As the subjects of last few posts suggest, over the past couple of months I have not had as much time as I would have liked to work directly on the Voceti project. Most of my spare time has been taken up with getting other assignments in by the due date. Yesterday, after much last minute tweaking, bad language, episodes of manic elation and maudlin self pity, I clicked the scary 'turnitin' button and 4380 words worth of fully footnoted musing on Wordsworth winged its way towards some unfortuate lecturer who has drawn the short straw, and will have to 'grade' it, as my US FB buddies say.
I have to admit, I am relieved. Now I can just concentrate on one thing - the dissertation. The opportunity to do a 'creative project' was the reason I did the M.A. in the first place. However, I seriously underestimated the challenge that the other modules would present. This is a bit odd really since I provided 'back-end support' to both Matthew and Sarah and should have rememembered the plaintive midnight phone calls I recieved concerning Foucouldian approaches to Burke's Reflections, or desperate attempts to pick my brains about Jackson Pollock and any relation there might have be between Abstract Expressionism and the early work of John Ashbery. I am not complaining. In fact these impromptu demands for parental help probably helped prepare me for the realities of post-graduate study as much as anything. So I should have known, more or less, what I was letting myself in for.
Except my children's postgraduate study immediately followed a three year undergraduate degree in the same subject. The Derby M.A. is multi-disciplinary and there is a 35 year gap between starting the MA and my previous foray into the humanities. The first assignments I completed back in January built on either my knowledge of history of art or my experience as a published writer. I achieved good marks and started thinking to myself, 'this scholarship malarky, it comes back to you quite easily - just like riding a bike!' That was before I decided to try my hand at a literature based research assignment for the Critical Issues module. Now I have studied some literature: back in the depths of last century English Literature was my weakest 'A' Level; at Manchester I did a subsidiary module on English poetry in year 1; my OU degree had some literature in it. However, I was always weaker in this area than in History of Art. Furthermore, the emphasis these days on critical theory is something that has grown over recent decades; I do remember doing a bit about Leavis in the OU poetry module - but no socio-linguistics, no semiotics, no post structuralism, not a queer theory in sight.
These gaps came back to haunt me as I worked over recent weeks on the Wordsworth essay. Unlike my previous assignment on Barthes where although the critical theory was new, I was able to slot it in fairly easily into my knowledge of iconographical analysis. Not so with the literature essay. Working on it was painstakingly slow. It sometimes took me most of a day just to write a couple of paragraphs. Also, just to get to a point where I had enough material to work on required a fair bit of primary research as the Duddon Sonnets - my chosen text - turned out to have received a minimal amout of critical attention previously. In order to get to first base, I needed to undertake an annotated close reading of each one of the 34 sonnets in the series. That bit was quite engaging actually - I wrote up the results here: http://imaginedelsewhere.blogspot.co.uk
All this effort has not been entirely wasted so far as the dissertation is concerned. The aim of the essay was to understand how the Duddon Sonnet series, which is characterised by wide variations in the style, diction and tone of the individual sonnets was, nvertheless regarded by both the author and contemporary critics as a "single poem". What you discover through close reading is an amalgam of a narritive arc with moments of 'fanciful' diversion. It's a flexible, playful arrangement. I am now thinking I should re-consider my 'Plan A' - the highly structured spreadsheet that I developed as a project plan - I think it is a good research plan, but too inflexible and limiting as a blueprint or 'shooting-script' for the sonnet sequence. I need to cut myself a bit of slack - in fact, Jason hinted that I might find this to be the case last time we met.
