disaffected
Aug. 24th, 2003 09:49 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyFinished reading Stephen Greenblatt's Hamlet in Purgatory. Fascinating in bits, interesting in parts, tedious in places. I am, I admit it, a freak for close-reading, and close-reading is not one of Greenblatt's great skills. He's brilliant at the New Historicist gesture he himself coined, the linking of a literary text to a cultural one, but reading the text is not really what he's about.
But he said some very useful things about Hamlet, and I had to read him anyway (because he's Stephen Greenblatt and he's writing about something related to my dissertation topic). So it's good to have that out of the way. Now I just have to integrate him into the Hamlet chapter, and possibly a couple other places.
I'm starting to get worried about that whole when I finish the dissertation idea. I've been working on this thing--or avoiding working on this thing--since 1999. Since 1996 I've been making my way up the ziggurat of my department's degree program. What the fuck am I going to do with myself when I'm done?
On one level, I know the answer to that: I'm going to write. And if I don't get lucky and sell a novel soon, I'm going to have to get some kind of job, as well. But that's not quite what I mean. This dissertation has been a part of how I think about who I am for four years--and the idea of the dissertation has been skulking about the edges of my psyche for years before that. I don't even know how long, because I don't remember exactly when, in my youthful ignorance and naïveté, I decided I wanted to get a Ph.D. It was well before I really knew what it entailed; I know that. It could be as much as fifteen years.
It's been a long, tedious, stressful, sometimes hateful process, but it's there, like the doorframe I walk into maybe twice a month. If the doorframe weren't there, I wouldn't walk into it--but then the house would fall down.
I don't think the house is going to fall down when the doorframe of the Ph.D. is gone, but I do think it may totter a little. I know it's going to feel very weird. It will be the first time in my life since the age of four, when I started kindergarten, when I don't know what the next hoop is I need to jump through. I think one reason I've stayed in school so long is that I'm very good at jumping through hoops, and I'm comfortable with it. That's not a virtue, any more than it's a defect. It's just part of the way I got put together.
I don't want to jump through academic hoops any more. I don't want to jump through hoops at all. But if I'm not going to jump through hoops, if I'm not going to let the lion-tamer's whip motivate me, what do I do with myself aside from sit around and scratch my fleas? Is the writing going to be enough work for my massively over-clocked brain?
I don't know. I guess I'll find out when I finish the dissertation.
But he said some very useful things about Hamlet, and I had to read him anyway (because he's Stephen Greenblatt and he's writing about something related to my dissertation topic). So it's good to have that out of the way. Now I just have to integrate him into the Hamlet chapter, and possibly a couple other places.
I'm starting to get worried about that whole when I finish the dissertation idea. I've been working on this thing--or avoiding working on this thing--since 1999. Since 1996 I've been making my way up the ziggurat of my department's degree program. What the fuck am I going to do with myself when I'm done?
On one level, I know the answer to that: I'm going to write. And if I don't get lucky and sell a novel soon, I'm going to have to get some kind of job, as well. But that's not quite what I mean. This dissertation has been a part of how I think about who I am for four years--and the idea of the dissertation has been skulking about the edges of my psyche for years before that. I don't even know how long, because I don't remember exactly when, in my youthful ignorance and naïveté, I decided I wanted to get a Ph.D. It was well before I really knew what it entailed; I know that. It could be as much as fifteen years.
It's been a long, tedious, stressful, sometimes hateful process, but it's there, like the doorframe I walk into maybe twice a month. If the doorframe weren't there, I wouldn't walk into it--but then the house would fall down.
I don't think the house is going to fall down when the doorframe of the Ph.D. is gone, but I do think it may totter a little. I know it's going to feel very weird. It will be the first time in my life since the age of four, when I started kindergarten, when I don't know what the next hoop is I need to jump through. I think one reason I've stayed in school so long is that I'm very good at jumping through hoops, and I'm comfortable with it. That's not a virtue, any more than it's a defect. It's just part of the way I got put together.
I don't want to jump through academic hoops any more. I don't want to jump through hoops at all. But if I'm not going to jump through hoops, if I'm not going to let the lion-tamer's whip motivate me, what do I do with myself aside from sit around and scratch my fleas? Is the writing going to be enough work for my massively over-clocked brain?
I don't know. I guess I'll find out when I finish the dissertation.
