This week, I've entered new territory in my dissertation work. I'm using the word "chapter" for the first time. Granted, in the Word doc in which it appears, "Chapter 1" is in parentheses right now, because my prose is just so very rough and I'm reticent to let "Chapter" sit alone without the crutches of those parentheses around it. It's like when Kent was first learning to sit up, and he'd fall over as soon as I took my hands away. I only have one really good sentence that I don't want to change, and all the rest of it needs some scholarly love. But my work with Fauré's First Violin Sonata is sort of coming together into something that sort of resembles a pseudo-chapter. Once I've turned my analysis of this work into a chapter, the work I do on my other pieces will be much easier by comparison, because I'm laying out the structure of my analytical prose in this work. Writing music analysis in a way that's both coherent and interesting is no small feat. So this chapter is like a prototype, which means that I'm feeling a simultaneous sense of exhilaration and intense pressure.

Just wanted to share that, for all of you who are curious about how my diss work is going but who don't want to ask because I've told you not to. Thanks for not asking, by the way. It means a lot to me.

Labels: dissertation land

• posted by erica 11/20/2008 05:02:00 PM
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