Postmortem

Sent out the chapter draft to my dissertation committee on Wednesday. Overall I feel pretty good about the whole process despite a few setbacks and the fact that was two weeks behind my projected deadline. Considering I didn't really start doing to reading for this chapter until early May, and the fact that moving issues ate up about two and a half weeks, this went much faster than the first chapter did. I am, as ever, not happy with the writing. Parts are still clunky and thin, and you can definitely tell when I'm running out of steam on an idea.

The narrative I constructed is probably the strongest aspect of the chapter. Starting with Dred and the swamp, and then moving onto Blake's transition from the swamp to the sea, and finally ending with Madison Washington's insurrection made it easy to keep track of the various threads of the argument. This chapter, far more than the last, gets closer to my concept on how the maritime imaginary operates as both a literary and political trope during this period.

I've also found some interesting stuff that might help me shore up the theoretical underpinnings of my concept of the maritime imaginary. One is Jacques Ranciere's On The Shores of Politics and the other is a very short essay by Foucault called "Of Other Spaces." More on them after my brief hiatus.

September 19th is Talk Like A Pirate Day!

Arggh.

Just Keep Writing, Just Keep Writing*

No ,I haven't disappeared, but I am in the final push to finishing the first draft of this chapter. That kind of writing leaves me a bit too wrung out for blogging.

After I send the draft off, and take a brief break from all things academic, I'm moving on to the fun phase of the dissertation...



...PIRATES!

If you haven't seen last week's New Yorker yet, it has a review of a new book on the economics of piracy. That, J.F. Cooper's The Rover, and Marcus Rediker's Between the Devil and The Deep Blue Sea will constitute the next series of posts in the not-so-distant future.

Before that, I still have 10-15 pages of writing to go. Sigh. Back to Delany and Douglass' maritime narratives.

*Apologies to both Pixar and Spencer Keralis