In the race to flesh out my thesis bit by bit, day after day, this week has been a test of bite-sized progress. Juggling coursework and activities is always a challenge, but as I approach the championship swim meet this weekend the intensity seems to grow.
My work this week focused on improving and expanding my methods and analysis/results section. Though the advice from last week’s writing tips was to work from the top down each revision, I feel that my progress will be maximized if I work out from the meat of my paper. Besides, I have done a lot of background research and thinking about the top and bottom of the hourglass lately, and the middle is going to be the longest part.
From feedback from classmates and advisers, I have worked to provide further description and justification for my methods. First, this is to describe exactly what I mean by “literary analysis.” In my English courses, there has been absolutely no discussion of “methodology.” We learn what a “close-reading” is and use than to write papers. Though I know how to do literary analysis, describing it to someone outside of the field (and to someone expecting a more scientific perspective) is an entirely different matter. For this, I provide a brief history of literary analyses. Close-reading arose in the school of New Criticism, a movement away from armchair history and biography that dominated literature education before the 1930s-1940s. New Criticism argues that texts should be considered only for the words on the page, disregarding historical context, author intention, author identity and everything besides the actually symbols on the page. The primary method of gleaning meaning was left to the process of close reading, which interrogated form, structure, and the relationships between words and symbols. While this had philosophical underpinnings at its inception, close reading has become a fundamental skill of nearly all literary analysis, divorced from its original philosophy of New Criticism. Indeed, in the 1970s and 1980s, other critics pushed for other lenses of criticism that take into account class relationships (Marxist reading), gender and sexuality (Feminist criticism), and the effect of literature upon its original readers (New Historicism). These movements move away from New Criticism to recognize that literature is embedded in culture and identity in important ways that would be lost in a strict adherence to New Criticism. However, close reading remains largely at the center of literary criticism, at least for the faculty at Lewis & Clark, even if writers bring in Marxist or Feminist readings. Ecocriticism rides this movement away from New Criticism, largely in response to environmental frenzy of the 1970s and 1980s. However, Ecocritism lacks a manifesto truly laying out its stakes. There are certainly important works that I cite, but its important that ecocriticism is a pretty young sub-field and my work has the potential to push on its tentative boundaries. So, from this background my methods emerge as close-reading based interpretations.
In my paper, I also refer to literature as an actor. Since this is a term I have derived from Actor-Network Theory, I have decided that ANT needs to play a larger part in my background and methods. In addition, my feedback was to include visualizations. ANT maps would be a way to provide that. Since there are concepts of power and describing reality in terms of connections, ANT may be a way to visualize my literary analysis in a productive and informative way. I am currently working on ways to figure this out, but I will update with figures as I create them.
Thesis draft removed — see here for full first draft!