Disclosure. Warning: strong language.

[truepenny]

What it is I'm doing with the goddamn dis.

No one will be surprised to learn that it's the motherfucking secondary reading that's tripped me up. I hate writing about other people's theories, therefore I do it badly, therefore my committee insists that I must do more work with the critics, therefore my mood can accurately be depicted as a mushroom cloud.

The Introduction mostly needs paring down, and I chopped 20 pages out of it last night. But the Hamlet chapter is going to need rewriting, and more reading, and I'm starting to clench my teeth against the impulse to scream.

No, I have neither knowledge of nor interest in the contemporary scene in Shakespeare criticism. Which is a defect I was praying I'd be able to handwave. And I can't.

Motherfuck.

Comments

[wintersweet.livejournal.com]

Reason #98714 why I'm passing on going into East Asian lit for a PhD.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

No, I have neither knowledge of nor interest in the contemporary scene in Shakespeare criticism.

Probably very wisely...it seems to be a great flaming hoop that students are shunted towards with cracking whips. And not flaming in a fun way, either.

[libskrat]

That was going to be my precise suggestion.

Should you lack a fellow student, a subject-area librarian might prove an adequate substitute.

[barbary-coast.livejournal.com]

I sympathize. I had a similiar issue with This is one of the primary reasons why I didn't pursue a post-graduate degree. I learned that my postgrad program (in history) was essentially nothing more than an assessment of the existing contemporary theories; furthermore, I was to align myself with one of these and only publish in this selected vein for the rest of my academic career. That is to say, were I to have chosen to align myself with a feminist/socialist/etcerta-ist interpretation of history, I would have been expected to use only that slant on all of my future research and publishing. Bollocks to that.

[oursin.livejournal.com]

EEEEEUUUUWWW! And what was supposed to happen if some big paradigm-shifting theory came along? This model (identifying with a particular 'school') doesn't even work: there was a point in my field where you had to make at least ritual obeisance to Foucault (even if you weren't a thorough-going fundamentalist Foucauldian, gimme that ol' time discourse, it's good enough for me), and now people are saying, well, old Michel isn't the whole story, is he? Time and change are the essence of history. Otherwise one becomes Casaubon plugging away at his Key to Mythologies without even realising that he's stuck in a scholarly backwater.

Adding my sympathies to the pile by the door

[pbprincess.livejournal.com]

The academic hoop jumping was one of the things that frustrated me beyond belief in doing my M.A. in English up here (I went to Queen's, here in Canada). I was afraid if I went on that I'd start to hate reading altogether (which is what happened with my dad--hasn't read a real book in 30 years *shudders*)

And I can sympathize with the specifics of your problem too. Contemporary Shakespeare criticism is a giant pool in which to be thrown.
Have they been any more specific in the sorts of directions that they want you to explore? Because even if you're just dealing with Hamlet, that reading could take a while, as I'm sure you already know.
I'd ask your supervisors for specific essays/critics they think you might find fruitful.
If you're stuck, I do have a friend whose specific interest is theory and whose period used to be early modern (he's doing his Ph.D at Madison and just switched to 20th C) that I could link you up with for suggestions.

Best of luck.

Acedemia

[dmsherwood53.livejournal.com]

Wish I could rember the tome that stated clearly in the introduction that ALL the footnotes in this volume are completly useless and irelevant to the text but the author could not get the original papers published without a certain heft of scholarlyness so he's sorrry but he tried to make them amusing reading anyway.
PS Its TOWARDS A HISTOGRAPHY OF SCIENCE by Joseph Agassi if anyone cared

[oursin.livejournal.com]

I have spent more verbiage than I like to estimate, in my career as a scholar and a gentlewoman, giving unnecessary publicity to works I think are fundamentally misguided, in order to refute their badly-grounded arguments. Because otherwise people say, but what about X or Y's thesis on the subject, and unfortunately, the category 'utter crap' is not considered appropriate for academic discourse.