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deepbluemermaid is wowing you all with tales of her triumph on the seminar floor, I noticed that I have barely mentioned what I used to call "the Evil Thesis" for weeks. Well, not a hell of a lot is happening with it. A lot of the work is the boring process of spelling and grammar checks. Some is reading through old chapters which I wrote before my ideas reached their current form, and sticking in sentences and paragraphs which tie it up into the larger context. However, I've had to do suprisingly little of this. Sometimes, even, I've stuck a "larger context" paragraph in there, not noticing that I already had one a few pages onward.
This is actually surprisingly liberating. I assumed that, once I started taking the Marxist tack about a year ago, my last chapters would contradict most of what had gone before, which I remembered as being liberal-feminist post-colonialism. But I was quite suprised to notice that, even three years ago, I had an acute awareness of the way class was shaping the narratives and ideology of those texts. So now, I'll keep coming along these little sentences which confirm that the big ideas were there right from the beginning in embryo form. It's a dialectic process - those little molecular changes kept happening until they became noticeable, and quantity turned into quality.
The other thing that I'm discovering is a lot of critical literature which confirms the tack that I've been taking with this from the beginning. An example has been the way that I'm totally rejecting the idea of a qualitative difference between Real Literature and cheap trashy novels. And now I'm finding all these Marxist critics who've been writing on this subject for twenty years, pointing out that it's a distinction based on ideology rather than any real difference in literary ideology, strategy or production. So I'm going through the theoretical chapters and throwing quotes from these guys in - to confirm ideas that were there, in rough form, three years ago.
In a way, I feel a bit naive for not having read this stuff in the first place. But I'm also proud that my analysis took me there anyway, and it's just being confirmed that a wider scholarly community agrees with me. I am making quite serious theoretical advances in this thesis, as far as late colonial NZ writing is concerned; or rather, applying cutting-edge Marxist theory where it's never gone before. So many theses in this subject area - even the PhD's - are very heavy on description and historical detail but have the most once-over-lightly textual analysis and theoretical apparatus. I am doing something new, and different.
So maybe it's alright after all.
deepbluemermaid is wowing you all with tales of her triumph on the seminar floor, I noticed that I have barely mentioned what I used to call "the Evil Thesis" for weeks. Well, not a hell of a lot is happening with it. A lot of the work is the boring process of spelling and grammar checks. Some is reading through old chapters which I wrote before my ideas reached their current form, and sticking in sentences and paragraphs which tie it up into the larger context. However, I've had to do suprisingly little of this. Sometimes, even, I've stuck a "larger context" paragraph in there, not noticing that I already had one a few pages onward.This is actually surprisingly liberating. I assumed that, once I started taking the Marxist tack about a year ago, my last chapters would contradict most of what had gone before, which I remembered as being liberal-feminist post-colonialism. But I was quite suprised to notice that, even three years ago, I had an acute awareness of the way class was shaping the narratives and ideology of those texts. So now, I'll keep coming along these little sentences which confirm that the big ideas were there right from the beginning in embryo form. It's a dialectic process - those little molecular changes kept happening until they became noticeable, and quantity turned into quality.
The other thing that I'm discovering is a lot of critical literature which confirms the tack that I've been taking with this from the beginning. An example has been the way that I'm totally rejecting the idea of a qualitative difference between Real Literature and cheap trashy novels. And now I'm finding all these Marxist critics who've been writing on this subject for twenty years, pointing out that it's a distinction based on ideology rather than any real difference in literary ideology, strategy or production. So I'm going through the theoretical chapters and throwing quotes from these guys in - to confirm ideas that were there, in rough form, three years ago.
In a way, I feel a bit naive for not having read this stuff in the first place. But I'm also proud that my analysis took me there anyway, and it's just being confirmed that a wider scholarly community agrees with me. I am making quite serious theoretical advances in this thesis, as far as late colonial NZ writing is concerned; or rather, applying cutting-edge Marxist theory where it's never gone before. So many theses in this subject area - even the PhD's - are very heavy on description and historical detail but have the most once-over-lightly textual analysis and theoretical apparatus. I am doing something new, and different.
So maybe it's alright after all.