Week Twelve: Thesis Envy

Though I interpreted it as an order, I received some good advice this week: don’t work for a while. Edict or recommendation, I don’t care: I’m stopping working on my prospectus on Tuesday and not starting again until next weekend. I need a break. I started rereading Gravity’s Rainbow from page one this week, looking for some fresh perspective and new insight, but all endeavor’s really accomplished is to remind me that I’m dealing with a humongous novel to which I’m applying complicated theory that I don’t fully grasp. Instead of cracking the code, I’ve just made myself more anxious.

In the meeting this week, I discussed having too much to cover in my thesis: the Sublime, sex, paranoia, and a big-ass novel. I almost wonder if any thesis about Gravity’s Rainbow should be ventured at all. I don’t know how Seth makes dealing with Moby-Dick, to which Gravity’s Rainbow is the 20^th c. corollary, look so manageable. I’m itchy with envy right now.

To scale this project down to a reasonable scope, I find myself jettisoning things left and right. The conversation I had the other day focused on which form of the Sublime to abandon. Do I lose Kant or do I lose the postmodernists? I’m still wobbling on that decision. And while that quandary still hangs in the air, I need to shed additional matter. Do I lose paranoia or sex?

I mean, historically I’ve definitely had more of the former than the latter, but …

Week Eleven: Inspiration Disparity

I don’t have a wealth of things to write about this week. Having completed my prospectus conclusion, I assembled all of my prospectus bits the other night. I laid them out on my kitchen table, page after page. Eight and a half pages. Seems somehow meager, even if the whole shebang only requires forty pages. I plan on revisiting my rough (but existing) prospectus one more time before taking Dr. Christie’s advice and scrapping everything. Recreating the prospectus from memory will be my Saturday/Sunday project.

I’ve been thinking a lot this week about how many of my classmates have read my work this semester. I’m kind of weirded out by it. I didn’t start feeling this way until I reflected on it the other night, but I feel naked. Not intellectually naked – I don’t feel stripped down in any greater existential sense, but I do feel exposed.

The “workshopping” element to the class has revealed my work ethic, if not my very capability. And standing next to some of the minds in this semester’s 8001, I feel as if I’ve squandered the opportunity be goaded, driven by some of my classmates.

Seth, in particular, is doing a masterful job of putting his prospectus together, and every time I read his work, I feel a combination of regret, envy, fascination, and –greatest – respect. Too, Sally obviously heeds some inner compulsion that not flagged yet, even this late in the semester.

I’m tired. I need some of whatever they’re drinking.

Week Ten: Half-assing it

In addition to taking 8001, I’m also enrolled in Dr. Thomas’s Beckett, Bersani, Badiou class – an interesting class consisting mostly of theory with a smattering of fiction. The class has two requirements (besides the tacit requisite that we attend class regularly: a presentation and a final paper. 50/50.

This week, I presented on the relation of Beckett’s fiction to the Kantian and postmodern sublime, and to be honest, I’m pretty proud of myself. I’m not gloating over having done an amazing job presenting, however. Instead, I’m taking some pride in having finally learned what I assume to be a necessity of grad school life: manipulation of previous, concurrent, and future assignments into discrete projects.

After a year and a half of busting my ass and (typically) trying to run in multiple directions at once, I made life a little easier on myself by adapting my thesis work into a presentation for Dr. Thomas’s class. While researching my Pynchon thesis, I noted Beckett’s work brought up frequently, both as reference point for the postmodern sublime and as an influence on Pynchon’s work. So, using the groundwork that I’ve done on the Pynchonian sublime, I built my Beckett presentation.

I felt as if I were taking the easy way out at first – half-assing it – but not only do I now feel as if I created a well-researched presentation, I also think that my further research for the project helped me get a better sense of what I need to my thesis.

My other big development this week is that Dr. Thomas agreed to read for me. I feel as if I’m assembling a dream team; this must be what successful fantasy football players feel like.

The semester is creeping to a close, and I feel pretty good.

Week Nine: Honest Abe

I’m wondering what this prospectus of mine is going to look like once I finally get done with it. It seems so distant at this point that I have a hard time imagining the final result. That we’re approaching the project piecemeal is a relief; the idea of having to produce in one fulsome chunk a ten-page, blueprint-like document from which our entire thesis will (supposedly) emerge – that’s overwhelming.

My concern now relates to our discussion in class Wednesday night. Say that this prospectus is a parfait. How much fruit? How much cream? Of what size should their respective strata be?

The idea that the prospectus be organic is a little intimidating. It reminds me of the saw about Abraham Lincoln (which can’t possibly be true). Apparently, someone once asked our 16^th president how tall a man should be. Lincoln putatively replied, “Tall enough for his feet to touch the ground.”

Whatever.

My literature review, then, certainly touches the ground. I’ve been using my annotated bibliography essay, a four-page document, as a starting point, but so far, all I’ve managed to do is transform a (what I considered to be) pithy paper into a six-and-a-half-page behemoth. Concision, perhaps, is not my strong point.

The project for the weekend is to reselect the texts that I intend to address, to concoct a “conversation” based upon those that have most direct relevance to me, and to put the other sources off to the side. The problem with my strategy – the one that inflated the size of my annotated bibliography – is that I’m trying to incorporate too broad a swathe of information. The stuff that doesn’t make the cut into my literature review is not necessarily unusable, just not crucial.

I imagine that once I begin hewing my seven-page monster, I’ll discover an organic length.

Week Eight: Before Pride Cometh...

So, the prospectus introduction exercise was helpful. I didn’t feel particularly filled with pride or confidence when it was over, but it was helpful. I suppose that feeling intensely deflated can contribute to your betterment. I remember arguing with this jockish lunkhead back in high school, thinking he was a total idiot, feeling confident that I could get away with insulting him publically – that he was too stupid to realize that he was being disparaged. He wasn’t, and I got punched in the mouth.

Hubris is what the Greeks called it right?

Well, I’ve been suffering, then, from academic hubris.

Even though I wrote my introduction in a cough-syrupy haze, I felt really confident about it. I was particularly proud of my first paragraph, of how I introduced the idea of postmodernism by discussing the very confusion about Pynchon’s identity. I am a relentless self-second guesser, but here, even drugged, I felt good about what I’d written.

When we received the rubric the other night, however, I realized that my introduction was not, as the kids say, all that. Perhaps it wasn’t even some of that.

One of my biggest problems, I think (as do others), my lack of clarity in establishing the problem that my thesis addresses. I’m also having trouble providing an adequate “so what” for my paper. It seems to me that establishing the problem and offering a justification for the thesis are closely related; it might be hard to do one without the other. Maybe that’s why I’ve done neither so far.

I’m not sure to what degree we’re married to these introductions, but mine needs a lot of work.

Week Seven: Vapor-rub Smeared Pages

Being sick is a drag, particularly when you’re trying to be lucid and productive and reasonably energetic. I few weeks ago a friend of mine invited me out to celebrate an accomplishment of his. When I bailed on his little soiree after an hour, he made some guilt-provoking comment about my failure to party adequately. My response was something like this:

“I’m in grad school. I don’t have time to not be in my right mind.”

The same goes for being sick. I have spent so much time focusing on the all of the formal requirements of this degree that I sometimes forget what a balancing act the rest of my life has become. The cold I've acquired this week and the time I've spent trying to restfully squelch it has caused me a little worry. What if I get a big-ass cold?

This is my regular schedule: I wake up around 5:45 during the week, arrive at my job by 7:00, begin teaching at 8:10 and stop around 3:10. Mondays, Tuesdays, and Wednesdays, I have class in the afternoons and evenings, so I typically don’t get home until 9:00 or after. The downtime – whatever that is – I spend doing homework, grading papers, researching, doing assignments. Occasionally, I get to exercise or cook dinner.

I’m not complaining, mind you. I signed up for this haul, and I’d much rather have too much to do than too little. I know that several of my classmates have families and babies. I do not. I have cats and a voluminous record collection, neither of which beg for tremendous amounts of attention.

I’m working on my first assignment for Dr. Thomas’ theory class – a presentation on Beckett. Originally, I had the idea to examine the language of the ineffable in Beckett’s work, the good ol’ mystical via negativa. I’d done a good deal of research and was beginning an outline when I started feeling under the weather the other day. That’s when the idea to multitask struck me. I don’t know why I’d never thought of it before.

Historically, when I take a number of classes at once, I allow myself to become pulled in several directions at once. I simply don’t have the time to be pulled like that (or to be sick). So, I fell back on the books I’m using for my thesis, my examination of the sublime in Gravity’s Rainbow. It’s a simple switch; I can even use some of the material from the original Beckett presentation. The epiphany is that I can allow other assignments to contribute to the development of my thesis, either in composition or research.

Perhaps it’s not the biggest deal in the world, but it gives me time to have a sore throat when my throat insists on being sore. I can take cold medicine without guilt or panic.

Week Six: Pomo Pervs

Things are finally beginning to take shape. After becoming attached to a thesis early in the semester, I totally abandoned it and started over.

Now, I’m thankful for the process and for what I learned. My original thesis required me to read a lot of queer theory, an area of criticism to which I hadn’t had much exposure. So, even though I don’t intent to salvage any part of my original thesis, I’m happy that I had the opportunity to read Bodies That Matter and Gender Trouble closely; I don’t know that I would have read them (and like texts) had I not felt the pressure of my thesis weighing down upon me.

My current – and last, dammit! – thesis sees me return to my favorite author, Thomas Pynchon (who should have won the Nobel Prize this week), and his novel, Gravity’s Rainbow.

I had a fantastic conversation with Dr. Kocela earlier this week, and not only did he agree to be my adviser, but he also provided me some much needed direction on whittling my thesis down to manageable size. I moved from “the sublime and Gravity’s Rainbow” to something much more specific. I’m going to be researching the convergence of paranoia, sexual perversity, and the postmodern sublime in Gravity’s Rainbow. That specific enough?

I scrambled to assemble this week’s annotated bibliography in the wake of my meeting with Kocela, and I was a frustrated that I could find little in the way of clear “conversation” lineage discussing my topic. At best, it looks as if I will have to pick up a couple of threads and try to stitch them together.

I suppose that I shouldn’t really be complaining; I could find literally nothing about my previous topic. Now I just need to start manufacturing something (besides piles of books on and around my kitchen table). This may be an impossible dream, but I’d actually like to get ahead and not feel the stress of last minute writing.