The aforementioned prospectus post

...which I can no longer afford to delay, now that I've finally read the last couple pages of "The Angel in the House." (Seriously, I don't know why more people don't read this poem. It's amazing in its ability to generate wtf? moments. I have a post about this up at the group blog where I use my own name, should anyone be interested.)

Okay.

I need to pick up the threads on my prospectus, which have been completely dropped since I crashed midweek. Before that, though, I was actually doing okay. I didn't do a lot of writing last week, but I did put in some intensive work on my bibliography, which mainly meant sorting out several stacks of files into piles that made sense--one stack for theory, one for general articles on the field (including both periodization and state of the field articles as well as ones that treat multiple authors or non-poetic texts) and finally, one for critical articles on individual poets. There's a lot on the bibliography that I will probably never look at, but I decided that it's easier to take things off the list than put them on there later on. And, for what it's worth, I was pleasantly surprised by the amount of things I had looked at and did know about. (A lot of these particular files were from when I wrote the fake prospectus for a class in the spring of 2007.)

The bibliography thing also had the advantage of helping jog my memory about the state of the field. It's lucky for me that the big journal in my field published two issues devoted basically to self-reflection within the last five years, though I do wonder if the field is almost too-self-reflective to the point of being almost paralyzed. And in some ways, skimming through a couple of the articles (especially the ones that are calling for a greater attentiveness to language and performativity) helped me better understand the contribution that my article is going to make to the field and the kind of intervention that VIE was steering me towards. While I continue to see myself as a theorist more than a historicist, I've gotten to the point where I can deploy the historical strategically when I need to. And I'm beginning to think, too, that what I got in the habit of calling "historicism" (after The Professor) is probably closer to an untheorized materialism, the kind of scholarship that makes book reports from the archives. (I ran across a particularly egregious example of this recently, where the author was basically making a very basic argument about a certain poet, with the only real contribution being that s/he had OMG touched the book!) But I'm beginning to think, too, that in order to get anywhere, the field is going to have to get even more comfortable with explicitly theoretical gestures rather than crypto-theoretical arguments that attempt to erase their provenance. (I wish I could be more specific, but I can't totally do that here.) I think that my committee member who says that deconstruction has largely become an uncontroversial part of the tools of close reading; I'd say the same for gestures of attentiveness to historical context and the situatedness of the text. Where we go from there--as a field, as a profession, seems up for grabs.

It's possible that one of the reasons I've had such trouble getting the actual prospectus down on paper (as opposed to notes and paragraphs and sets of disjointed ideas) is that I was trying to start with the texts when I needed to start with the field. When I did the fake prospectus, I began with Tennyson, Arnold, and Wilde--now that it's for real, I realize that I may have to begin with the recent work in the field more generally. For some reason, this feels like a capitulation to...something: I mean, shouldn't my dissertation be coming directly out of the texts from day 1? There's a very specific place in Coleridge that sparked all of this: shouldn't my prospectus begin with that? I'm finding the answer to be no. What I realized when I was going through my files (especially those reflective issues of the journal in which I will soon be published) is that my thinking on this topic has always been directed, at least to a certain degree, towards making an intervention in the field. But I think my project makes more sense in that context. And that feels like a weird place to be. What I need to do today (one of the many things I need to do today) is to push back against that weirdness and just write the way it works. I think I'll be a lot better off when I get that down.

One of my other big realizations of early last week is that I've been a Victorianist all along, despite the forays into Romanticism. At least for dissertational purposes. I mean, I do still plan to talk a lot about Coleridge and a few others. But I don't feel compelled to talk a lot about, say, Shelley or Keats. (I managed to get through my orals with a Romanticism list that had no Keats on it.) On the other hand, I do still want to talk about things like the sublime, and I'm worried that there's going to be a huge time gap that I will need to somehow justify from a thematic perspective. Possibly by applying de Quincey. I'm suddenly aware of the ways that my interest in the Long Nineteenth Century is spread rather unevenly....I'm all about, say, the 1790s and the mid-1810s Coleridge. And then I don't really care about anything until the 1850s. I'm slowly inching into the 1860s and, with Augusta Webster, touching barely on the 1870s. And then there are several female poets of the late 1880s and 90s that I love but really can't justify writing about here. Ditto for Wilde. This leaves huge swaths of uncharted decades that are making me ever so slightly nervous. I may simply just have to atone for it all by promising to write my second book on the 1830s and 40s.

I've been walking around for several weeks saying that I'm going to write my chapters on concepts and themes rather than on a single poet or text. While I'm not going to discard that right away, I may do single-author chapter breakdowns. I can't really see past chapter 1 and whatever chapter the article becomes right now. And I'm not sure I'm really going to know what I'm writing about until I do the first chapter. This is a bit scary. But this is the point at which I should probably remind myself that the prospectus is less a document for planning the dissertation as it is the creation of a projected document that people would want to give you money to work on. Meaning that I don't necessarily have to write the dissertation that gets prospectused. If I can keep that in mind, I should be able to get it done fairly quickly, as I'm sort of frustratingly good at writing documents that predict interesting projects that I don't really intend to write. Of course, this makes me miserable later on, but it gets you through. And then I can go back to reading for a little while and perhaps coming up with an abstract or two.

I think I'm always looking for things in academic books that literary criticism is no longer able to deliver. And, as I begin my own project, it's possible that I'm beginning to realize the impossibility of my being able to live up to my own expectations.

On the plus side, the summer's article writing experiences seem to have had the effects of making me a more generous reader. Not in the uncritical "this is published so it must be good" way that I was when I started grad school, but in a way that nonetheless tempers the tendency to go into every article ready to rip it apart or be disappointed. That's probably a necessary stage to go through in grad school, and it's no doubt a side effect of certain seminar assignments, but in my case it was probably taken to more of an extreme because I was hanging around with The Professor so much. Cultivating a bit of generosity has, at least, begun to make my intellectual life a bit more rewarding.

I kind of just want to put off writing for another day and curl up with something old school like The Ethics of Reading, but I'm not going to.

Realization: my approach to my prospectus thus far has been plagued by the same problems as my approach to my personal improvement. Both of these projects have been undertaken with something less than the strategic organization that they require and as a result I've been wasting energy trying to think along too many different lines at once, forgetting what I already know, and having very little to show for the effort. I've also been worrying about the wrong things a lot of the time. I finally revisited the assignment sequence for the dissertation prospectus in our department's required course and realized the value of that kind of process and of at least revisiting it selectively to build on the work I completed a year and a half ago. Would that there were an assignment sheet for fixing one's life and not being all about the negative attention getting.

Anyway. Probably time to start working with the specifics that I can't post here. Either that or grading. (Shudder.)