter, and if they were to add anything to the argument of the dissertation, I'd have to talk about Seneca's philosophy, rather than just his plays, and I have been conspicuous heretofore by my lack of interest in doing same. So Bussy's outta here.

I also did some triage, since I now have approximately two months before my self-imposed deadline to hand the fucking thing over, and my To Do list has been revised. Thus:

1. finish the morality section


2. bundle morality section up with big wodge of text (that's a technical term) on psychoanalytic criticism and audience-response stuff and make it a section in the introduction on Reading Revenge Tragedy.


3. Reread Atheist.


4. Write Atheist section.


5. Reread Changeling.


6. Write Changeling section.


7. Reread Revengers.


8. Finish Revengers section.


9. Lit search for crit. on 2nd Maiden.


10. Read articles on 2nd Maiden.


11. Integrate quotes from all secondary reading thus far.


12. Write a conclusion--you know, actually concluding things from the rest of the argument.

At that point, the dissertation will have a kind of bare bones completeness to it, in that every section will be written and will have at least some stab at a critical apparatus. I will then take a look at the calendar and see how much time I have left for other things like doing MORE secondary reading; adding sections to the conclusion about Equus and Le Pacte des Loups; finding John Marston's Antonio's Revenge and seeing if I have more relevant things to say about it than I do about the Bussy plays. (I really want the Elizabethan chapter to have three plays, but finding something that rounds out an argument made by The Spanish Tragedy and Richard III is not so easy as one might at first be led to suppose.) But, I realized last night, I'm to the point where I'd better have the entire skeleton assembled before I worry about putting more flesh on the bones.

Comments

[oracne.livejournal.com]

That actually sounds manageable.

Of course, I don't have to do it.

[rysmiel.livejournal.com]

There must be a suitable line about Bussy slayers in here somewhere, but my head is full of sequence quality control statistics right now, which is a very marginal improvement over being full of mucus.