Here is my thesis in five pages!
This was a very difficult exercise and I’m not sure how much further it got me into writing the whole entire thing. I was very grateful for the work I did last semester. I’m looking forward to receiving feedback this evening to see if condensing my thesis into five short pages makes any sense.
Reflection:
Upon reflection, this five pager definitely got me further along because it got me writing. With a lot of writing ahead, it can feel a little daunting for me to start at the beginning and just go. This five pager is a road map. Of course it doesn’t reflect everywhere I want to go. Instead, it acts more as a stand it for entire sections. I find that sometimes I have to write the thing that is wrong before I can write the thing that is right.
But now it seems is the time to start that writing process. Moving forward, I have a lot of ideas about how to expand from this paper. First, I want to spend a lot more time on the analysis, of course. I want to spend about 10-15 pages with each text, really exploring how it works within itself. Frances suggested that I work in some visualizations into the paper. I want to try my hand at making an actor-network for each text to account for its interaction across the reality/fiction line. Frances also suggested a pattern tracker, inspired from her English class. I want to meet with her professor in order to get more information about this. I think with such a text heavy paper, this would be highly helpful for both me and my reader as an organizational tool.
A note on methodology: my methods are “literary analysis” which is broad and opaque. For many, it would seem extremely subjective. It probably is. But there are certain conventions and lenses through which to look at literature to yield many different types of results. This list outlines the central tenets of a few of these lenses. Ecocriticism is missing, and that is partly because it is a very new type of criticism that doesn’t have a lot of practice or backing. My methods are a bit experimental, and I am excited to put them into their context in the full paper.