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.
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