Life in Thesis-land : and what have you done for us today

a little reflection on my research

Karen.Hall — Mon, 19 Nov 2007 08:11:00 GMT

It's been quite a while since I've posted about my research: in part, because I haven't been posting much at all, with the demands of full-time work and thesis writing fitting in whenever I find the time and energy, but also because I don't want to add to the negativity around the process of thesis writing while still reporting honestly on my own experiences. Thus, silence. Today I've been tireder than usual - the mistake of trying to have a life somewhere in the weekend - but for me tiredness also seems to clarify things in a strange distanced way. I'm staring down the barrel of just a little more than two months to submission, and still a lot of work to do. My abstract is heading out into the universe today, while I have six months of a future planned the rest is still unsettled, and a house move is on the horizon. So I'm tired, and I'm stressed, and I have hours in the middle of the night where I hate my thesis and want to hit myself over the back of the head but still, as I insist to all the students I work with, my research does matter. I need to hold onto the passion that I felt for it somewhere along the line, and I need to convey that - to myself, to my examiners, to the universe at large.

What does my research do? It complicated things. While this might not sound like Nobel-winning stuff, to my mind, complicating things is the job of the humanities and social and cultural studies: to insist that people are messy, that history isn't singular, that we always say both less and more than we mean, that reading is an act of transformation, that trying to pin things down just creates more things. My thesis looks at one sub-genre of science fiction - the lost race story - and argues that recognising its presence in science fiction unsettles previous critical accounts of the development of science fiction. It helps to connect up science fiction to writing and reading practices in the Victorian period, while still showing how the pulp science fiction magazines of the early twentieth century were where the genre was first really articulated. Looking at lost race stories shows how pulp science fiction ambivalently negotiated the radical social and technological shifts of the period: that its 'prophetic vision' of the future was in fact underwritten by construction of its pasts. The writing, publishing and reception of lost race stories show how together, these factors created a shared memory of what science fiction was and how it worked: a dialogue both inside and outside fiction texts building a cultural memory of genre. And finally, that even up to the present, lost race stories keep being written and rewritten by science fiction authors, mapping newly imagined spaces through familar narrative terrain.

There's more, of course, but my head hurts enough without going into the critical theory side of things. From long experience, the best way for me to handle the way I'm feeling now is more writing and more sleep. Homewards and onwards.

I flu, therefore I am not

Karen.Hall — Thu, 30 Aug 2007 08:58:00 GMT

I hate being unwell. It might be my meglomanic conviction that the world will fall apart without me, or internalised childhood guilt about days off, but mostly I think it is the sheer misery of being overwhelming conscious of embodiment.

Now, with my academic hat on, I'd argue for the importance of embodiment: that the mind/body split impoverishes both these aspects of existence, that body and mind inform one another, that to ignore or supress the body has an intensely dubious history of power, priviledge and exploitation. Lying on the couch on Tuesday, focusing on breathing with Dr Phil on TV because that was as much as I could engage with intellectually, all I wanted was transcendence of the body.

A few days later and feeling better, I'm more aware of the taken-for-grantedness of my healthy body - that getting up in the morning with energy to do things isn't always the case. I'm also aware of the irony of one of my first reactions to feeling better, which was planning how to discipline my body to work harder, more efficiently and more healthily. Being told that you need to take better care of yourself (thanks mum) as yet another set of chores to add to a long list still feels, at the moment, like weight on the transcendence side of the argument.

(un)Anniversary

Karen.Hall — Fri, 20 Apr 2007 06:00:00 GMT

Jumping on the bandwagon with everyone else, I should note that this weekend I'll be writing up my fourth annual report. Somewhere this year I slipped from being one of those people that finishes vaguely on time to one of the people that have been around for ever, with the end of their thesis somewhere in an indefinitely deferred future.

It's the end of another week without much thesis to show for the time passing: I'm alternating between a conviction that I need/deserve/require thesis boot camp, or that I need sleep. Friday afteroons are quietly disspiriting in that way.

(metaphorical) nose back to the (metaphorical) grindstone

Karen.Hall — Mon, 26 Mar 2007 09:04:00 GMT

Today is my first day back from suspension. It feels a little like sitting in a rollercoaster carriage as it settles momentarily into stillness at the top of the slope before plunging downwards. From here it is - or should be - all down: finishing the drafting of the last two chapters, conclusion, editing, checking, formatting ... done. The 'done' is still hard to imagine, but I can feel the vertigo as I stare at the rest of it.

The morning started with a stall: literally, in that my car battery waved this life farewell with one last feeble splutter. I was left sitting in the driveway waiting for the RAC, then again waiting for a new battery. Autumn was in the air, I decided, sitting in the sun in a cardigan soaking up the warmth as through it was a transitory gift. Then uni, and the parking run around, and the computer run around (my SNAP snapped!), and the admin run around when I found I needed yet another form filled in.

But I have bombarded ILL with requests for the articles that I need for the writing that is slowly accreting into chapter shape, and written 500 words. Not a total write-off of a day. It's hard to find much enthusiasm at the moment, though: not much momentum behind me, I'm either over or was never that into the texts I'm writing about, and even the arguments I'm trying to make seem either too obvious or too hard. Nose to the grindstone, I tell myself. One word after another.