vswpaper's Diaryland Diary

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

Revisions, starting with the thesis

Apparently I needed a break after my long session getting to the end of the first draft. Actually, I guess I can say finishing the first draft as I began the second one last night, the first time I returned to the paper itself. This weekend I did manage to revise the thesis statement. It took me a bit of work, stumbling through my thoughts to get something worth starting from, and then plopping that down and going back and fiddling and then radically scissoring it back--so far back, in fact, that I was worried about it. It was very much shorter, with none of the map-of-the-paper aspect the first one had, just the bird's-eye view of the landscape. But the shortness was something I had planned, and the quick broad remark (even quicker since there was no Coleridge quote to quote, just a reference) at the start, and then pretty much bang into the three-part thesis statement. It was funny, looking back, how reluctant I was to let go of the stuff about Bernard, but that was really the key to rounding the thing off.

I sent that to my friend and then didn't catch up with her until this afternoon. She gave me a quick okay (she was in the car and didn't have it in front of her) and promised to chat tonight.

What I did last night was to put in the part I wasn't sure of about Clarissa and Mrs. R defying the gods, with a side note on Mrs. R as Arachne. (Very pleased with myself I was on that one, and I told Prof. Abel about it when I was in her class. She accepted it as possible, as I recall, but didn't respond much more than that. And then I added some page references that had been missing. My task tonight is to work in the defiance showing up in Bernard's O Death, and how his final rush is a variation on the peroration (not to be phrased that way, though), suggesting that VSW had found a way of accommodating this masculine convention, within the pattern of the way, and didn't undercut it but only fitted it into her pattern with the final waves falling on the shore.

My other task is to go through my quotes and see if there are any key ones I've left out. Funnily enough, although I began iwht more than 200, I've added 25 or so more in writing the second half because I recalled things I hadn't written down and so had to go and look up.

Below is the revised thesis I sent to my friend. I'm hoping it's pretty near final, as I'm hoping that this draft is very close to the final paper to send off.

"In A Room of One�s Own, Virginia Woolf famously cites Coleridge�s dictum that great minds are androgynous, using her idea of androgyny as a cornerstone of her essay. The idea of androgyny not only forms an important part of her discussion of women and fiction, but also informs the development of her own work in the 1920s, the main era of her career. From Jacob�s Room through her next five long works, four labeled as novels and all novelistic in approach if not conventionally fictional, she elucidates androgyny in the pursuit of her new method of rendering human character: She moves from advancing a female-centered viewpoint that valorizes feminine experience and portrays its masculine aspects, to addressing androgyny directly, and finally to endowing her male characters with something of herself and finding in them a new quality�the feminine."

6:02 p.m. - 2007-03-08

-----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------

previous - next