actual dissertation progress!
May. 2nd, 2003 11:20 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
truepennyOkay, 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.
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.
