Upstart Crow

This post is coming from the department's newest minted PhD candidate; I passed my area exams one week ago.  So I'm an 'abd' in diapers, really.  Just beginning to negotiate the diss prospectus, forming a committee, and so forth.  

In terms of where I'm coming from: my first area, drawing on my primary interest in early modern drama, consisted of a bunch of plays and secondary work on theater as a socially and economically engaged art form (a marathon beginning with L.C. Knights's Drama and Society in the Age of Jonson and ending with Jean Howard's recent Theater of a City).  I ended up with a rationale focusing on the social function of stage props.  Adam was my advisor (which put me on AFK's shit list for awhile, until I explained my reasons, which I won't rehearse here.  We're doing fine now.  He only nodded off a few times during the exam).  My second area pertained to non-dramatic lit & early modern social life, theories of consumption, and consumer culture.  Joe had me reading diverse kinds of primary texts--anything from a year in Pepys's diary to cookery books to temperance tracts to Jonson's "Inviting a Friend to Supper."  When constructing the lists, I suspected that I ultimately wanted to do a project on dramatic representations of food and drink, so I used the second area to look at food history, food studies, and cultural materialist methodologies to see if they were indeed of interest.  And they are.  

Now that I've come out on the other side (pause, sigh of relief), I'm trying to put together a project focusing on recreational consumption.  Such forms of consumption are happening conspicuously on the stage (1 and 2 Henry IV, The Fair Maid of the West,  The Honest Whore, The Dutch Courtesan, Bartholomew Fair are a few examples that I'm interested in),  just as drama is itself a new form of recreational consumption in London, and it's going on in the taverns and bawdyhouses around the theaters.   So far I can sort of locate specific kinds of consumption and spaces within which class and economic status are negotiated through alimentary terms and materials.  There are, for example, tensions around homosocial conviviality in the tavern in contrast to the domestic economy of the home.  And I keep wondering about the connection(s) between consuming theater and consuming other things.  I still have a lot of work to do when it comes to putting forth a big idea and dividing up the material in a way that will help me talk about that bigger issue.  I've only begun to think about an organizational scheme (if there's a chapter on taverns, which I know I want, do I write on other social spaces?  Author-based chapters?  Issues of genre?  Heaven help me, some kind of chronological study?)  I do know I need to move beyond arguing "these things were met with deep anxiety" or "there was an explosion in the availability of these kinds of consumable materials."  Those angles have been pursued to death.  Just a matter of finding out where else I can push the conversation...

GEMCS is coming up next month and I'm giving a paper on the materials of Jacobean drinking culture  in Middleton and Dekker's 1 Honest Whore.  (David Swain put together a panel on the politics of drink).  Hopefully by then I can at least be able to say something like "this brief reading of the play is an interesting iteration  of a broader concern involving X, Y, and Z..." where X, Y, and Z are clearer than what I've described above.  And I know sharing time--and drinks--with Dave will be really helpful for my thinking.

So that's where I'm at.  I'm already gaining a great deal from your posts, and I've read the first few chapters of Joan Bolker's book, which have been enlightening.  I look forward to the discussions!

Bibliographic style?

I was reminded tonight by Booth, Columb, and Williams that I need to cite my bibliographic info in the correct way for UMass. What style are we required to use? Is there a cheat sheet? Is it advisor dependent?

Follow-up to ‘writing spaces’

Congrats on getting the letters out, Kevin. I agree that writing about the dissertation is a big part of writing the dissertation. (You know, from my vast experience so far.) I’ve been re-reading Joan Bolker’s Writing your Dissertation in 15 Minutes a Day, and she champions starting to get in the writing habit early and writing about your process and work in an informal way.

The PhinisheD post was great, and when I described the guy’s strategy to T (husband who wrote a dissertation in Computer Science in 8 months), he said, “With that strategy, I could have written a dissertation in 4 months!” I think the trick to the poster’s strategy is that all the writing time is accomplishing something, rather than being wasted getting distracted or being unfocused. His 20 minute breaks sounded especially valuable, based on ideas about insight I read in a recent New Yorker article (abstract). The gist is that the best way to get to a point of insight is to switch from detail-oriented, linear, analytical left-brain activity to more global and connective right-brain thinking, and the best way to get your brain to switch is to relax. Staring at the problem won’t make it any better; taking a shower or a walk might.* I’m counting on this kind of writing strategy not taking 15 years--I’m pretty sure someone in charge would tell me I needed to graduate or quit--and my favorite advice-giver at UMass (David S.) said you can finish if you’ve got 20 hours of writing time a week.

I’ve taken to writing “snippets” every week: a list of what I’ve completed in the last week and what my goals are for the following week. I keep it all in one text file, so I have an easy way to assess my actual progress. So my goals for this week: finish reading Anne Clifford’s diary, start reading ER’s Collected Works, write my 15 minutes a day, and increase my evening reading time over the course of the week.

This past week, I’ve been writing to start developing my topic (Kevin, thanks for the Manual for Writers of Research Papers, Theses, and Dissertations recommendation), and I think my first dig into the material will be about the representation of Elizabeth as mother to her country. I’m interested in how the metaphor plays out for various groups of people (and individuals, including ER herself), and how the representation expanded her role as monarch (if it did) while highlighting her potential limitations as a woman. I’m new to the topic and idea, so I’m sure it will get changed and refined as I go.

*A friend who’s a learning specialist also told me that some people benefit greatly from movements like running where the body has to move the left arm and right leg at the same time (and vice versa) because it increases the connections between the hemispheres of the brain. Can't hurt to try.

writing spaces

I just finished sending out a number of job letters to colleges all over the country (with many more to go) and oddly felt satisfied after the fact. Sure the hope that at least one of these strange letters will land me an interview was satisfying in itself; but what I mean is that having another space in which to write about my dissertation was helpful. Like this blog (I hope), other spaces to write about the diss, what it's hoping to do, how it works or does not offer opportunities to write through the frustration and find new ways to approach the topic. I recommend it heartily.

The job market has slowed me down but I'm still committed to writing at least a few hours a day. One recent graduate over at Phinished.com has a useful post on daily habits that helped him get through it all. The essence: he writes in 40 minute blocks, with 20 minute rests, and does this six times a day. It sounds like a recipe for a 15 year dissertation, but advocates like Robert Boice strongly argue for daily, short, repeated routines that create a habit. (See Boice's Advice for New Faculty. The writing style will annoy you, but the advice is sound and grows out of years of empircal research.)

Another approach fellow writers and experts recommend: make it public. So here are my goals. I need to put together a draft of my first chapter, the one that has added new grey hair. I also need to get a working draft of my sonnet chapter since I'm presenting a short part of it at a conference in a month! By this Sunday, Nov. 2, I'd like to have 20 pages together on the first chapter. By the 20th of November, I need to have around 20 pages done for the sonnets. I'm aiming low so that the goals are not too lofty so as to encourage more frustration and procrastination. This is a little too vague now, but maybe tomorrow I'll have a more specific set of goals with details on which parts of which chapter I hope to fill.

slogging

Here's my status report:
I have one chapter finished, many more in draft, and I'm stuck on the first chapter, which is holding me up terribly. The goal in all of this is to write a little bit each day, but I've hit a serious wall these months and with the job market in full swing I'm having trouble getting any traction. The first chapter is essentially outlined, and most of the research is done; for some reason I'm just mired in it.

So here's the general breakdown. The dissertation at large argues that Queen Elizabeth's succession caused a tremendous amount of stress and frustration for the English because she forbade any discussion of the subject and she refused to name an heir. As the Virgin Queen aged beyond any possibility of marriage or producing an heir, the English wondered who would succeed and if that transition would be peaceful or would invite civil war and/or foreign invasion. Because the question was cloistered, it had the effect of stirring anxiety and initiating a reappraisal of the past to help predict the future. My dissertation largely focuses on the literary responses to this context and hopes to show how certain genres, like the sonnet, Ovidian epic, and satire, were particularly useful vehicles. The genres developed alternative historiographic models which emphasized the distance between past and present, or the present's independence from historical precedent or literary typology. It was a poetic invested in the material present where the construction of knowledge came with collaboration rather than recovery. It was a poetic that emphasized renewal and imagination rather than lineal progression or teleology.
(Apologies if this is still vague - now you know why I'm stuck in the mud.)

So the first chapter describes the sixteenth century's historiographic method of fusing royal genealogy to England's providential emergence. It centers on illustrations of the Tree of Jesse, a medieval illustration of Isaiah's prophecy of a flower emerging from Jesse's (King David's father) root. The iconography linked New and Old Testament offering a genealogy from David to Jesus, and suggested a lineal logic that organizes the biblical history, with the flower/Christ as the ultimate end.
The Tudor's appropriated this and instead of the recumbent Jesse at the bottom they placed both the Dukes of York and Lancaster. These adorned history books, beginning with Hall's The Union of the Two Noble and Illustrative Families (1550), and presented Henry VIII at the top as the flower from the union of the two previously warring factions. After Elizabeth's ascension, she was added to the top and the biblical allusion to the Virigin was even stronger. After the 1580s, however, these icons in many texts began to be removed, and it is this general turn away from providential history that I am documenting, and how it effected the English at the time. How, in other words, did the English grapple with the fact that their lineal connection to the past was about to be broken?

My goal is to have a substantial draft of this monster done by the end of the month so that I can get back to the good stuff: the poetry!
I need to have this monster done by the end of the school year. No other way.

Let's keep reporting on progress, thinking, tips, things to avoid, etc. This really helps curb the isolated misery endemic to writing a diss.

More soon, I hope.

Current Progress

Here’s where I am in this whole process:

I finished exams last December, on (1) Late Medieval and Early Renaissance Women Writers and Writing about Women, and (2) Female Communities in Spenser and Shakespeare. I took the spring off, eased through the summer with a bio of Elizabeth, and have started reading and writing for the dissertation this fall. Right now my topic is pretty nebulous, but I’m trying out ideas involving Spenser and women perhaps the concept of social networks (and perhaps some other writers--Shakespeare and Sidney maybe). My first “assignment” is to write on Elizabeth’s representations of herself and Spenser’s representations of her. I’m hoping it leads to something fruitful, but am open to the idea that it may reveal what I don’t want to pursue in the dissertation. My commitment this fall is to work Mon-Thurs evenings (and the occasional weekend day), and to write at least 15 minutes a day, just to get in the habit. (I’m also a full-time stay-at-home mom with two young kids, so I’m getting a slow start, but will ramp up when the kids start preschool and school.)

Where are you in the process?

An Invitation

Welcome disserters! Post about any dissertation related thing: comments, questions, goals, updates, problems. Perhaps start with a "state of the diss" report. Glad you have you on board.