My online work has been really busy, as has teaching, but that's not the only reason I'm not dissertating these days. What I am working on is that project I mentioned a while ago - the one where a colleague contacted me out of the blue to contribute to her book project.
I've set aside the next two weeks to work on the revisions. I figured two weeks (which really with everything else translates to about 3 days) would be enough when I first heard of it. But I just looked at the requirements again, and because I actually have to pretty much double what I've got right now, I've got lots of room to talk. That's good. I've got lots to talk about.
I'm also thinking there's another really good reason I should give this project a bit more attention. After all, I've been working on it for almost 10 years already. Such commitment deserves more than a couple weeks revisiting, don't you think? Hard to believe it's been that long, but it has. I first wrote on the Dark Tower series when there were only 4 books in the series. In fact, when I wrote the proposal for my undergrad honors thesis, the fourth volume was still in production and I read it as I was doing the research for the project. I enjoyed it so much, that once the last three books were produced, I decided I wanted to revisit the work I'd done back in undergrad, so I submitted an abstract to a conference and dug out the thesis and started working. I certainly needed to do a lot of work on the thesis - after all, I'd written it many years before as a novice scholar. But to my surprise as well, there were some really good bits in it. Surprisingly good. I found myself marvelling that I'd actually written it in some places. I didn't remember being that insightful...!
And now I'm returning to it again several years later. It's a really interesting project to look back at my work on this particular piece of scholarship over the last decade. It kind of nicely chronicles my development as a scholar. The thing that surprises me the most about looking back at my undergrad writing is that there were some good ideas there - but they were badly expressed. Or more often, only partially expressed. I wrote a lot of observations, but failed in a lot of cases to make the connections between them. I didn't move beyond the surface. I didn't pose difficult questions of the text. Probably because I was still in the grip of author-awe I wrote about a few weeks ago. (Being reminded of my own struggles, even as an honors student has also helped me understand the fumbling rhetoric of my students a bit better)
But the work I did then was a good start. It has created a nice groundwork for me to take now and shape into a more nuanced argument. Or at least that's the hope! But it's funny how my grasp of the implications of some textual moments that I just observed earlier is much firmer now than it was then.
What's the neatest part of all this is it gives me an idea of what it might be like to be a professor, working as a scholar, knowing all the foundational texts, or having heard all the arguments before, having that huge reservoir of knowledge and experience to draw upon when making an argument.
In the dissertation, as much as I love what I'm doing, I feel like a novice. I feel like there's so much that I DON'T know in comparison to what I DO know that it's difficult to adopt the authoritative voice that I need in order to make the very arguments I need to make. In this project, I've worked over the material so many times now, the writing is all developing the best argument possible and then choosing an effective means of expressing it - I find I'm not worrying so much about authority.
It's a really nice feeling. I'm looking forward to attaining that confidence in more than just this one text. So this must be what it feels like to really be an expert, not just write as if you are one!
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