As my dear friends know, I am nine months into my Ph.D. program at Aberystwyth University (formerly University of Wales, Aberystwyth). UK programs don't tend to have the post-master's coursework requirements that we have here in the U.S., so I'm jumping right into the dissertation (or "thesis" as it's called there). In some ways, this is great because I get to do my own thing straight away. But in some ways it's not so great because I'm really on my own as I try to learn enough to be an expert. I imagine this will all take me five or so more years since I have full-time job and the two kiddie-poos!
In early summer, I wrote about 5000 words for my supervisor (who is awesome) that outlined the central part of my argument, but now the real work begins. I'm writing about Eliza Haywood, and I have SO much to learn about the social and philosophical contexts that surround her work. For my dissertation, I will be writing about the sex vs. virtue opposition that shapes much of the criticism of her work, arguing that such a binary opposition presents a false dilemma. In addition to reading Haywood's giant oeuvre, I need to research c18 British philosophy and culture, the development of the novel as a genre, and theories about narrative, rhetoric, and dialogic texts.
It's hard to know what exact direction to take at this point, but this week I'm reading Christine Gerrard's book Aaron Hill: The Muses' Projector 1685-1750 and J. Paul Hunter's Before Novels: The Cultural Contexts of Eighteenth Century Fiction. (Gerrard's book is fun because reading about the folks in the Hillarian circle is a bit like reading Hollywood gossip.) I also have a goals this week that include printing out some database articles and tracking down an important text that isn't available locally.
I jealous that both of you (Amstr and Maine) are close to good research libraries.
A question for my fellow dissers: Do you want this blog available for all to see? or just invited guests? Anybody else we should invite?
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3 comments:
I'm open to any of the options (invited, closed, open). It seems like the blog could be an interesting forum for other folks to add diss. advice in comments, so open sounds interesting to me. I've been thinking about upcoming posts as if it were open. But it could be more direct support-oriented (which might be more necessary for us) if it were closed. What are you thinking?
I had initially thought it would be open, but then when I was recounting my thesis, I realized that (because of rat race paranoia) I was hesitant to publicize the central tenets of my argument. Perhaps that is silly. Shall we try it one way and see what we think? Shall we try it open first?
Isn't there a way to make some posts private and the majority public? I'm up for trying one and seeing how it goes. I think if we're posting more detailed stuff about our work, we might want to go the closed route. If we're going to more general "here's what I'm struggling with as a dissertation writer" route, then public seems fine and maybe helpful.
As far as inviting people, I don't know of anyone that all three of us know who's also working on a dissertation. I do have a couple friends from UMass who are farther along in the process who might be interested in contributing--but I suppose that depends on the purpose of our blog.
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