Too Much Text - Here, an Irony
So, I've been planning on making a serious return to livejournal for about a week now. Y'know, with actual posts.
This isn't that. But soon! Once I finish a few papers.
But I did want to share my thesis prospectus. Mostly because I can't believe I'm already at the cusp of the thesis. I remember orientation being so recent. Also this way I can look back in a year when I'm pulling my hair out over the thesis and see the tiny, seemingly innocuous seed of hope from which the demon sprang forth.
And so, the informal prospectus, which is supposed to be scrawled in a tiny box on a carbon-triplicate form (mine says "Please see attached"):
"In my thesis, I'd like to examine two historical/literary moments with some very obvious parallels: the rise of print culture in the centuries following the arrival of the printing press in England, and the modern wave of New Media in our own historical period--for instance, the phenomenon of blogging. At both of these points in history, the sheer amount of text in existence increased exponentially, and in both cases there followed serious concerns about the authenticity of text, the relationship of writer to reader, and a host of moral questions that mostly boil down to 'How can we know that people are reading the right texts?'
While my ultimate focus is still uncertain, I'd like to use these parallel phenomena to do interdisciplinary work that engages both sides of my joint-disciplinary concentration, Literature and Medieval & Renaissance Studies. As of this writing, I'm particularly interested in using some of the literary criticism that has recently arisen in response to New Media as a sort of lens to look back on the texts that emerged in the early days of print culture. Some of my potential areas of focus include: the reader/writer relationship, news culture, and concerns in popular pedagogy."
There follows some tentative bibliography, which I doubt anyone really needs to see.
This isn't that. But soon! Once I finish a few papers.
But I did want to share my thesis prospectus. Mostly because I can't believe I'm already at the cusp of the thesis. I remember orientation being so recent. Also this way I can look back in a year when I'm pulling my hair out over the thesis and see the tiny, seemingly innocuous seed of hope from which the demon sprang forth.
And so, the informal prospectus, which is supposed to be scrawled in a tiny box on a carbon-triplicate form (mine says "Please see attached"):
"In my thesis, I'd like to examine two historical/literary moments with some very obvious parallels: the rise of print culture in the centuries following the arrival of the printing press in England, and the modern wave of New Media in our own historical period--for instance, the phenomenon of blogging. At both of these points in history, the sheer amount of text in existence increased exponentially, and in both cases there followed serious concerns about the authenticity of text, the relationship of writer to reader, and a host of moral questions that mostly boil down to 'How can we know that people are reading the right texts?'
While my ultimate focus is still uncertain, I'd like to use these parallel phenomena to do interdisciplinary work that engages both sides of my joint-disciplinary concentration, Literature and Medieval & Renaissance Studies. As of this writing, I'm particularly interested in using some of the literary criticism that has recently arisen in response to New Media as a sort of lens to look back on the texts that emerged in the early days of print culture. Some of my potential areas of focus include: the reader/writer relationship, news culture, and concerns in popular pedagogy."
There follows some tentative bibliography, which I doubt anyone really needs to see.