Being an educated scholar of English Renaissance Literature

Hi fellow scholars,

I've been feeling lately (again) that I have no real comprehensive view of critical approaches to Ren. Lit. in English (or any other language for that matter). I wish I had taken a class called "Critical Approaches to Renaissance Studies" or the like, and would love to teach a class like that one day.  So I thought you might have ideas.

If you were teaching a grad course to people going into Ren Lit as their specialty, what would you include? What are the groundbreaking articles and books in the field? Which critical approaches might a grad student choose in their further study?

approaches to note-taking

Hey everyone, 

For those of you who noticed, I've been deep, deep underground. Between in-laws raiding our small apartment for the inauguration, the flu, writing anxieties, and what has been the worst job market in decades (over half the jobs I applied to were canceled outright), I've been less than productive. The gods have smiled, however, and I've been given an office all to myself at Georgetown were I've been camping out and writing every day. 

But there still seems to be too little result for so much work, and I've been forced to reevaluate my work-style. Which brings me to this post: my recent epiphany on note taking. 

I wrote some time ago about how I use the DevonThink database to capture all my notes from primary and secondary material. Basically I've been setting up a document for each thing I read, write in quotes and responses as I go, and maybe tag a few words/notes to myself on where these my be useful. After amassing almost three hundred pages/100,000 words of this crap, I was confronted with the fact that I haven't been able to move this material to actual writing. For  a while I assumed I was too dumb and not qualified to write this dissertation - hence my recent silence. But after re-reading some books on writing, I realized my whole approach to note-taking was flawed. 

Many guide-books build off the old model of using 3x5 cards. They suggest you record only ONE piece of information per card, and on that card perhaps write a response and a few keywords. The keywords component is key (pardon the pun), and the part I was lacking. This way you can easily sort out your notes into categories relevant to YOUR project, not the author's. I spent too much time documenting what the author was arguing and how - not more selfishly organizing the information according to my argument and diss structure. 

So this weekend I'm going to rebuild my database. I'm going to instead create a folder for every work I read, and within that folder create a separate page for each quote/paraphrase/response I have, and with that response record a few key terms by which it will be useful. 

Columb/Booth/William's books The Craft of Research and Guide to Dissertation Writers spell this out clearly in their note-taking chapters. You can also read the author Steven Berlin Johnson's posts on how he imports info into Devon and then how he makes use of it to write books. (I read the first of these posts some time ago, but missed the message of documenting information usefully rather than comprehensively.)  His posts are here and here. 

I hope this helps some of you avoid this waste of time. I'm kind of embarrassed it took me so long to discover; but maybe now I can crank the pages? 

Speaking of reflections on writing, I've recently read Paul Silvia's How to Write a Lot. It's a calm, honest, and fun reflection on what it takes in the academic world (he's a psychologist, but it applies to all academic writing). Basically I've been reading around quite a bit to supplement the relative silence in graduate school on what it takes to cultivate writing skills and good habits. This seems to be the dirty secret among English professors - as if we all should naturally be excellent, dedicated writers; to have to look for advice is a sign of inadequacy and lack of imagination. And yet so many of us don't get jobs; and so many don't get tenure. 

I'm glad to be back; I hope everyone is well. 

Hello?

I was planning to do some work in December, but that sure didn't happen.  And now it's the middle of January.  For me, Monday will be what I like to call DO NOT PROCRASTINATE AND GET YOUR BUM IN GEAR day. (And yes, the name of the day must be shouted.)

How are things going for the rest of you?

Far Out

I was realizing this past week that for most folks in the academic world, early December is a big push time. And I just took a week off to look for a new rental.

After a break for Thanksgiving and househunting, I'm back to my 15 minutes a day of writing and whatever reading I can squeeze in.

How are you all doing?

waah

First post here from the department's newest ABD (I've supplanted Tim as the baby of this little academic family). I passed my area exam on Nov 19th, and I've spent the last 10 days trying to get the muscles in my neck to relax (without much luck, by the way - apparently several consecutive months of stress will do that to you).

My primary area was about performance issues in Renaissance Drama in general. I used information from the plays to describe what it might have been like to go to the theater, but I'm actually more interested in what it was like to be on the production side - e.g. Shakespeare vs Jonson and their attendant problems (indoor vs outdoor venue, adult vs boy company). My second area was on manners, using various courtesy books / manuals and manners in the plays to talk about ideas of etiquette and virtue (or lack thereof). For me, acting styles (which is one of my greater passions) and social etiquette are intimately linked (not so much for my examiners).

Here's where my head is, currently, on an idea for my diss: at this moment in England, we have for the first time the rise of a profession theater and thus professional actors. At the same time, we have the rise of a strong courtly culture. It seems to me that both of these cultures are based around performance and perhaps that is one of the reasons that so many plays are about the court (and flattery and disguise) - actors and courtiers are essentially the same kind of animal, and actors can speak to the issues of performance at court, perhaps better than courtiers would want to admit. I think that, in fact, actors are offering an alternate system of behavior. So, for example, courtiers want to conceal how hard they are working while actors want to show it. And I think there's an argument to be made that theater professionals were often more successful than courtiers (compare, for example, Shakespeare's end - wealthy, given a coat of arms - to poor John Lyly's - poverty-stricken and begging for any kind of preferment to no avail.)

For me, this all connects to one of the fundamental rifts in performance studies - what does performance actually mean? For courtiers, it's what they do all the time; for actors, it's what they do onstage. (Full disclosure: As a person coming from a theater / performer background, I find the desire to think about what we do in everyday life as "performance" to be a little insane.) I think my biggest theoretical touchstone will be Joseph Roach (he wrote "The Player's Passion").

And I think my biggest dissertation hurdle is going to be getting someone to agree to head up my committee. I spoke to Jenny Spencer the other day (she was on my areas committee) and she basically told me that I'm going to have to write a chapter before anyone will even agree that the argument works. And if I could get it published, that would be even better. Oy.

So that's that for now. I'm enjoying eveyone's posts and am already getting tips to help me rethink my methods. It's greatly appreciated!

Your Turn!

Okay, I've made the last three posts (four, counting this one). Someone else's turn!

Here's my latest fun internet find: the memorial Anne Clifford had installed for Edmund Spenser in Westminster Abbey's Poet's Corner.


“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”.

Weekly Update

Here's my first official weekly update. I didn't quite reach any of my goals, I don't think, though I did make progress in every area. But I'm content to settle for less this week and get ready for good progress next week. My big accomplishment was writing two brief paper topic proposals and sending them with my monthly check-in email to JB.

For next week: continue reading ER collection, secondary sources on motherhood, and start doing some actual notetaking and giving DevonThink a whirl.

Right now, though, I have a stinky diaper to change. It's quite a shift from the academic to daily life.