(Untitled)

[k_navit]

I need to submit this tomorrow for a job app. I think there will be medievalists and early modernists on this search committee - it's a department apparently trying to develop something bigger with medieval lit, and they already have someone teaching OE and ME, so I do need to presume that my readers are at least familiar with these works. So I don

Comments

[rabswom]

Overall, as someone who does medieval things, but not Lit and not Europe: I think that you need to put more in the first paragraph about why your dissertation is cool, groundbreaking, and a contribution to the field. I think that, inherently, these documents are about selling yourself and your project and you need to get people's attention. I think that your stuff about how your dissertation's findings challenge the way that modern readers think about medieval people is really awesome and you should foreground that more -- as someone not in your field, that totally gets my attention

[k_navit]

Thanks so much

[k_navit]

In short, it's not one of those projects that looks at work A in ch 1, work B in ch 2, NOR one of those projects that looks at decade A (or country A or genre A) in ch 1, decade B in ch 2, etc. In large part that's because I can't give a "start date" for my OE homilies and poems - nobody can. (Part of the trouble with putting actual dates in is that we can't date any of these OE works with any certainty, and the extant mss all certainly posdate the original composition by lengths of time that people get into actual, heated fights about. So when I tell people what I study, I tell them "Old English literature" and "Middle English literature," or just "medieval English literature" -- those *are* the time periods/eras, so in lit circles that would be understood as all the lit of the OE period and all the lit of the ME period. So while I can appreciate what you're saying about needing to be better anchored --and I'm glad you said that, because of the things that had occurred to me as potential problems, that was not one of them-- I'm not

[k_navit]

Re angels, I just have an awful lot of shit in this dissertation. I simply don't know how to explain the link in an abstract. Basically I start out with showing that OE concepts of soul and body were like so (that takes 80 pages), and one of the big recurring things is this kinship metaphor, that soul and body are in a relationship characterized by kinship, not master/slave or anything like that. Angels are also described in these kinship terms, in relation to the soul itself in places, and in relation to humanity itself in others (which is not especially remarkable since human beings were created to fill a void left by the fallen angels), and they play a central role in humanity's understanding of itself for a really, really, really long time. Gradually, the metaphorical and conceptual categories and characterizations change - the soul becomes immortal and immaterial and rational, the other half of the physical body. The role of angels in relation to the human soul or self also changes as rational conscience emerges as a concept and

[matrygg]

Is this an abstract or part of a cover letter? I agree with Rabs, but if it's for a letter it's too long.

[k_navit]

Yeah, that's why I said "one-page diss abstract follows" before the cut :-)

[matrygg]

Bah. It's like I'm in a profession that rewards close reading or something.

[fambrena]

I agree with rabsworm. Re: revolutionary/cool/groundbreaking, I was told (however uncomfortable it makes me) that we should hardcore bullshit the significance of our projects, even if we know that they really *aren't* that revolutionary. So yeah---move the smoke and mirrors up. :)