Tag: 28 Days of Thesis Updates

Yesterday was not good on the writing front. It basically consisted of one long, mild tantrum;  a break in the middle for present wrapping and my mum’s birthday dinner; then another long tantrum that escalated as I got tired, until I hit the point where I was tempted to throw my laptop through a wall. Sometime around four a.m. I closed a file containing my exegesis draft, now another thousand words shorter than I started with, and went to bed to not-sleep for about six hours. Not, overall, my finest hour. Or sequence of hours. On the plus side, I have new shoes. Very, very green sneakers. And some rather nice charcoal sneakers for back-up. The challenge for today? Resist shiny things. Not easy, as just about everything is shiny at present. The Id has taken over the thought process and my brain would rather be doing just about anything rather than continuing to work on this frustrating, shitty morass of thesis,

Yesterday I spent several long hours feeling appallingly stupid before scrambling my way through about five hundred words. Still less than I need to do, and ordinarily I’d be all angsty about it, but I’m taking my wordcount where I can get it at the moment. In theory, this is the bit of the exegesis that explains what-is-genre in theoretical terms so that people aren’t left sitting there wondering what the hell I’m banging on about or confusing the fact that they’re thinking science-fiction or romance or literature kind of distinctions when I’m prone to occasionally back-tracking to short story as genre or film as genre or something along those lines. My notes say that this is the point where I’m spending some quality time with Bahktin and Todorov, but because I’m me I’ve also managed to worm in some of the personal anecdote kind of stuff I so love and quote from a few “what is a roleplaying game”

TO START, AN EXPLANATION OF WHAT THE EXEGESIS IS When you do a creative writing PhD they don’t necessarily ask you to write a thesis. Instead, they get you to write a creative project (in my case, a whopping great lot of short stories) and then write an short exegesis that serves as a kind of thesis-substitute where you do thesis-type-things such as critical analysis of the work and practice, but done with the knowledge that you’re the writer of the creative text up front and center. The irony is that no-one really knows what the boundaries are when you’re doing these yet – the idea only really started to gain traction in the last two decades or so (from what I’m seeing, anyway; the name comes from analytical studies of the bible, and they’ve been doing it for a lot while) and there are relatively sparse examples of what a good exegetical document looks like out there. And, just