Anyway, I met with my actual adviser, who happened to be in town this week. Looks like I'm going back to the partial drawing board. My current idea was too narrow. He kindly stated that he could see it work as an article but not as a dissertation topic.
However, I think I want to stick with the concept of rereading practices. So, I need to find out ways to broaden the idea and limit it to choose specific texts.
Things I will be looking for after this semester is over:
- Prefaces
- Epilogues
- Advertisements
- Changes in Editions
- Sequels by the same author and other authors (the fanfic!)
- Marginalia and annotations
- Literary Criticism
- Whether I wish to examine satires, dramas, novels, etc.
- Secondary criticism
- A notion of how my argument will progress through the texts I am using
- What I found joyful about studying specific 18C texts... maybe this will give me a clue about what I should write on.
Some questions I am thinking about:
- How do authors engage their readers into a practice of rereading?
- How do authors reread their own texts?
- In what way does an author address his reader? Does this truly reflect the common response to a text?
- What does it mean to engage with a text through writing your own sequel and/or annotation?
- Are the ways we read and reread different when we approach different genres? Why or why not?
No comments:
Post a Comment