vswpaper's Diaryland
Diary
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Starting the final push?
For a change, I'm writing before doing work. It's Friday, and after my smidge done on Tuesday evening, I haven't been able to get back into writing.
Wednesday my best-writer friend called and dismayed me by having actual feedback and wanted some substantial changes--at least at the beginning. She wants the thesis paragraph to be different, in particular for there to be a thesis sentence that states in three parts the points that I shall be arguing. I believe my last sentences summarizes my thesis, and that the preceding ones accurately map what I establish in the paper as sort of the terms of the thesis--the place of The Waves at the end of a particular era in Woolf's writing; that the era was about exploring character, including masculine and feminine differences; what some of the actual feminine qualities are; and finally that Bernard has them, including some personal stuff, so that Woolf puts part of herself in him (and although I don't include this, that's why he's such a compelling character for me and the book is among my favorites). One thing my friend also wanted was a general statement of sort of the area where my thesis lives.
I had to calm myself to hear this and take it in rather than just being defensive and upset. The part about the general statement was the worst, I think. I believe I got clipped for that on papers in my youth, and in any case it's murderously hard to come up with something that's not simply banal. But I think in reading the beginning of Prof. Abel's book Virginia Woolf and the Fictions of Psychoanalysis that I've figured out what my friend meant. (I was annoyed in listening to her that she was talking in general terms about what should happen, and pretty eloquently, but I didn't understand what she meant exactly, and wanted more than anything some specific examples.) Prof. Abel starts off with "Woolf's novels are thick with a variety of pasts." Well, yes, that's the way to do it. And the rest of the paragraph is quite short and gets right to the point, which she goes on to expand. So the conclusion I've drawn is, I need to move a lot of the setup stuff out of my first paragraph and somehow do that mapping elsewhere. The first paragraph should start with something general about men and women in Woolf, and then bang through to the three-part thesis sentence, taking in stride some of the points I need to go out of my way to prove.
I think I need to finish the main draft first, though, and come back to the beginning to do this rather than setting about it right now. So on to discussing the "making up stories" part of susceptibility--in fact I'm not quite done with the feminine attributes part. This is going to be a little tricky--saying that the reading of the world around them is in fact a creative act that leads to storytelling--oh, wait, I think I've just manage my transition. Okay, off I go.
7:37 p.m. - 2007-02-23
-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
previous - next
|
|
|
|
|
|