Thursday, August 03, 2006

First feedback on thesis

I sent my advisor the first very rough draft of my thesis the other day. She emailed me back and said I was coming along.

Hi Matt, I read the halfway point draft of your thesis, and I am happy to see that you are coming along with your analysis. One thing that I am sure you noticed is that you need to change the title of the thesis that is mentioned twice on the signature page. Also on the signature page, please change School of Arts and Sciences to College of Letters and Sciences. Chapter 2: Review of the Literature needs to include summaries of what every other scholar has ever said about the stages of mourning in In Memoriam.

Ugh, it is that last sentence there about Chapter 2 that makes me cringe. Not only do I have to do my analysis, I have to list "what every other scholar has ever said about" it. That's actually more work!

I remember my Shakespeare class back at Western Illinois University. It wasn't the plays that gave me difficulty. We had to read one a week or so throughout the semester. The real challenging thing was finding a scholarly article about some aspect or critique of the play and then writing a five-page analysis of that scholarly article. You have to interpret how appropriate or how well, for instance, the scholar proved his or her analysis of The Merchant of Venice from a feminist viewpoint. Or the famous one of the utilization of the Oedipus complex in Hamlet. It was really a synthesis of two complete things. I did a ton of those and actually posted a bunch earlier on this blog.

Now I have to still do a ton of research on Tennyson and find out other scholarly opinions while fitting in my own analysis. Ugh. Anyone know where I can get a ton of Tennyson research??

No comments: