Dissertation update

I was having a great week getting revisions done on chapter 3 of my dissertation, where I am presenting my best case for why saga scholars have totally missed the mark on a huge and important part of saga narrative as it would have been received by the original recipient audience. Call me crazy, but I cannot shake the feeling that to make the sagas speak to any modern literary concerns, without first completely understanding what they did in their original milieu is, well, honestly, disrespectful. So I am trying to make strides to rectify that.

So I was a bit stressed out when I received a text from my brother Thursday night informing me he was coming up to see me for the weekend. I had planned on this being a writing weekend, that is to say during the time when my son was with his father. But I could not refuse my brother, who has moved most of his stuff up to my apartment, and we are currently looking around for a new place to live.

I must say it is a LOT harder than you might imagine to find a 2 bedroom 2 bath apartment in the Bay Area in any sort of price-range one can consider "affordable." This would not be quite as monumental an undertaking in Iceland, so maybe that is the thing to do...

But before I can do that, I need to get this dissertation done. And having a life gets in the way of that, no question about it.

I was therefore really happy to find that when I finally got back to "dissertating" this evening, after my brother hit the road back down to Southern California, that I was able to solve a messy little problem I was having with the flow of the chapter quickly and easily. All I had to do was add in a bit more commentary and analysis. And to think my idea Friday had been to chop the whole thing up and reorganize it. Glad to not have to resort to that.

So I have proved the adage that when you are having a writing block, the best thing to do is take a break, especially a spur-of-the-moment-totally-not-planned break.

Comments

Jon Frimann said…
Gangi þér vel með fræðigreinina þína. Þér tekst örugglega að endursemja það sem þarf í tíma.
September 19, 2012 at 1:45 AM
Skúli Páls said…
Hlakka til að lesa ritgerðina þína.
Skúli Páls
September 29, 2012 at 8:24 PM
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