Baseline

Over the last two weeks, I had to field the question, 'So, what is your dissertation about?' many, many times. My standard answer is sufficiently baffling that most people, even serious academics, do not really comment much afterwards: 'It is on the relationship between literary culture and material culture.' Because the fact is I have developed my dissertation topic basically öfugt from the way most others do so. I've thought a lot about the theory, a lot about the baseline, I know what conditions I need met in order to begin exploring my topic. Where the dissertation goes from here I have no idea. All I can vouch for is that I have thought about the conditions a lot, I have chosen the best possible examples. Now all I can do is move forward, letting it go where it wants to go and needs to go, no preconceived expectations one way or another, no hypothesis to test, just the confidence that with the examples I have chosen, it cannot help but go somewhere interesting.

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