8 May 2008¶ Why I'm not yet sleeping, or the bureaucratic bane
I’m fiddling around here, feeling somewhat guilt about not working directly on my program of study which I should have had done yesterday and today I’m still not yet finished. Why not? Because I’m not. Because I can’t seem to get my head around writing something that describes the world of early modern literature in a broad way that makes any sense in just three paragraphs. I keep defaulting to talking about my research, my questions, my issues because I don’t really think about early modern literature much, just about specific parts of early modern literature.
My program of study has three prose parts,1 each of which are only about a page long. The latter two — one of which describes my “field list” and the other describes what I think my dissertation might be about — are pretty easy for me. The first one, the one that I describe above, is driving me nuts. Every time I sit down to write it — and it’s just a page, one lousy page! — I wind up writing about my specific interests: families, domestic space, conduct books, paternity, religious ritual.
It should be the easy stuff. Why am I struggling so much with the easy stuff? Because deep down, I think, I feel some resentment towards this document. It’s busywork. I do it because the university requires it, and perhaps this page makes sense for some studying, oh I dunno, say lesbian chicana literature. Does that require some justification and description? Probably. But does anyone really question the validity of studying early modern literature? Isn’t Shakespeare sufficiently validated to skip this justifying step? Apparently not. And so I’m bitter towards it and towards the university and I’m writing this blog post rather than it. Maybe I’ll try my trick of distancing myself from y work by writing with loud music playing.
Is this a blog post that serves any purpose other than to give me a (quiet) social space in which I can complain and perhaps reveal my own inadequacies? No, none. You bet that when the time comes to do some job hunting that I’ll delete this one; yes, you betcha.
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1 Prose is not the word I want to use here. What’s the word I’m looking for here? It starts with the letters ex- and is used to describe an essay. Why can’t I come up with it? extemporaneous? No.
When I’m doing my own writing, my work that’s never intended for other people to see, I use lots of footnotes for this kind of thing. I’ll ask “is this true? better check” or “Why isn’t this working?” in addition to questions about the content itself. I should probably take out this footnote, but that might ruin some of the fun.
expository.
— renaissance girl · May 8, 11:57 PM · #
excuses?
— Arianne · Jun 3, 02:53 PM · #