Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Advisor and Snippets

I heard back from my advisor already. His email reminded me that he’s a pretty fantastic advisor. He’s willing to read my writing whenever I want to send it, in whatever state it’s in, and will vary his approach to responding accordingly. He’s already given me a gentle “assignment” to start with. And he’s really flexible about the prospectus: it could be a sentence long, or it could be more fully developed but handed in after I have chapters done.

My first writing assignment toward the dissertation is to read one of the recently published collections of QEI’s own writing and compare her representations of herself to Spenser’s representations of her. I’ve ordered the QEI, and am eager to get started.

In the meantime, I’m planning to finish up Anne Clifford’s diary, read the Spenser Encyclopedia sections on QEI, and start Sidney’s Old Arcadia. I’m also planning to dig in to the Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations.

SafiaK, how did advisor-talk go this week?
GEW, I hope your next two weeks go well. It's tough to do kids and work!
Looking forward to your updates.

2 comments:

Good Enough Woman said...

Does it feel good to have an assignment? Sounds like an interesting assignment!

Amstr said...

It does feel pretty good, but I read an entry in the Spenser Encyclopedia on images of Elizabeth and got totally overwhelmed! I think I'll have to pick one image to start (or two conflicting images). I think I'm going to start with the image of ER (Elizabeth Regina) as the mother of England. I'm not sure how that will transfer to Spenser, but it's a place to start, and there's a lot of interesting material like Anne Clifford's diary and the Countess of Lincoln's Nursery that deal with motherhood. AND it seems important since the question of succession was so key during ER's reign, and many images of her during the first part of her reign had to do with her being HVIII's daughter (and thus the legitimate monarch). Anyway--more on all that later.