Paper Cuts

The ongoing gloomy weather has not been conducive to getting out and about which, in truth, has been a godsend as far as my thesis is concerned. I did postpone, during the snows, my January supervisory meeting partly because of the weather, but more because I hadn't added much to it for weeks. Well, that's not exactly true...I've been putting together a parsed corpus of the Pauline epistles (1 & 2 Corinthians complete, Romans and Galatians underway) and I've read an typed up quotable sections from a key book, but although it amounts to many pages of A4, it doesn't count as original scholarship. I don't think my supervisor would be very impressed if I plonked all that on the desk in front of him! So I've spent most of my time since the New Year revising my first chapter, and damned sick of it I am now.
Since it provides an overview of what I hope to achieve in the rest of the dissertation, it can't be too detailed, but as it sets out the principle arguments, it has to be sufficiently detailed to engage interest and look suitably different from any other piece of work in the same field.
The whole question of 'original scholarship' is fraught with difficulties: I know that swathes of quoted text doesn't count towards your word count (if you get my meaning) but it's necessary to include it to show that you're engaging with the accepted authorities (or indeed mavericks) in your field. But if you are a relatively new researcher it really is difficult, especially in the early stages of the thesis to know exactly what it is that you think about the various issues. To engage too hastily leaves you in danger of closing up your arguments too early and admitting no new influences. I've read a few pieces where the doctoral candidate comes across as an obnoxious know-it-alls who've got a bee in their bonnet and are on the offensive from page one. Not to engage leaves you open to charges of colourlessness and being unconvinced by your hypotheses.

But if you are dealing with world class authorities, surely a little hesitance to engage is both acceptable and understandable? I know, at the moment, how little I know, and the more I read around my subject the more convinced I am that of that fact. It's almost as if I'm going to have to put on a fake cloak of argumentiveness and go into battle under false colours!

The arctic conditions have had the benefit of ensuring that I have not been tempted to go out much recently. Consequently I am romping along and making quite a bit of progress with the thesis. The Christmas holidays, despite my best intentions to do a little work, mostly passed by in a blur of eating, drinking, socialising and sledging. Actually, I'm quite glad they did, because I have returned to work with renewed enthusiasm, having devoted time to family and fun. The German Reading Skills course doesn't start again for a couple of weeks, so that's one distraction less for a while. A turning point came with the arrival in the post of Vygotsky's Thought and Language, which I devoured and then precis'd over a couple of days when the house was relatively empty. This book forms an interesting forerunner to Wallace Chafe's Discourse, Consciousness and Time, which I am using to supply insights into discourse prominence, linking it to focal consciousness. Reading Vygotsky re-enthused me to press on gathering material from Chafe and now it's all moving along nicely.
Another task that fell by the wayside over the past couple of weeks is the parsing of the Pauline epistles that I had planned to do, but I've set aside a portion of the day to make steady, plodding progress. An incremental approach always pays dividends and I have now completed all of 1Corinthians, including picking out verbal textual variants using the NA27 apparatus criticus, and am working my way through 2Corinthians. I contacted my supervisor and asked if I could postpone my supervisory meeting so that I could get back on track and fortunately he didn't have a problem with that. Now I have an extra two and a half weeks to revise my chapter, and I am determined not to squander the time. The bad weather that holds all the UK in thrall will see to that!