dissertation woes redux

[k_navit]

In light of my sort of horrendous problem (ie, that a 2011 book has left me with nothing to say - because oh yes, come to find out, my plan to start with homilies instead since she discusses everything else is out, because she discusses my homilies too), I am in a horrible, horrible writing place.  The plan was to have two chapters to my committee

Comments

[fambrena]

I don't have any helpful advice, but am sending you good thoughts and a mental ass-kick aimed at your committee, who are batshit crazy for thinking you can assemble the materials to go on the job market *without*, it seems, anything resembling their full and engaged support.

[k_navit]

Advisor is WAY laid back and has this sort of "everything is going to be fine" attitude, about everything. But seriously. I don't think it's asking too much to meet to go over my translations with the one damned person on campus who can help me with them. Etc. He probably is sure they're fine etc, but we are just wired completely differently :/

[vitabeata]

For me, writing the second chapter was the very worst, the ultimate nadir of dissertating, and I think it is for a lot of other people as well. (This was the point at which the bartenders not one, not two, but all three of my locals began the practice of pouring a Jameson for me as soon as I walked in the door, no order needed.) My advice, such as it is, would be to go back to the text, to start with the cool stuff and, once you've got that mapped out, see how it does or doesn't coincide with others' non-binary readings of the same material

[k_navit]

I would not care so much about the diss - "done not perfect" is my motto - but at least one chapter will be an important document in that it will be a writing sample. (Maybe). I mean, the Milton paper was supposedly one of the best things I've ever written, but it nevertheless took about a year to revise from seminar paper to article. A chapter completed a week before it becomes a writing sample is not likely to be very good.

I cannot figure out what postdoc you are referring to?

[vitabeata]

I may have misconstrued or misremembered something you wrote earlier, but I was thinking of the OE postdoc at Penn.

Anyway: I went out with a largely early modern writing sample, tweaked to play up medieval content as much as possible. It wasn't the end of the world, and it was certainly enough to pique some interest.

[rabswom]

I think it's okay that there's a book that agrees with your primary argument because you can talk about your stuff and point to the brilliant book that agrees and say 'see, I'm not crazy! X agrees! Now we must stop looking at these sources in such a binary way.'

Unless I'm totally misunderstanding what's going on here.

[k_navit]

It's just that I have nothing to say that she hasn't said. I mean, I no longer have an original thesis or an original reading or, at this point, even an angle where I can say "here's where I'm taking her reading further than she did." If I can't articulate what I'm saying that she hasn't said, then all I have is a book report / lit review. I mean, at first I thought she'd written my second chapter, the ontology one, and I could at least keep running with my homilies and say "here's how the homilies fit as well as the poetry she examines" and hopefully come up with a sliver or two beyond that too.

But then I got to the part of the book where she examined the same obscure homilies I've been slaving over for the past six weeks. So... I have nothing but a bunch of stuff that has been said and published already.

[rabswom]

Oh, that's rough.

I wish I had some advice, but not knowing your field, I have no idea. I'm so sorry.

[k_navit]

No, you do know what you're talking about, and are correct that is has not had time to trickle everywhere yet, and in fact, that my panel is not likely to be full of people who have read it AND who are working on this stuff means that I may not be the target I fear I will be at the conference. But then again, it's possible the author of hte book will be there lol. But I need to be able to say *something* if somebody asks "what are you saying that the scholarship isn't already saying" and right now I do not have an answer. And even if nobody asks that question, it's my job to make sure I know what is being said around my topic

[k_navit]

Just incidentally, you keep saying "I don't knwo anything about your field" by way of disclaimer, but your perspective here has been very healthy and helpful, not only because I am my own biggest enemy when it comes to freaking out and not seeing the forest for the trees. And given that one of my major goals is to be able to produce prose that treats this stuff in depth and seriously *without* getting bogged down in language so highly specialized as to make it intimidating or too dense for an educated but non-specialist audience (not easy when talking about Augustine and cognitive linguistics and Aquinas, whose picture appears in the dictionary next to "intimidating philosophical discussions," I think you would be a fabulous reader for draftiness. You are just about my target audience (I don't mean for the diss, but in general - my future career in being the Carolyn Walker Bynum of AS Christianity who can point out all the really cool, weird, gross, fascinating, bizarre stuff about AS religion that nobody knows about because who in