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.

Week Five: In Which I Take the "Dead" Out of "Deadline"

This week has been a tale of two states of mind.

On Sunday, I was freaking out about as hard as I ever freak out. I was consumed with the thought that after three consecutive semesters of success, I could no longer manage teaching full-time and going to school. I was in danger of becoming a crappy teacher. I was threatening to become a sloppy student.

Much of this worry stemmed from some conversations I’d had with classmates who given me information about our grad program that I was hearing for the first time.

“Yeah, if you’re planning on graduating in spring, you should already have your committee formed by now.”

“There’s so much paperwork that you have to fill out and so many professors that you have to chase down that you might be better off just postponing your graduation to summer semester.”

“You’re screwed, dude.”

And that’s why, after hearing all these rumors of war, Wednesday’s night 8001 class was the most valuable that we’ve had this semester. I felt that, for the first time ever (not even at orientation), I was receiving information about hard deadlines. Not necessarily the date of these deadlines, but the fact that hard deadlines did actually exist, hypothetically.

As is obvious to everyone by now, the emailing en masse to Ms. Brooks brought us some quick clarity. Sometimes all you gotta do is ask a question.

So, the easy part is over now. The assumptions that I’ve made about deadlines in the master’s program were incorrect. I have to hustle. I have to find an advisor, assemble a committee, do a hell of a lot more research, write a proposal, and make sure that all of this happens soon.

I was under the impression that I had seven more months to write my thesis; I have five. But all of this disillusionment is a good thing. I know what’s up. I know what I have to do and by when it needs to be done. I have an enormous amount of work to accomplish in much less time than I figured, and for some reason, I feel more self-assured than I have in months.

Week Four: God and Other Problems

After spending about two and a half months working myself up into a good (and wildly frustrated) lather over my thesis, figuratively banging my head against walls, and trying to figure out how I can tie in H. P. Lovecraft with queer theory, I think that I’m giving up. The other night in Dr. Thomas’ theory class, it occurred to me – in the same way it suddenly occurs to you that you’ve had a splitting headache for the past two hours – that I was uncomfortable with my pursuit. I still love Lovecraft, and I’m still intrigued with queer theory, but I find myself wanting to return to more familiar grounds.

I read a biography of T.S. Eliot when I was a senior in high school, and I remember one particular passage. Eliot was discussing his Christian upbringing in relation to the period in his young adulthood when participated in other religions. He said something like this: “I’m seeing what the world has to say about the matter of spirituality, and I’m participating in those global rituals, but I know that at the end of my life, when death and possible salvation lie near, I’ll return to kiss the cross.” Of course, Eliot died an Anglican.

Well, here, I’m about to kiss the cross again.

My undergraduate degree was in Religious Studies, and every time I read a text, I unintentionally focus on how religiosity and sex operate in work.

But religion trumps sex. I want to draw upon my experience as an undergrad, and I can do that more easily writing about religion than I can sexuality.

The question now becomes what to focus on. A week ago, I was happy to examine late Victorian texts, but now that I’ve broadened my focus to include religious studies, I think about studying Thomas Pynchon or Herman Melville or James Joyce or Simone Weil or Hart Crane or a bunch of other writers who smack of mystical influence.

For the first time in a while, I’m feeling inspired. Why do I feel so horrible about ditching an unproductive thesis topic?

Week Three: Academic Manscaping

I conceived the idea for my thesis last semester after writing a paper for Dr. Galchinsky’s Victorian Lit class. My essay addressed a pair of short stories, one by Oscar Wilde, and the other by his contemporary (and confederate), Vernon Lee. I claimed that the supernatural events in Lee and Wilde’s work were a representation of repressed “queerness,” the stories’ characters closeted reflections of their creators’ outsider status. While working on my paper, I was reminded of a few short stories from the same period – Algernon Blackwood’s “The Willows” and Arthur Machen’s “The Great God Pan” – stories that lent themselves to queer analysis, stories that pivoted upon premises of the supernatural. Once I made that connection, I became excited about drawing parallels between (what H.P. Lovecraft deemed) “weird” fiction and fiction with “queer” inflections. I was off to the races.

But here’s the problem: as fascinated as I am with the intersection of the “queer” and the “weird,” my search for scholarship is coming up goose eggs.

I spoke with Dr. Galchinsky a few days ago, and while he validated many of my ideas, he also pointed me in several new directions. Any scholarship on Blackwood and Machen is scarce, but queer scholarship on other writers of the period is bountiful. Thomas Hardy, William James, J. S. LeFanu and other Victorian authors have been subjects of countless efforts of queer scholarship. Galchinsky’s suggestion: perhaps discuss one of these established authors before drawing parallels to the esoteric writers I intend to address.

Later that night, in the library, I found myself unsteady beneath a wobbling tower of books, each one contributing to the “introduction” of my thesis argument. I began researching James, Doyle, Hardy, and the like, but I soon felt discouraged and overwhelmed.

I was reminded of the episode of Seinfeld in which George Costanza decides to trim his chest hair. He confesses to Jerry that he’s totally depilated his body; once he began the trimming process, he couldn’t figure out where to stop. I have a terrible feeling that I’m going to find myself like George, unable to locate an appropriate stopping point, denuding myself of sanity.

Week Two: I Am a Rock. That's All. Just a Rock.

After Wednesday night’s class (and our discussion of the Robbins article), the importance of the “so what” question began to weigh on me. The class was edifying, but a little discouraging. I feel pretty ignorant and egotistical, actually.

Originally, the justification for my own research was self-serving – and that felt adequate. Screw the fill-in-the-blank exercises, I would have said a semester ago. I am researching my thesis topic because it’s compelling to me. Isn’t that enough? If you need a more academic justification for my work, then I’ll whip one up, but (shhhh – don’t tell anyone) I’ll confess this: my justification, while believable and defensible, will be arbitrary.

I’m not thinking that way anymore.

I can’t fake my way through the dance steps. In becomes increasingly apparent to me that I can’t retrofit my research to my justification. I have to figure out what my desire to complete this specific thesis means. Until now, my attitude towards my degree has been entirely too insular; this is what Robbins has taught me. My work, regardless of my intent, has political repercussions.

Like a messed-up Russian doll, my personal academic interests lie at the core of my work, but enveloping those interests is the politics of the English department. Encompassing that, I have to be concerned with the politics of English within the greater context of the humanities. Once I decide that my ideas deserve to be brought to life through research, my work has to continue to fight for existence in progressively vast fields of knowledge. I find that prospect terribly intimidating.

My answer to the “so what” question cannot be satisfactory only to myself, but must struggle to thrive among a host of people whom I never even knew were my audience. Even academics who never come in contact with my work (or anything approaching it) will participate in this “game,” this cycle of tension and release between the disparate fields vying for funding. I do not exist at the center of an academic universe; I am an insignificant rock among millions.

This is the most recent in a series of dark epiphanies.

Week One: Theory and Balance

In consideration of the Jonathan Culler article, I’ve been thinking about the balance I will have to strike in gathering critical materials. I know that my thesis – as nascent as it is – revolves around the idea that we can read H.P. Lovecraft’s “weird” fiction as “queer” fiction. My anxiety-provoking question is this: exactly how much queer theory do I have digest before I can make a compelling argument?

My first, cursory searches for queer readings of “weird” fiction have yielded almost nothing – and, in a way, the absence of scholarship excites me. Do I get to be a pioneer? Could I win this miniature genre wider scholarly appreciation? On the other hand, I wonder if no queer criticism of “weird” fiction exists because the application of queer theory is artificial and forced.

If I can find no (or few) critical assessments of “weird” fiction, how far can I stretch queer theory in general, the works of Eve Sedgwick and Judith Butler, who never even issued a glance towards my textual area of interest? I worry about creating a Frankenstein’s monster of sorts. I’ve read criticism of late Victorian supernatural fiction, and I’m familiar with a smattering of queer theory, but how can I guarantee, in the absence of more direct criticism of my texts, an agreeable marriage? I know that the onus is largely on me, at least in the sense that I have to provide harmonious rhetoric. My main anxiety (un)rests in the discrete essences of queer theory and “weird” fiction. What if their profound incompatibility is obvious to everyone but me?

These are the things currently keeping me up at night.