actual dissertation progress!

[truepenny]

Okay, not a lot of progress, but.

Yesterday I gave the cultural history chapter to the godlike committee member. Also gave my director a draft of the introduction. Today, I cleaned up the smorgasbord chapter (5 plays from the 1590s to the 1630s) and put the necessary bits of Marjorie Garber's chapter on Richard III in Shakespeare's Ghost Writers into my section on Richard. Am debating now whether to go fall asleep over her chapter on Hamlet or try to do some expansion on the sections about Jacobean plays (The Atheist's Tragedy, The Changeling, The Revenger's Tragedy) because goodness knows they need it.


I think I am inspired in my academia today by the talk HL and I attended yesterday (see her post on hair gel, peanut M&Ms, and ice-cream for tangential reference to same). Not so much by the talk itself, which was about Elizabethan prose and not relevant to my own work, but by the discussion afterwards, in which I was brought abruptly face-to-face with the fact that my ABD in early modern English lit. hasn't been all about the fancy footwork and the dazzling smile. From a standing start, I can talk about things like Mary Herbert and the metrical Psalms; Sir Philip Sidney's experience of Elizabethan court politics; the Protestant mindset about a post-Lapsarian world and post-Lapsarian literature (and how Sidney's project in the Old Arcadia resonates with the thematic arc of revenge tragedy); the Euphuistic tradition in Elizabethan prose. And not only do I sound like I know what I'm talking about, I DO know what I'm talking about. And that's really fucking weird.

I've been feeling recently, as I do the secondary reading to make this dissertation decent to go out and meet the grown-ups (or, more often, not doing the secondary reading), like a fraud. Partly, this is because of my decision not to continue in academia; if you're getting the Ph.D. and bailing, whispers a treacherous voice from the dark closets of the underconscious, why are you bothering to get the Ph.D.? Partly it's the fact that I hate and am bored by the process of doing the secondary reading, which means that I have been getting very little work done over the past couple months. Real scholars adore their work, right? They live, breathe, and eat their research 24/7. They don't waste time with LiveJournal posts and reading novels and watching TV shows and surfing the web and the unspeakable indulgence of writing something as crass and plebeian as genre fiction. That's not how real scholars behave at all. (I can hear you laughing in the back. Go on, go get a drink of water before you choke.) Whereas with the secondary reading, I know it's necessary, but I resent it. And that's surely not the attitude of an upright and honorable scholar. That's the attitude of a lazy, smartass punk who's only gotten this far on innate brains and arrogance. If I were really worthy (insists that same treacherous voice), I would have been doing the secondary reading all along, like normal people do. And then I wouldn't be in this hole.

Which, of course, is nonsense. I'd be in a much deeper and nastier hole, with water oozing in, because if I'd been doing the secondary reading as I went along, I wouldn't have gone anywhere. But the treacherous voices from the underconscious never care about stuff like that.

So I've been feeling, not quite consciously, like a fraud. And then yesterday, I got this reminder that I'm not really a fraud at all. And that has made me feel like working again.


Vindice is smirking at me. I must go to meet him.

Comments

[stakebait.livejournal.com]

That's the attitude of a lazy, smartass punk who's only gotten this far on innate brains and arrogance.

Which is, really, far more interesting.

C'mon. Do you wanna watch a movie about someone extraordinarily diligent and compliant, or a smartass punk with innate brains and arrogance? Which would you actually date, if both gave your their phone number? (or maybe that's just my disorder)? And -- here's the kicker -- whose class would you rather take?

I'd go for innate brains and arrogance every time. Because it means you're more likely to have a critical perspective of your own -- more likely to create a school of thought or defiantly contradict it or (less likely to grab the brass ring, but just as admirable) ignore it and do your own thing, than to attach yourself to its coattails and churn out a bunch of uninspired papers applying someone else's theory A to someone else's creative product B.

You're also more likely to turn those innate brains onto whatever I say in the classroom or the homework, as opposed to being stumped whenever you encounter an idea you haven't swotted up on. And arrogance, however problematic in dating, plays very nicely across a lecturn or, within reason, the pages of a thesis or a journal.

I do realize you're not planning to stay in academe, but if you're judging yourself on how well you play in that arena, I'd say -- pretty damned well, by the sounds of it. Of course you need to do the secondary reading, so that you don't accidentally reinvent the wheel and you have people to argue with, which always produces ideas. But I don't see why you have to like it.

*Nobody* likes all of their work equally, everybody, regardless of job, has the stuff they just have to slog through to get to the good bits. For some people, it's teaching, or grading papers. For some its conferences and schmoozing. For some its the writing process. So for you its reading the secondary sources, so what?

Do you know *any* Real Scholars like that? And if you did, did they strike you as well-adjusted?

I do realize I'm after the fair, since you've had an epiphany all on your own, but I just had to speak up on behalf of lazy smartasses everywhere. :)

Oh, and hi. I'm Mer. I friended you because you say nice things about Dorothy Sayers and you watch Buffy.

Mer

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Oh, I'm not leaving the ivory tower because of the secondary reading. I'm leaving because I hate teaching. And I don't mean I dislike teaching. I mean I hate it. Every time I wonder if I'm doing the right thing in bailing, I imagine how I'd feel if I had to start a teaching gig next week. Nothing like a reality check for affirmation of one's principles.

I'm also leaving academia because what I want to do is write fiction, and what academia does (to me--I realize this is not what happens to everyone) is suck out all my creative energy, not unlike a vampire.

I agree with you about the much greater value of brains and a judicious helping of arrogance than painstaking attention to what everyone else has said. I always have. It's just that I don't think, on some lower level of my brain where we've kissed logic good-bye, that I ought to be allowed to apply it to myself. Cognitive dissonance. Fucked-uppedness. Grad student. Go figure.

[pameladean]

"'I sometimes wonder whether I am a scholar at all,' said Miss Lydgate."

You haven't her particular affliction -- you certainly do not get muddled when you put it all down on paper -- but everybody has some affliction or other. I bailed out of academia because I hated, hated, hated teaching and was terrible at it, and you can't get a Ph.D., can't just study literature peaceably, if you don't teach. There is, or was, absolutely no provision for it.

Even when I was there, I liked other people's secondary reading better than mine. That is, if it wasn't the topic at hand, I thought the secondary reading was fascinating.

Just saying.

Pamela

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Even when I was there, I liked other people's secondary reading better than mine. That is, if it wasn't the topic at hand, I thought the secondary reading was fascinating.

You suffer from that, too? Oh good. Because, yes, I can read anything so long as it's not what I'm supposed to be reading. And it breaks down in increments. E.g., Five and Eighty Hamlets is singing to me right now because my dissertation, while it has a Hamlet chapter, is not really about Hamlet in 20th century performance. Whereas the thing I should be reading I am shunning as if it had the mark of Cain stamped on its cover. And that doesn't even begin to address all the things I want to research that aren't related to my dissertation at all.

It's things like this that tell my my operating system is really just a beta-test.

[vass]

She also tells Harriet how glad she is that her students have gone out in the world and done such interesting and varied things, if I remember correctly. I thought of that passage reading Truepenny's post.

[oracne.livejournal.com]

They don't waste time with LiveJournal posts and reading novels and watching TV shows and surfing the web and the unspeakable indulgence of writing something as crass and plebeian as genre fiction. That's not how real scholars behave at all. (I can hear you laughing in the back.

BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

I get LOTS of use out of my MA. I use it to write crappy genre fiction!!!

BWAHAHAHAH...[goes off to get drink of water]

[naomichana.livejournal.com]

*wipes tears of mirth from eyes* At one point does one qualify as a "real scholar"? I don't have tenure yet, but I am on the tenure track (and am semi-convinced that my ability to discuss Buffy coherently got me where I am today). My research is pretty damn cool, and I would often go so far as to say I adore it, but it is neither edible nor breathable. I would go stark, raving mad if I tried to do nothing but research, and so would most people -- not to mention the support staff (previously the "faculty wife") who would be required to keep me alive and socially acceptable if I did nothing but research.

Everyone feels like a fraud on some level; graduate school nourishes these feelings. However, in a grad-school context, said feelings are usually wrong and pretty much always counterproductive. If someone could figure out a way to instil intellectual self-confidence into graduate students, it would be the greatest improvement to the system since the development of the seminar. Definitely remember to reread the post you just wrote next time the little voices start up again. :)

[truepenny.livejournal.com]

Thank you. Very very much.

It isn't something that bothers me deeply, just another outlet for the deep frustration of I want to be done! butting heads with I don't want to do the work! Which I think is the state of mind dissertations are designed to engender