Stalled

I have stalled to such an extreme degree that I have just stopped. I think I might have to pick up again after the new year (since we're leaving town in a few days and won't be back until then). I hope to read a few related things between now and then to keep the ideas alive and, perhaps, developing.

OMG

I just realized I lost a month.

This IS Hard.

I wish I had some words of wisdom to drop into the pool, but I'm stuck. In fact, I'm crashing. My brain is suddenly empty; I've never read a thing in my life; I have no idea what I am doing here. Seriously. I have to write a paper, and I am drawing a blank. I keep trying to go back to the days when I'd think of a topic and begin exploring it. I have no idea how I did that. In fact, looking over essays I wrote just a couple of months ago, I'm perplexed. I don't recognize any of the ideas. I'm beginning to panic. I think this is a block, and I'm not sure I've ever experienced a real-life, god-forsaken block. I'm in trouble. I will think about what I would say to you, GEW, and hopefully I'll come up with something over the next day or two. Ack!

This is Hard.

So. I need to submit some pages to my advisor in January. I want to get it done at least a week before I start teaching again. I'd REALLY like to have a draft done by the end of next week, so that I can just tinker over the holidays, adding stuff, fixing footnotes and filling in references.

But here's the rub. Suddenly, I feel as if I know nothing. Or, at least, that I have read nothing.

Suggestions about how to slog forward?

Underwater

We traveled for Thanksgiving. Then we all got sick. Then on the day we were heading home we got notice that the owner of our rental wants it back by Jan. 3. So now I'm still sick and still unpacking from the trip and househunting. The good news is that after a couple days of panic, the househunting is going well, and I should be able to get at least a little work done before the next holidays. Until moving interrupts it.

Welcome, Kevin! Good to see you last week, GEW. And hope you had a great break SafiaK.

Learning to be Advised

Yet again, I approached contacting my advisor with trepidation. Yet again, he had great wisdom and encouragement. My dissertation actually seems to be taking form, instead of looking like alphabet soup.

I had one of those insight moments last night where I realized that the work I've been doing fits in with the work I did for my areas, particularly my focus on female authority. Instead of looking at a broad range of female authorship and authority, I'm focusing on motherhood and queenship and how the two intertwine. The two preliminary topic proposals--one on QEI as "mother," the other on Anne Clifford's relationships with her mother and with her daughter--probably connect in some way and give me a good starting point. (This is Anne to the left.)

The big question I asked my advisor was how to approach non-literary texts from a literary perspective. He said that training as a literary scholar will naturally lead to literary questions (of genre, rhetoric, voice, (self-)representation, constructions of identity and authority, audience, etc.), but that my question now should really be how construct my work so that literary and non-literary texts interact. He cautioned against focusing solely on non-literary works (as he did; it makes the job market more difficult because one might be seen as too non-literary [this may be particularly true in Ren studies]), and encouraged me to focus on mother-queen images in Spenser, Shakespeare, and Sidney (again, making my areas work helpful), using non-literary texts to support and broaden my arguments.

In a week where I've felt more like quitting than like plugging along, this advisor response was a much needed and positive motivator. How did I manage to luck into the most awesome advisor (for me) ever?

On a sort of related note: I just found out that Anne Clifford had memorial for Edmund Spenser put up in the Poet's Corner of Westminster Abbey. Small world, that Renaissance aristocracy.
“HEARE LYES (EXPECTING THE SECOND COMMINGE OF OUR SAVIOVR CHRIST JESUS) THE BODY OF EDMOND SPENCER THE PRINCE OF POETS IN HIS TYME WHOSE DIVINE SPIRRIT NEEDS NOE OTHIR WITNESSE THEN THE WORKS WHICH HE LEFT BEHINDE HIM. HE WAS BORNE IN LONDON IN THE YEARE 1553 AND DIED IN THE YEARE 1598. Restored by private subscription 1778”.

Nota Bene

Well, I've downloaded the trial version of Nota Bene and will be working with it for the next few weeks to see what I think. It sounds great, but I must admit that I balk at the price and at the learning curve involved in using it. I tend to think, "Who needs it?" But then I realize that I might be underestimating the task ahead. But didn't people do dissertations for decades without even having a computer? Do I really need to spend such money to keep myself organized? Perhaps I do. I'm not sure. Do my fellow dissertanians have any of this ambivalence?

In truth, the most important part of the program might be its ability to change the format/style of a doc. This could be VERY helpful since I will be writing my thesis in MHRA style but might want to submit portions of it for publication in MLA style. Does that sound presumptuous?