Tuesday, December 8

Brainstorm, December 8

Notes on the day

After a nice breakfast with the "Pride at Work" group, which included a good conversation about how GLBT Programs Office director Anne Phibbs managed to get her own dissertation in philosophy completed, I went to my office and read more from Fairbank's China: A New History (view my typed notes).

I studied this book at Harvard, of course, but there is a big difference between reading a textbook for a class and reading a textbook for inspiration. I see much more now the elegance of the piece, and the power of that elegance. In class today, I'll read from parts of chapter 20, "The Cultural Revolution, 1966-1976" to fill in the context of our last week of class, on Yang Jiang's Lost in the Crowd.

I worked out in the 1pm hour, a good time to find the gym relatively uncrowded, during which time I listened to lecture 18 of "The World of Language," in which McWhorter reflects on the connection between spoken language and writing. For my own theoretical purposes, these are extremely important lectures. More on that soon.

Later in the day, as I rode the bus around town doing errands and then in the evening, I finished the book. Literary Theory: A Brief Insight (aka Literary Theory: A Very Short Introduction, the newer edition is part of a series I should check out a bit more) by Jonathan Culler. This was so inspiring! Culler's sense of elegance is unequaled: "Meaning depends on context, but context is boundless." As I finished this book, I set up a new "game board" for my entire dissertation, which I had already been imagining to move from literary criticism to cultural studies in a chapter-by-chapter tour. The goal is actually to learn a lot about Chinese literature and the theoretical methods for approaching it, in exercise form, at the same time. I drew a diagram on my white board to illustrate this -- to be attached here.

Anne said that a major discovery for her was that a dissertation is "a very bad book." The significance here being that it is a book-length undertaking, but need not be a good one. When she said that I thought to myself very reflexively, "Well, mine is going to be good." But now I wish to modify that by saying the my dissertation will be, if not good, then elegant. Elegance means that a lot happens "under the hood." It means theory, translation work, and exposition have to be seamless. It means I see the entire work as a performance art, something in between theater and a novel for the academically-minded. I realize that is probably too ambitious still, but that's the model I'm working with.