I don’t intend to regularly delve into the personal and professional matters I laid bare here in that post a few weeks ago, but I allude to said post now as a way of ramping up to the introduction of the newest recurring feature to my blog: ((Joining Mmm… Marginalia, the (Bad) Medieval Movie Club, Google Penance, the Calendar posts† and that thing I never named where I make fun of the way people use the word ‘medieval’.
† Which will resume, eventually, worry not.)) Thesis Thursday. ((And given how often Medieval Marginalia Monday tends to slip its Monday deadline, even when I’m on my game, maybe its best to think of it as Thesis Thursdayish.)) This announcement does mean that I have decided to complete my dissertation in the coming year. Here’s how it’s going to work.
Though actually writing the damn thing has, until recently, proven beyond my ability, I do have a mound of research and a headful of thoughts about my dissertation, which once-upon-a-prosectus was titled “Before Arthur: Uther’s Generation in the Medieval Arthurian Literature of England, France, and Germany”, then later “The King’s Two Fathers: Uther Pendragon and the (Re-)Making of Arthurian Literature”, then later “The Literary Autobiography of Uther Pendragon”, then later still “The Three Uthers: Arthur’s Father in History, Romance, and Eschatology” ((Inevitably the focus will shift as I herd that headful of previously uncorralled thoughts forward.))
Each week I plan to force some of those thoughts on my thesis into a coherent post and put it out there for the world to see. On Thursdays. ((If there were a day of the week starting in D, I’d have gone with Dissertation D-Day, because I love me some alliteration. For non-academics worrying over terminology, I’ve always used dissertation and thesis interchangeably, and nobody has beaten me down for it so far.)) These posts are not going to be in the full-on academic voice, and the footnotes will likely be the usual bloggy style instead of reference laden. ((Though I did figure out how to get my footnote plugin to let me use a different style from post to post, so the Thesis Thursday posts will use numeral footnotes instead of stacked asterisks, to help with the academic transition.)) While the things I’ll write on Thursdays are not meant to pass as things that would actually appear in a dissertation, I do welcome any comments people have on them, positive and negative, academic and not. ((In particular, if you read something and say, ‘Wow, that’s exactly what Big Fancy-Pants Professor So-and-So said in his recent book, except less coherent’ that might be something to let me know… discreetly, in an email, maybe.)) I recognize this move means I have to ask the indulgence of my normal readers to put up with (or skim over) ((or delete unread from their RSS readers)) posts that won’t quite fit with all the rest of the stuff I do, but I am fairly confident that I can be entertaining enough that it won’t require much indulgence. There will certainly be more pop culture reference in the bloggy drafts than there would be in a for realsies academic text.
Let me end by saying that since my ragged status update of a few weeks ago, I’ve gotten a lot of support and well-wishes through non-comments-field channels, and I’m really grateful to all those who have reached out to me. I think I’ve thanked you all individually, but if there’s someone I missed, accept my thanks now and know that the omission wasn’t intentional.
I won’t close off comments here on this post, but everything I said on the last still applies. No parties are needed, pity or otherwise. I’m doing OK.