Initial Thoughts

I think I’ve finally figured out what I’m going to do for my dissertation. It of course depends on what I find in my reading and whether or not my supervisor thinks it’s a good idea. My supervisor seems to have a good instinct for what works and what doesn’t so I trust he will let me know ahead of time if it’s going to be a disaster. Though he claims that I too must have good instincts or I wouldn’t have made it this far. He may be right about that — we’ll see.

The primary literary texts will be authored by Dorothy Richardson, Katherine Mansfield, Virginia Woolf, and perhaps D.H. Lawrence. I knew I wanted to work on Woolf and Richardson but part of my problem thus far was feeling like my choice in authors was going to necessitate a feminist project. I am very resistant to this for a number of reasons. I have done a fair bit of work on feminism and gender already and I haven’t been terribly excited about it since I finished my Master’s. Also, it seemed to me that any feminist reading I came to of the texts would be incredibly boring — it is really hard to say anything beyond ‘this is an example of the feminine aesthetic,’ ‘this is écriture feminine,’ ‘feminine perspectives are different,’ ‘this is how gender is constructed,’ blah, blah, blah. Boring. And already done by legions of scholars before me.

What interests me lately is questions of politics, political resistance, representation, style, and specifically the everyday. It didn’t properly occur to me until yesterday, as I was discussing it with a friend, that I could use the feminist angle as a way in to the everyday. Framing the project with women’s particular experience of modernity, then using it to talk my way into politics, resistance, or aesthetics. I could frame it thus without having to resort to a ‘traditional’ feminist reading. Brilliant! And there is piles of room for that kind of a reading as well considering most feminist work on modernism is banal and uninteresting.

The inclusion of Lawrence would be a way of addressing the gendered experience of modernity without doing a ‘women’s writing’ project. So much of the work on Lawrence is preoccupied with his either being a proto-fascist or a misogynist. It would be nice to shed a different light on some of his texts, particularly Women in Love. Lawrence is the least stable part of the plan at this point though.

My friend made a very valid point yesterday as well — in the eyes of a hiring committee, this would be a very sexy topic. I could market myself as not only being able to teach 20th Century Literature, Modernism, and Theory, but also women’s writing, and from a potentially more sophisticated point of view.

So here it begins.

I’m sure you are wondering why I am writing in my blog about this. After all, not very many people would be interested in reading it. However I find that, if I am writing just for myself, I don’t write. Many journals of mine have ended up in the garbage or stashed in a storage box with only three entries in them. If I think there is the remotest possibility that someone is listening, I feel compelled to share. In turn, I’m hoping that anyone who is reading will also feel compelled to share their thoughts. The lone scholar is a myth as far as I’m concerned, yet in practice we are still plagued by the solitariness of this endeavour. I strongly believe that it doesn’t have to be that way — that the best way to work through these things is to talk them out with trusted colleagues and friends.

You may also be wondering if I am worried about people stealing my ideas. Well, guess what — I am really not. I don’t intend to write my (inevitably) brilliant dissertation online. What I really want is a space to say all the things I won’t actually write down in the finished project. You know, the stupid stuff, the thinking-through of it. If someone wants to publish my stupid stuff, good luck with that, I don’t think it’s worth much to the academic market. That last sentence is not a permission by the way.