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Oct 08, 2011 19:09

I've been feeling the itch to write something here again recently, but haven't yet bothered. The longer I refrain from bothering the more there will be to write and so the process of actually putting fingertips to keyboard becomes ever more unlikely to occur.

I can, of course, write meandering sentences about not bothering to write anything worthwhile. That's easy. And to think: being concerned to write something worthwhile on the internet. Oh me, oh my.

But I maybe possibly perhaps will. For now, here are things of relatively recent thingage.

I submitted the second chapter of my phd. Yes, the second. By now I should probably have written more than two, but the material I have written has been through quite a few iterations. There's a substantial section in this chapter on the use of Picturesque Aesthetics by Charlotte Smith (popular in her day, read by Austen, important but neglected, etc) that I've actually written at least three versions of before. One was presented at a conference in Swansea last December and I gave a more refined version, with pictures at the International Gothic Association conference in Heidelberg this summer. Yeah, I went and gave a paper at an international conference. It was great. It seems to me that the British have very little awareness of Germany as a place to visit and culturally engage with. Certainly not as compares with, say, France or even Spain. There are probably obvious and Fawlty reasons for that. I enjoyed myself in any case. The third version of the Smith material was written up in a a draft of an article that I may yet submit to a journal. It's got a lot about landscaping, Capability Brown, levelling, etc. Quite a fascinating topic actually. One of my areas of focus is the way the Picturesque aesthetic helped bring the Gothic into focus within the immediate geographical and cultural landscape of modern (ie, post-enlightenment) Britain and the way this contributes to the  development of the 'Gothic Imagination' around this time. So there's a lot to say about exactly how ruins are described and the motivation for those processes. Picturesque estate management is a slightly different topic, but ties really intriguingly into debates about governance and political authority. That jives neatly with debates about the Gothic which, from a C18 perspective, is also tied into ideas about authority, responsibility, restraint... or lack thereof.

Speaking of articles (I did speak of articles, a few sentences back) I'm finally definitely absolutely certainly being published in A Proper Academic Journal. It's a piece from my MA thesis about an author writing Victorian pulp and her clever play with Genre and Genre-Consciousness to turn the tables on a dominant literary critical discourse that use Genre to curtail and undermine such writing. I even use Derrida. It's not an area I do much work in now, but it's awesome to be properly getting my name in print. Won't hurt the CV either!

I'm teaching again this year. In fact, for this term, I'm teaching the entire course on C19 Literature myself. Two classes a week, four hour teaching load. Bear in mind that some salaried academics only teach a 6-8 hour load (though they have lots of admin and supervision responsibility on top of that). Again, it's pretty neat CV sparkle. The commute to Wales twice a week is hitting my Wallet a bit, but I'm in profit overall. I'm considering the train, but the speed and flexibility that comes with driving is hard to beat. Especially when taking the train involves paying more for car-parking at Swindon station than the Severn Bridge toll. It also means I can zoom down the M4 listening to Jane Austen audiobooks (the smart way to refresh the material). This, to be honest, is exactly how Austen meant her work to be experienced. She, like Nietzsche, was born posthumously. Or maybe she was just published pre-media-ally. Or something. Don't know. Bored of writing now. Made an effort. Maybe more later. 
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