I am ramping up for my final push to complete the final draft of my thesis, to be submitted to my committee for evaluation before my thesis defense after Spring Break. It’s a little terrifying how soon this seems to have arrived: a week from tomorrow I should be 96% finished.
And there is so much to do before then! I’ve now met with my entire committee to discuss their feedback. From Liz, I aim to redefine and hone my thesis statement to to better reflect the specific finding I have arrived at by the end of my draft. This will then serve to focus my entire around a singular goal: to prove and demonstrate my thesis statement. In my first draft, I have basically catalogued my findings. In this next draft, I aim to pick and choose which points to emphasize to make a more coherent argument guided by the theories and the thesis statement. This reorganization will foreground my theoretical work and my literary analysis. From Jim, my goal is to (better) articulate why my thesis is new, exciting, original, etc.
And so, my plan. First, I will revise my theoretical framework to extract a sort of model or hypothesis through which to evaluate the works of literature. Then, carefully, I will revise/rewrite my results section to show how the specific quotes from the texts work alongside or challenge the theoretical framework. My hypothesis is that earthquake literature uses authors as instruments of feeling change/disruption/empathy and that the texts themselves are a medium which both registers those feelings and transmit them to readers/the world, which also creates empathy. Murakami’s stories demonstrate most strongly the first, the role of the author and the role of the text as a register of land disruption . Ozeki’s text demonstrates most heavily the empathetic possibilities of text/narrative. In this way, both of these are successful and fit the theoretical model. Rothstein’s text may not, though it may try. It has moments of narrative empathy in its first person perspective, but its omniscient and detached foundations don’t generate connection in the same way. This endeavor, I predict, will take a long time and a lot of hard thinking that I have yet to do. Then, I will try to find ways to connect the secondary texts into the flow of the project.
After this middle is solidified, I will expand outward. I will revise the bottom and the top of the hourglass interchangeably. I will synthesize and diminish the top so that it sets up the rest more clearly and obviously. I will use the bottom to speculate on power, texts in the world, readership, and what my thesis regarding intimacy/attachment brings to ecocriticism, disasters, art, and change at large.
I’m a little freaked out about how much work this entails for the next 8 days. The workload this year just seems to keep getting more and more impossible But I’ve come this far and overcome similar daunting tasks of of writing so far. So, I jump back in.